Behind the Book Archives

by George Dawes Green

While researching Ravens I got the chance to ride on patrol with a Brunswick, Georgia, cop. I’ll call him Officer Jack. He took me driving around and around the slow-baking city. Nothing was stirring.

Like the sad jowly cop in Ravens, Jack had been a detective before his own eagerness had tripped him up. He’d fallen far, and wound up as a corporal on this traffic beat. Many times he’d thought of getting back on that ladder again — re-applying for sergeant or detective — but all that was too much hassle, and besides, he couldn’t bear the the boredom of a desk job. He wanted to be out on the streets, working with people.

We took Rt. 17 north and then the I-95 Spur west. One strip mall after another. Ace Hardware, Wendy’s, Cap’n D’s Seafood, Empire Title Pawn. Now and then came fleeting pockets of deep antique beauty. Trailers shrouded in grey moss, clustering around an oak tree. A rolling seascape of kudzu.

A million years ago, this had been my home town.

Jack, knowing I was writing a thriller, tried to tell me thrilling stories from his detective days. But thrillingness wasn’t what I wanted from him. I wanted some essential generous detail to bestow upon my character. Although I had no idea what that might be.

We fell silent. There were no drug deals going down that day, no murders, no knife-fights, nothing — not so much as a broken taillight. Just the hot summer streets for hour after hour. Officer Jack kept apologizing. Finally, Dispatch sent us to an elementary school in the ghetto. School was in summer recess, but the old women working in the office told us they’d heard strange noises. We investigated. Tramped through the lonely gym, the cafeteria. The A/C was scarcely working and the place was an inferno. Passing one classroom, we spotted two little girls clambering out of a window. One was chubby, and got stuck, and Jack nabbed her. The other one got away.

Jack brought the chubby one back to the office and sat her down. Naturally she started to bawl. This moon-faced white cop and his creepy companion (me): we must have been terrifying. Jack tried to get her to confess what she’d been up to. Why would any child ever try to break into school?

She said something about a ‘picture’ — but she was bawling so hard we couldn’t understand her.

Then a strange thing happened. Her partner in crime showed up. The girl had made a clean escape, but she came back to face the music because, I suppose, she knew it was wrong to leave your friend.

She sat down and folded her arms and stared at us with enormous eyes. She was tiny and beautiful, and perhaps eight years old. She was a ghetto child. She wouldn’t say a word. Tears were flowing from her eyes but she didn’t blink and she held her silence.

But Jack kept patiently, gently pressing her, and finally she turned away and let it out. She said she had brought her friend into school to see a picture.

"What picture?" Jack asked.

"Picture I made."

Jack asked if we could look at this picture. So she took us back to that classroom, and hung up on the wall was a watercolor of a school bus. It was stunning. The bus had the soft underside of a living creature. I told her how much I liked it, and Jack said she should listen to me because I was from New York and knew everything about art.

He was beaming.

He was so taken by these amazing girls.

And I had what I wanted. I wrote the scene into Ravens. It’s not thrilling; it’s just a moment of rest, an aside from the tension.

But it has its own quietly beating heart and I think it gives life to my Brunswick cop. It might even make my readers love him. And I know if I can get you to love my characters — well, that’s really the whole deal. That’s all I’ve ever looked for.

Screenwriter George Dawes Green is the author of Ravens. His first novel in 14 years, it tells the story of a family of lottery winners whose newfound weath endangers their lives.

Author photo (c) Nick Cardillichio.

While researching Ravens I got the chance to ride on patrol with a Brunswick, Georgia, cop. I'll call him Officer Jack. He took me driving around and around the slow-baking city. Nothing was stirring.

Like the sad jowly cop in Ravens, Jack…

World Fiction

World Fiction

Behind the Book: The story of Vietnam’s street children

Behind the Book by John Shors

by John Shors

I’ve been lucky enough to do a lot of traveling. A time existed, after I graduated from college, when I taught English in Japan and then backpacked around Asia. I had little money and tended to stay in rooms that cost a few dollars a night. With nothing more than a couple sets of t-shirts and shorts in my backpack, I visited places such as Vietnam, Thailand, Nepal, India, Indonesia, Hong Kong, and Korea. Some of these countries I grew to know quite well. I’d find a cheap room, rent a scooter, and explore as much of an area as possible. Sometimes my future wife or my friends were with me, though I was often alone.

I saw so many beautiful things throughout these adventures, sights such as the Taj Mahal, the Himalayan peaks, and white-sand beaches unspoiled by humanity’s touch. But I think that I witnessed the most beauty within the street children I encountered. These children seemed so similar, country to country. They were out at all times of day and night, selling their postcards, their fans, their flowers. For many nights in Thailand, I played Connect Four with a boy who wasn’t older than seven or eight. We bet a dollar each game. Some travelers told me not to play with him, convinced that his parents were nearby and were sending him out at night to work. But I never saw his parents, and one night I spied him sleeping on a sidewalk, a piece of cardboard his bed. I don’t think I ever beat him in a game.

Throughout these travels I met hundreds, if not thousands, of children who lived on the street. Sometimes they were sick or had a physical deformity. But most of them were simply homeless—abandoned into extreme poverty. Bright, eager, and unafraid to laugh with a stranger, they taught me so much. I owe them so much.

My encounters with street children inspired my new novel, Dragon House. Set in modern-day Vietnam, Dragon House tells the tale of Iris and Noah—two Americans who, as a way of healing their own painful pasts, open a center to house and educate Vietnamese street children.

I’m quite excited about Dragon House. David Oliver Relin, who lived in Vietnam, and is the best-selling author of Three Cups of Tea, let me know that he thought it was “a sprawling, vibrant novel.” Robert Olen Butler, who fought in the Vietnam War, and won a Pulitzer Prize for his collection of short stories about Vietnamese Americans, told me that Dragon House is “a strong, important work from a gifted writer.” Such feedback from two wonderful writers, and two people who spent a significant amount of time in Vietnam, means a great deal to me.

It is my hope that Dragon House will be a success, and out of that success something good can happen. I plan on donating some of the funds generated from my book to an organization called Blue Dragon Children’s Foundation. This group works with children in crisis throughout Vietnam. Blue Dragon Children’s Foundation offers disadvantaged children a wide range of services and support to help them break out of poverty, forever, by getting them back to school and helping them achieve their best. If you would like more information on Blue Dragon Children’s Foundation, and what I am doing to help, please visit my website.

I appreciate the support of everyone who reads Dragon House, because the success of my novel will allow me to help street children in Vietnam, and to raise the level of awareness of the perils that street children face around the world.

My very best wishes to you.
John Shors

Fiction, Women's Fiction

Fiction Women's Fiction

An author finds inspiration in familiar terrain

Behind the Book by Jacquelyn Mitchard

by Jacquelyn Mitchard

When is a series not a series? The easy answer is . . . when I write it. But the real answer is more complicated. Now, they say that a sequel for a writer is the last refuge of a scoundrel. But it’s not a sequel when the primary character is—well, when she has to share the stage.

Far more accomplished writers than I (Louise Erdrich and William Faulkner, to whom I’m not comparing myself) have written books that didn’t so much continue the history of one or two people but dipped into a familiar universe for the next story. That’s what I’ve done with my new novel, No Time to Wave Goodbye.

It does, in fact, take up where my first novel, The Deep End of the Ocean, left off, 13 years ago. But it begins a series of new events, not a new take on old ones.

What I learned from No Time to Wave Goodbye, other than that I could do this with dignity, was that I had the time of my life. I didn’t realize how vital these ancient characters still were. I didn’t recognize the places they inhabit in my writer’s heart.

And so, perhaps not so surprisingly, I’m back in that universe for the novel I’m currently writing, to be published in 2010.

There’ll be new people with new stories and old faces turned toward new complexities. Turns out, I have a crush on my own Yokapanowtha County—Chicago’s Italian neighborhood at Taylor and Racine Streets and the exurbs beyond.

In fact, The Deep End of the Ocean started with a crush. I thought it was a crush on a boy. Back when I was a young widow with four young kids, pushing 40 and ever so alone, I began to dream at night of my high-school sweetheart, taking refuge in the endless summer nights we shared, lying on a quilt on the hood of his grandpa’s Bonneville, smoking and stroking skin that would never be so soft again.

My honey and I were plumbers’ children, but still privileged. While we had to work, it was only after school. Before our dates, we girls dropped by the cologne counter at Marshall Fields—as one of my pals put it, “renting to own” our cosmetics. Four guys once serenaded me under the window of our apartment, singing “Jackie” instead of “My Girl” in the refrain.

Yet, there were stains on that place and time, just as there were for Francie Nolan in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. A mile from our apartment, a friend parked his car on the railroad tracks until an eastbound train dragged him and his 15-year-old girlfriend away. She was already dead, from an overdose. Mr. Curry beat his wife so badly he put out her eye and didn’t go to jail. Our great-uncle raped my first cousin. What I felt wasn’t really a crush on a boy, but on the past— particularly the sweet and profane world in which I grew up.

When I wrote Deep End, I keened my own grief through the grief of another mother, Beth Cappadora. My children’s blunt suffering became the blunt suffering of Vincent Cappadora about his little brother’s kidnapping.

The book was a hit and a triumph.

I put away my west-side Chicago youth.

Or so I thought.

Last year, I had another book ready to go—one day to be published. But I found myself writing (around the edges) about the Cappadoras. Finally, it was clear I had the answer to the question that so many readers had asked me since the publication of my first novel: what ever happened to Vincent and the rest of the Cappadoras?

Back to the beginning I went with a purpose. I rewrote and followed the strands. The book bloomed into No Time to Wave Goodbye. Not everyone who read it will have read The Deep End of the Ocean. That’s not necessary. This new story didn’t come from the previous story.

It came from that great interlaced weave of lace and chain link that is my place, my locative past. And as soon as I finished it, I wanted to go there again, because the further we get from the life we once lived, the clearer the details. Why keep that universe under lock and key?

Of course I hope readers like revisiting people whom they once considered beloved, as I did. But more than that, I turn to those streets and those nights to find myself. I walk down a block of two flats, and a dog barks. A passing car trails the ribbon of a Frankie Valli song under the viaduct. Under the light in a kitchen window, a girl opens her books. Her hair is mayonnaised with Dippity-Do and wound on rollers the size of a car’s tail pipes.

I know her. I am her.

Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense

Trip to Turkey reveals truths about women

Behind the Book by Tasha Alexander

by Tasha Alexander

We all have preconceived notions. It’s unavoidable. One of the most exciting things about doing book research is discovering all the ways in which our assumptions about people, places, and history are wrong. In the course of writing five novels (almost six; I’m just about done!), I’ve been forced again and again to revise my opinions about our Victorian counterparts.

But of all the books I’ve written, none has surprised me as much as Tears of Pearl. I’d decided to send Emily and Colin to Constantinople for their honeymoon—partly because I loved the exotic nature of the city and partly because I liked the idea of Emily, who struggles with the limits English society placed on women in the 19th century, in a society where the so-called weaker sex were even more repressed.

Sounds great, right? I thought so. But after I’d read letters and memoirs from women of the period, I realized the Ottoman ladies had a great deal more freedom and upward mobility than the average Englishwoman of the time. Their veils, which I’d ignorantly viewed as repressive, actually gave them quite a bit of freedom—they enabled them to move about the city freely without anyone knowing who they were. Meeting a lover in a café? No problem. The veil keeps you anonymous.

Last year, while working on the book, I visited Istanbul (because, as we all know, you can’t go back to Constantinople…). And for all that we like to think of our contemporary selves as modern and enlightened, many people did not react well to the idea of my trip. They didn’t think it was safe for a woman to travel alone to Turkey—surely it would be too dangerous. Now, of course it’s essential to be careful any time you’re traveling. But I can honestly say that I’ve never felt safer in a city than Istanbul. If anything, men were more respectful of a solitary woman than they are in New York or Chicago.

My first morning in the city, I met three wonderful American women at breakfast in my hotel. (You won’t find a more glorious breakfast spread anywhere than that set out at the Hotel Empress Zoe every morning.) They were going the hamam—the Turkish baths—that evening and invited me to join them. The hamam was high on my list for must-sees in the city. I’d read all kinds of fabulous descriptions of them in letters written by Victorian English women travelers. As a junkie of all things spa-related, I loved the idea of being massaged and scrubbed. But I must confess to having felt a little nervous about the whole thing.

First, because I wasn’t exactly sure what the process would be like. Second was the whole issue of sitting around naked in a room full of total strangers.

Going with my new found friends alleviated the first problem. Because if we all did everything wrong, at least we would all be wrong together, which is somehow less daunting than being wrong alone.

As for the second point, there was simply no avoiding it. And it struck me, as I walked into the more than 300-year-old Ca?alo?lu Hamam, that countless Victorian women travelers (Florence Nightingale included) had preceded me. And surely if they—whom we all assume to have been much more modest than the Modern American Girl—could do it, I could.

Which sounds fabulous until you’ve emerged from your beautiful wooden dressing room stark naked only to have your bath attendant hand you a tiny piece of cotton to use as a towel. This and a pair of wooden clogs are all you can take into the haratet, or hot room. We did our best to cover ourselves up and shuffled over marble floors into an enormous domed room lined with washbasins. Here you’re instructed to sit and handed a silver bowel. This you dip into the nearest basin, fill with hot water, and dump over your head. Repeat over and over and over.

Obviously at this point, you have to abandon the towel. Somewhat terrifying at first. But all the women in the hamam do it—and you find that it’s actually not so bad. And before you know it, you’re relaxed, your muscles loose as you lean against the marble bench dousing yourself with water and falling into easy conversation with the people around you. By the time your attendant comes back to lead you to the marble platform in the center of the room, where she’ll massage and scrub you, you could care less what you’re wearing. The entire ritual was amazing, and by the time I emerged, my skin softer than a baby’s, I knew that if I could, I’d hamam every single day.

It was an ethereal experience in an exquisite building. Those Victorian women travelers knew a good thing when they saw it. As much as I loved Istanbul—cruising the Bosphorus to the Black Sea, combing through the treasures of Topkap? Palace, haggling in the Grand Bazaar and the Spice Bazaar—the hamam will always be high on the list of my favorite experiences. I loved it so much I went back two more times during my trip. Research, you see, needs to be well and thoroughly done…

Tasha Alexander is finishing up her fifth novel starring Lady Emily, who heads to Turkey in Alexander's new release Tears of Pearl.

Mystery & Suspense, Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Suspense

Behind the Book: Secret military experiments inspire thriller

Behind the Book by C.S. Graham

by C.S. Graham

Psychic spies. Remote viewers. It sounds like the stuff of fiction. Our latest thriller, The Solomon Effect, features a remote viewer named Tobie Guinness and her reluctant, skeptical partner, CIA agent Jax Alexander. But the truth behind the fiction is that virtually every United States intelligence agency in existence actually has dabbled in the paranormal for decades. Of course, military and government types generally like to avoid admitting they’re spending taxpayers’ money investigating something as woo-woo as clairvoyance. So they came up with their own name for it: remote viewing.

What exactly is remote viewing? Basically, it’s a method for experiencing and describing events, objects, and people from a distance, using only the mind. Does it really work? Yes. Do we know how or why it works? No. But we do know that anyone can be trained to do it, while those with a natural talent can learn to do it very, very well.

My own experience with the U.S. Army’s remote viewing program dates back to the 1980s. By that time I’d been an Army Intelligence officer for many years. Most of those years were spent doing typical espionage stuff like running agents in Southeast Asia, flying into Laos with Air America types, infiltrating and spying on domestic organizations like the SDS and the John Birch Society, and studying Soviet weapons systems. But then one memorable spring day the Army sent me—along with bunch of other majors and captains—for a weeklong course at the Monroe Institute to learn how to have out of body experiences.

Hard to believe, I know. But it was all part of a top secret program that saw colonels and generals attending “spoon bending parties” and learning to walk barefoot over live coals. The U.S. government was obsessed with the idea that the Soviet Union was using clairvoyants to spy on America. Our mission was to find a way to bridge the perceived gap in the “psychic arms race.”

Did we succeed? Well, much of that information is still secret. But in 1995/96, the government officially shut down all remote viewing projects and declassified the program’s existence. Which means that I’m now free to use my knowledge of remote viewing in novels.

Written in partnership with my wife, the novelist Candice Proctor (who also writes the Sebastian St. Cyr Regency-era mystery series as C.S. Harris), The Solomon Effect is a rollercoaster ride of a romp through Russia, the Middle East, and Germany, as Iraq War vet October (Tobie) Guinness uses her remote viewing talents to track down a sunken Nazi U-boat and the deadly secret it once hid.

Yes, this is fiction. But it’s based on a real program that once existed—and may still exist. While all remote viewing projects were officially ended in 1996, the British government recently admitted to using remote viewers to try to track down Osama bin Laden after 9/1l, and there are rumors that American programs likewise persist. It was Major General Ed Thompson, a former Army Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence, who once said, "I never liked to get into debates with skeptics, because if you didn’t believe that remote viewing was real, you hadn’t done your homework."

Lt. Col. Steven Harris (Ret.) and Candice Proctor, who write together as C.S. Graham, now live in New Orleans. Their latest novel, The Solomon Effect, is being published this month by HarperCollins.

Fiction, Women's Fiction

Fiction Women's Fiction

Behind the Book: How I learned tango

Behind the Book by Patrizia Chen

by Patrizia Chen

My entry into tango was as convoluted as the steps I would eventually learn.

Having grown up in Italy, I was obsessed with America, cowboys and Indians, tepees and corrals, and dreamt to be able to two-step. Several years after my move to New York, I finally enrolled in evening classes at the aptly called Shall-We-Dance studio and began my formal instruction. Since Seven Brides for Seven Brothers had been one of my favorite childhood movies (yes, it dates me terribly), wearing boots and stomping around a fake barn to the sound of a banjo and a steel-guitar, seemed like a fabulous option.

Nothing came easily to me: not the steps, the pirouettes, or the arm movements. I felt like an orangutan let loose in a room full of mirrors. I bumped into everything and everyone, terrified by turns, afraid to drag my partner into such inelegant, senseless dancing. Beet-red after each of my mistakes, I’d burst into tears at the thought of my evident inadequacy. Doggedly, I continued to suffer through all those intricate patterns: Pretzel, Basket, Weave, Whip, Flip Flop, Lasso, Turning Crossbow, Barrel Roll, Wagon Wheel, Double-overhead Loop, Starburst and then Wrap, Cuddle, Hammerlock, Sweetheart, Skater’s lock, Killer Duck. The names alone were horrifyingly incomprehensible; imagine trying to remember the 180 degrees spin my feet were supposed to make in order to propel my legs (and the rest of my body) into a passable turn!

Two-step was followed by salsa and cha-cha, swing and rumba, waltz and the obscure Peabody and Balboa. As the months went by, I finally got it and began to feel omnivorous and hungry about dancing, any kind of dancing. I tried everything.

Then one day John, my teacher, played a song. He took me into his arms and suddenly that was it. Somehow the music of my youth, the notes so often played on Italian radio and never before registered, had seeped into my bones and asserted their power over my heart and brain. It was my first tango. And it would last.

I traveled to Buenos Aires, I took classes with the best teachers. I bought a ballet-bar and put it in my dining room to practice my moves. I studied videos of the greatest. I listened to everyone’s advice. “Tango is natural, just walk . . .” In total disbelief I would watch those fabulous performers imparting their simple teachings while their legs, seemingly completely detached from their torsos, whipped the air with incredible arabesques. “Where is your weight?” My weight? Panicking I would try to concentrate on this esoteric question. I had no idea.

The very first tango class I ever took in Argentina was at the beautiful Confiteria Ideal. The teacher showed a simple pattern and called me up to demonstrate. Horrified I slowly moved toward him, a sacrificial sheep about to be immolated. And then something happened, I still don’t know what came to my mind, but the moment he took me into his arms I swiftly unloaded a kick. Right at his balls . . .

Yes, I’m afraid I did. I had seen too many videos and thought that this was what was expected of me so I went for the first opening. I saw a knee bend, a thigh raise and BAM! My foot, size 10, was there. At full force.

I immediately hoped the earth would open under my feet, or a pyre would engulf me in flames, incinerating me quickly before Daniel’s fury unleashed on me. Let go like the pariah I was, I slowly, painfully (never as painfully as poor Daniel, naturally) walked back to the group and metamorphosed into a statue of salt.

Thankfully hours, days, months and years went by.

I learned to tango—but I will never forget the day I started.

A former model, Patrizia Chen used her passion for tango to inspire It Takes Two, a charming debut novel that chronicles a woman’s midlife escape from a dead-end marriage. Chen and her husband divide their time between New York City and Todi, Italy.

Author photo by Elisabetta Catalano

My entry into tango was as convoluted as the steps I would eventually learn.

Having grown up in Italy, I was obsessed with America, cowboys and Indians, tepees and corrals, and dreamt to be able to two-step. Several years after my move…

Science Fiction & Fantasy

Science Fiction & Fantasy

Putting together ‘The Gathering Storm,’ book 12 of the Wheel of Time series

Behind the Book by Brandon Sanderson

by Brandon Sanderson

When fantasy writer extraordinaire Robert Jordan died in 2007, his best-selling Wheel of Time series was left in limbo. His widow and editor, Harriet McDonald, selected novelist Brandon Sanderson to write the two final books using Jordan's extensive notes. Here, Sanderson explains how it feels to step into the shoes of a giant.

In a word, it's been daunting. Imagine stepping into a room and seeing an enormous chalkboard filled with equations, then being told that Einstein wrote them all out before he died. At the very end is a small blank spot, the apex of the entire formula, and a glaring 'equals' sign right before it.

My job has been to sort through all of the notes, the equations, the bits and pieces of shattered glass in an attempt to reconstruct what was going on in the genius's mind during those last months. There are parts that were scratched out, others that ran into dead ends, others where logical leaps were made that aren't explained. There are hints, tidbits and guideposts. In places, the way is clearly marked.

It's been the most challenging, rewarding and reverent literary experience of my life.

Here is just a glimpse into the astounding detail behind Robert Jordan’s notes and materials for the Wheel of Time:

And meet the team—“Team Jordan”—who was with me all the way through The Gathering Storm:

Brandon Sanderson is currently hard at work on book 13 in the Wheel of Time series, Towers of Midnight, and preparing for a national tour to support The Gathering Storm. You can find more information on the series and tour dates here or on Sanderson's own website.

Fiction, Inspirational Fiction

Fiction Inspirational Fiction

Behind the Book: Author finds Christmas in July

Behind the Book by Donna VanLiere

by Donna VanLiere

Christmas found me on a hot, sweaty day in July. My husband and I drove four hours in July of 2000 to see a friend sing in concert in Knoxville, Tennessee. We parked at the back of the arena and ran inside the loading dock where we were greeted by our friend Eddie. The opening act was finishing on stage and he was moments from going on, but we asked what he’d been up to and he told us he was writing songs for a new album. He looked at me and said, “I’m actually thinking of putting a Christmas number on it as a bonus cut.” He rattled off a two-sentence premise (the opening act was closing) and asked if I thought that would make a good Christmas song. I said, “I actually think that’d make a good book.” The crowd liked the opener and cheered as they left the stage so Eddie leaned close to my ear. “Then get to writing it,” he said, yelling above the noise. “You’re the one with the computer!”

Plenty of people over the years have told me they have a great idea for a book (a complete stranger talked at length about an idea this week. It didn’t matter that my 3-year-old had to “go potty really, really bad” and was bouncing up and down with each plot point), but for whatever reason, those ideas have never struck me as a good idea. Maybe it was because Eddie didn’t present it as a good idea for a book that something clicked in me. Maybe it was because the set-up for the idea was so short and we didn’t have time to whittle it down to nothing that the plot came alive in my head. Eddie finished the lyrics and by that time I was already deep into the writing of my untitled book. “I’m wondering,” he said, after playing the song for me. “Should we call this Christmas Shoes or The Christmas Shoes?”

“The Christmas Shoes,” I said.

I sent my outline of The Christmas Shoes and several chapters off to a literary agent in NYC. I was painting the walls in my husband’s new office when she called a few days later. “When can you have this finished?” she asked.

I put down the roller. She sounded, dare I say, interested! “When do you need it?”

“Yesterday would be good,” she said. I finished painting the office and stayed up late each night to write the remaining chapters.

Christmas found me again sometime around Easter. I had begun work on a novel I’d been writing off and on since college when my editor called. “Have you thought about writing another Christmas book?” I hadn’t. She called again a few weeks later. “Have you thought any more about writing another book to follow The Christmas Shoes?” I hadn’t. When she called a third time I knew something was up.

“Do you want me to write another Christmas book . . . because you keep calling.” She did—and so I did! It was a good call on her part. I had thought I was done with the Christmas stories, but now realize I would have missed several great journeys along the way. I have managed to write non-seasonal books in between the Christmas novels (I’m currently working on another non-seasonal novel set in Morgan Hill, Tennessee, where The Angels of Morgan Hilltakes place) and I enjoy the process for both.

A reporter recently asked me if I liked writing books set at Christmas—five books in, with the release of The Christmas Secret, I’d say the answer is obvious. Even if you don’t believe in miracles, somehow the most hardened cynic suspends his disbelief in that season of goodwill toward men. Christmas is difficult for so many, but it brings out the best in so many others. I started work on The Christmas Secret with that in mind. . . life can be hard, but people can be infinitely good. In The Christmas Secret, Christine Eisley is a single mom with a jerk of an ex-husband. I have an ex-brother-in-law who makes Christine’s ex look like Santa himself. Somehow, single mothers juggle kids, work, grocery shopping, laundry, cleaning, paying bills and even going to night school without spousal support. It has to be the most difficult job on earth, yet no reality series is dedicated to following them around. Christine encounters one roadblock after another but comes across people who won’t sit on their hands while she struggles to get around them.

A friend told me last week that if I kept this up I would start to be known as “The Christmas Lady.” I suppose there are far worse things to be known as; for instance, “The Gastric Bypass Lady” doesn’t conjure up images of coffee and scones on a wintry day and the “Scary Cat Lady” culls up visions of long, waxy fingernails, harsh make-up and incessant meowing. Who wants Scary Cat Lady to speak at their book club or annual convention?

CBS picked up both The Christmas Shoes and The Christmas Blessing and turned them into “movies of the week.” When CBS ditched their movie department, Lifetime picked up the third novel, The ChristmasHope, which will air this year. I never imagined any of that on that sweaty day in July 2000, by the way.

I’m grateful that Christmas found me. I just hope I’m leaving a body of work that will leave readers grateful as well!

Donna VanLiere is the New York Times best-selling author of the Christmas Hope Series. The Christmas Secret is her 10th book. Lifetime will air movie adaptations of her books on Sunday, December 13. The Christmas Shoes and The Christmas Blessing will be followed by the world premier of The Christmas Hope (starring Madeline Stowe).

Photo courtesy of Sheri O’Neal Photography.

Fiction

Fiction

Debut author finds inspiration close to home

Behind the Book by Amy Greene

by Amy Greene

On the way to my sister’s, there is an abandoned house. It sits on a rocky hill with trees crowded close, overlooking a creek that parts a briar thicket. The windows are broken and the front door is gone, the tin roof rusted and the chimney stones tumbled down in a heap. I’m not sure when I first noticed the house, but now I look up there each time I pass. Sometimes cows are grazing in the shade of the yard. Sometimes there are cords of firewood stacked against its sooty clapboard. Once I saw a man riding a tractor on the hillside. I can understand why he lets the house stand empty. There’s a sadness about it.

One evening three summers ago, I happened to be passing with my camera in the car and stopped to take pictures. I stood in the weeds beside the road as the sun was going down, the woods quiet and still beside the rustling creek water. The abandoned house had never looked more haunted. I remember the lonesomeness that came over me, and the sense of a story attached to the place. Whatever happened under that roof had cast a pall. Then a car rounded the curve and the moment was gone. But the feeling stayed with me.

A week or so later, I was folding clothes when it came to me who belonged in that house. I saw a black-haired woman with wild blue eyes and her two hungry-looking children. The children were twins, a boy and a girl. There was something mysterious about the three of them, especially the woman, and I needed to figure out what it was. I pictured her and the twins living in isolation on that hill in the mountain woods, maybe hiding from some kind of danger. I don’t know where the image came from, but I was captured by it.

When I sat down with my notebook, I didn’t start with the woman, even though I knew she was the heart of the story. I saved her for last, discovering her through the eyes of the characters whose lives she turned upside down. I wrote about her son, Johnny Odom, first. Somehow I identified with him the most, in spite of his violent streak. Almost from the beginning, I saw Johnny as a poet. His evolution into a writer felt beyond my control. It was the part of me that seeped into the narrative, my understanding of the power of words and of books. Perhaps because I felt a kinship with Johnny, he’s the character I imagined standing as I did in the roadside weeds looking up at the abandoned house. That lonesome moment I had one summer dusk became the first scene I wrote for Bloodroot, of teenage Johnny returning to his empty childhood home after six years in foster care.

It took a year to write the first draft of Bloodroot. In the process, I found the woman with wild blue eyes and named her Myra Lamb. I wrote about how she was raised by her grandmother in that house on Bloodroot Mountain, a free spirit born with “the touch,” an inherited gift for communing with nature. I learned what made her a destructive force in the lives of the other characters, her tortured relationship with a man named John Odom that affected all of them. I wanted to explore whether a love like theirs was destined for a tragic end or if they could have resisted their dark passion, and whether or not a person’s blood dictates how they turn out. Getting to know Myra in that very first draft, but also in the subsequent drafts I wrote over the next 18 months, I realized that while my characters might be products of their upbringing, they have a choice: they don’t have to let their fates be determined by where they come from or who their parents are. This was something I didn’t know before I started writing, something the characters had to tell me.

The last time I passed the house on the way to my sister’s, one side of it was stripped to the studs and there was rubble piled in the yard. The man on the tractor must have decided to demolish it. He doesn’t know that his place has meant something to a stranger. I might glance up there from time to time and be sad to see it gone. But I won’t ever forget how it looked from the road that day three years ago. Whatever the true story is of that house on the hill, in my eyes it will always be where Myra lives with her twins, where she was raised by her grandmother and where she ran home after escaping her cruel husband. Myra Lamb may be the heart of the story, but she didn’t give birth to it. For me, that abandoned house will always be where Bloodroot was born.

Bloodroot is Amy Greene’s first novel. She was born and raised in the foothills of East Tennessee’s Smoky Mountains, where she lives with her husband and two children.

Picture Book

Picture Book

Behind the Book: Learning from history—and experimenting outdoors

Behind the Book by Deborah Hopkinson

by Deborah Hopkinson

"Do you know what building this is?” I ask a gym full of third graders as I direct their attention to my next slide.

“Empire State Building!” several voices call out. (Good start. Sometimes kindergarteners think it’s the Eiffel Tower.)

“Exactly! Any idea how old it is?”

“A hundred years,” someone yells. “Ten years,” another guesses.

A boy in front raises his hand excitedly. Maybe he’s a kid who’s really into history, I think. Maybe he’ll nail it on the first try.

I call on him. “How many years old do you think it is?”

“Five thousand!”

Right. Well, therein lies one reason I like to write books that tie into historical anniversaries. Anniversaries help give kids a touchstone—a way to make sense of all that amorphous past that happened before they were born.

It’s a start if, after I visit a school, children can remember a few things: there are cars in the illustrations of Sky Boys, the Empire State Building book set in 1931, but none in Apples to Oregon, a pioneer tale set in 1847; or that not every black-and-white photograph of a man with a beard is a president. More importantly, I hope students continue to find ways to connect with and understand the lives of those who have lived before us.

In addition to Sky Boys, written for the 75th anniversary of the Empire State Building, I’ve published a book on Matthew Henson, co-discoverer of the North Pole in 1909 and Abe Lincoln Crosses a Creek, in honor of the Lincoln bicentennial in 2009.

And that brings me to my new book, The Humblebee Hunter, inspired by the life and experiments of Charles Darwin with his children at Down House.

All right. I know. All this talk of anniversaries and I’m a year late. Anyone who was paying attention to the Lincoln hoopla last year knows that Darwin and Lincoln were born on the same day—February 12, 1809.

Sometimes that’s just the way it goes.

Besides, Charles Darwin—as a transformative thinker and scientist, a lifelong naturalist and as a father and family man—is worth reading and writing about in any year.

I first began research on Darwin for a biography for young readers I published in 2005 entitled Who Was Charles Darwin? Among my valuable resources were biographer Janet Browne’s two volumes on Darwin, Voyaging and The Power of Place. (I recommend both, along with Darwin, Discovering the Tree of Life by Niles Eldridge, curator of the American Museum of Natural History.)

Actually, it was visiting the Darwin exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History in June 2006 that inspired me to write a picture book about Darwin’s family life. (It’s not the same as seeing a Galapagos turtle in person, but you can still access the exhibit online.)

As I turned a corner of the exhibit and came upon the recreation of Darwin’s study at Down House, I stopped short, transported into the epicenter of Darwin’s creative life.

This is where he wrote and worked, I thought. Here was a desk crowded with papers, pens and a microscope. And there was his comfy old armchair near the hearth, where he wrote using a cloth-covered board set across the arms. There were shelves crowded with notes for the Origin of Species. And, of course, a bed by the fire for his dog, Polly.

One could almost imagine Darwin here. But it wouldn’t have been Down House without something else—the clatter of children’s feet and the noisy, happy racket of young voices.

Charles and Emma Darwin had 10 children, seven of whom lived to adulthood. And while Darwin never traveled far after returning from his legendary voyage, biographer Janet Browne describes Down House itself as a kind of Beagle, “a self-contained, self-regulating scientific ship.”

While Emma ran things efficiently, Darwin could work in his “cabin”—his study. The children and Darwin’s numerous, far-flung correspondents became a kind of crew, ready to help with a wide variety of natural history experiments from flowers to pigeons, from worms to bees.

Bees were a favorite Darwin subject, and Darwin’s articles on bees are still cited today. In Voyaging, Browne writes that watching her husband bending over a flower, “Emma got the feeling that Darwin would have liked to be a bee above all other species.”

I was fortunate when working on The Humblebee Hunter to have the guidance of talented editor Tamson Weston at Hyperion, who paired the manuscript with gorgeous illustrations by artist Jen Corace that capture the love and warmth of the Darwin family at Down House. The story begins this way:

One summer afternoon, Mother and Cook tried to teach me to bake a honey cake.
But raspberries glistened in the sun, and birds brushed the air with song.
More than anything, I wanted to be outside.
Then, out the window, I saw Father, home from walking on his Thinking Path.
He stopped in the kitchen garden and bent over the beans. He wanted to study the bees.
Mother smiled and brushed a speck of flower from my cheek.
“Henrietta, I think your father would become a bee, if he could. Just like them, he’s always busy.”

While we have descriptions of at least one bee experiment Darwin did with his children, I can’t be sure the experiment described in the fictional The Humblebee Hunter—counting the number of flowers a humblebee visits in a minute—is one that Darwin and his children did together.

But in a letter written to the British horticultural periodical, “The Gardener’s Chronicle” on August 16, 1841, Darwin describes the number of flowers he saw a humblebee (bumblebee) suck in one minute.

Like Darwin, I did research, involving my family on summer days, bending over flowers to watch bees at work. (My results were pretty close to Darwin’s but not always exact.)

So, any idea as to the number of blossoms a bumblebee visits in one minute?

You may have to wait for summer to experiment yourself.

In the meantime, here’s a hint: it’s not 5,000.

Deborah Hopkinson gardens and writes near Portland, Oregon, where she serves as vice president for advancement at Pacific Northwest College of Art. Visit her on the web at www.deborahhopkinson.com. (And if you really want to know Darwin’s count, of course you should do research. The answer appears in Letter 607 in the Darwin Correspondence Project.)

"Do you know what building this is?” I ask a gym full of third graders as I direct their attention to my next slide.

“Empire State Building!” several voices call out. (Good start. Sometimes kindergarteners think it’s the Eiffel Tower.)

“Exactly! Any idea how old it is?”

“A…

Fiction, Historical Fiction

Fiction Historical Fiction

Real-life resort for slaveowners and mistresses inspires fictional debut

Behind the Book by Dolen Perkins-Valdez

by Dolen Perkins-Valdez

I have never been very good at coming up with ideas for stories and novels. When I was in graduate school, they encouraged us to scan the obituaries for stories. I could never do this! Aside from the fact that I'm a Southerner and have a deep respect for the deceased, I often take ideas to my desk and find they don't work. I don't know your experience, but I've found that most ideas aren't viable ideas.

So when I came upon this historical footnote about a summer resort that existed near Xenia, Ohio in the 1850s, notorious for its popularity among slaveholders and their enslaved mistresses, I did not know where this fact would lead me. I began by just digging in the historical archive. I learned that the resort had been established by a lawyer and state legislator named Elias Drake. At the time, it was very popular among the country's elite to travel to areas with natural springs. Hoping to create a successful business, Drake acquired the property in 1851 and opened it in 1852. Eventually, Northern visitors displayed their disdain at the sight of Southern slaveholders and their slave entourages. Ohio was a free state, and many of the Northerners were abolitionists. They did not enjoy vacationing with the Southerners, so they stopped coming and business declined. The place closed in 1855.

This was my first time writing something set in another era. As a result, I had a lot of research to do: what kinds of clothes did slaves wear? what did the men hunt in Ohio? what kinds of flowers and vegetation grew there? Then, when the novel takes the reader back to a plantation in Tennessee, I had to research the daily culture of life on a Southern plantation. After I felt more comfortable with this era, I had to figure out how Southerners would have made it to Ohio in the first place. I learned that advances in transportation, such as the ever-improving steamships that traveled up and down the Mississippi River, or the recently constructed Little Miami Railroad that stretched from Cincinnati to Xenia, made a significant impact on who was able to vacation in this Ohio town known for its mineral baths.

Even with all this fascinating history, I knew that I wanted to complete more than a scholarly essay on this period in history. What I really wanted to find was a record of the women who were alleged to have been the mistresses of their owners. Of course, I found no such records because most slaves left behind very little other than oral remnants. That's when I knew there was a rich fictional landscape waiting to be mined. I understood that I would have to imagine myself into the minds and bodies of these women. It was a task that I undertook with great care. What would it have been like to be a slave woman at this resort at this particular time? Would she have considered escaping to freedom? Or would the bond with her master be so strong that it would have a hold over her that even the promise of freedom could not overcome? Ultimately, I discovered there are different kinds of freedoms. I was in the face of something very complex, so complex that it took four years to work through it.

Throughout my drafting period, the novel was titled The Women of Tawawa House. Once I entered the contract with Amistad, I shared with my editor Dawn Davis another idea for a title. "Wench" I said. She asked why. I told her that I was interested in this word because it originally meant, in the Middle English, a young girl. As it evolved, it came to mean a "wanton woman." Yet it was only when it entered American usage that it began to be specifically applied to black women. Many reward posters seeking runaway slave women referred to them as "wenches." It was a derogatory term of the period that I wished to highlight, complicate, recast. I wanted to humanize the women to whom this term referred. Give them a chance to tell their own story. To my delight, my editor agreed.

And so my debut novel Wench was born.

—

Dolen Perkins-Valdez was born and raised in Memphis and graduated from Harvard University. She teaches creative writing at the University of Puget Sound and has had stories published in The Kenyon Review and Robert Olen Butler Prize Stories 2009. Wench is her first novel. Visit her website for more information.

Debut Fiction, Fiction

Fiction Debut Fiction

Behind the Book: A child’s second chance

Behind the Book by Heidi W. Durrow

by Heidi W. Durrow

I started writing The Girl Who Fell from the Sky after reading a haunting news story about a young mother—recently depressed and despondent—who led her kids to her building’s rooftop, and apparently pushed the children off and then jumped.

Reporters interviewed neighbors and friends who spoke of the young mother’s fierce devotion to her children. She’d had a recent setback, but no one could have guessed that the loving mother could do such a thing. No one could put the pieces of her story together to make sense of the reason why.

I became obsessed with the miracle of that horrible tragedy: One of the children, the girl, had survived!

I searched the news for more information about her, but all I found were the barest facts of her biography: her name, her age and a photo that must have been a couple of years old. It was sad to think that the whole story of her life was now this tragedy.

In follow-up articles, I learned that the girl would make a complete recovery. After a few more weeks in the hospital, she would be healed. But then what?

I had so many questions: How would the girl grow up? How would she deal with the legacy of her past? What would her survival look like?

I hoped that she would be able to create a normal life for herself. I hoped that she would still know how to love and be loved. So I decided to imagine a future for her. I wanted to give her a voice.

I wrote the rooftop scene first. That’s when I understood the reason the girl’s story resonated with me. It had something to do with my own. No, I’m not the survivor of a fall, and I haven’t lived through a deadly family tragedy. (I always mention that up front at readings so people don’t feel like they have to treat me gently.) But what I learned writing that scene was that I wanted to write a mother-daughter story. I wanted to write a story about how a girl learns to be a woman without the help of her mother to guide her. I think it’s a reality so many women can relate to—whether a mother has passed away, or just isn’t available emotionally. And sometimes a mother just doesn’t know how to help a child navigate an unfamiliar world.

I named my character Rachel. And then I started to fill in the details of her biography. I couldn’t draw on the real girl’s story. I didn’t know it. So I wrote what I knew, as the old saying goes. I am half Danish and half African-American, and Rachel became a biracial/bicultural girl newly transplanted to a mostly black community after the accident. Her story let me write a story exploring race and identity. I didn’t know when I started to write the book that the nation would soon be talking about the same things with the election of our first biracial African-American president.

The final thread that made the book come together was the character Brick. He’s not anyone I know or have known, but I absolutely adore him. A tragedy needs a witness, and Brick became Rachel’s.

Many years have passed since I read that news story. And I still think of the real girl. What happened to her? My character Rachel is about the same age at the end of the book as the real girl might be now. I imagined Rachel growing up to be a heroic and loving young woman—I would like to believe that the real young woman is too.

Heidi W. Durrow received writer Barbara Kingsolver’s 2008 Bellwether Prize for Literature of Social Change for The Girl Who Fell From the Sky, her first novel. She is a graduate of Stanford University, Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and Yale Law School.

Behind the Book: Mayhem and murder in NYC

Behind the Book by Ellen Horan

by Ellen Horan

I discovered the idea for 31 Bond Street one Saturday afternoon, years ago, while idly flipping through the bins in a print shop. I found a yellowed newspaper page with an etching of townhouses on a tree-lined street in New York City. At closer look, a crowd was assembled on the cobblestones before one of the homes. The caption said the address was 31 Bond Street and the date was 1857.

The print shop was on Houston Street, just blocks away from Bond Street, which is a short street nestled between Soho and the Bowery. It was puzzling, because I knew of no townhouses on that single block. Not yet trendy or gentrified, there were only warehouses, car parks and the type of business that sells rusting scrap metal. Examining the page further, the story mentioned a crime at 31 Bond Street—a wealthy dentist had been brutally murdered inside his home.

I bought the print for $8 and followed the trail of that one page to the New York Public Library. At that time, the library still had newspapers on microfilm. Thinking I would have to dig for clues to this lost story, I pulled out The New York Post, The New York Daily News, The New York Daily Times, The New York Herald and The New York Tribune. Immediately, unspooling across every city paper, was coverage of the murder of Dr. Harvey Burdell. In the first half of 1857, his murder created a sensation that covered all 13 New York newspapers and spread to those of Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, then London, Paris and beyond. It remained in the headlines for months, as the newspapers competed to cover the investigation and the murder trial.

“Unspooling across every city paper was coverage of the murder of Dr. Harvey Burdell.”

I became fascinated reading about the case firsthand. By sifting through the newspapers day by day, I learned the outcome as a 19th-century reader might, discovering the story through their morning paper at breakfast. I also learned about the era through the advertisements and news of the day. In 1857, New York was a vibrant and chaotic place, and urban life was marching forward at an accelerating pace. One hundred steamers left the ports every day and immigrants still disembarked from sailing vessels at the foot of the Battery. Women wore steel spring hoop skirts with adjustable bustles and paraded their fashions to the theatres and entertainments along Broadway. Rents had gone up and the Union ferry raised its rate to two cents. Canal Street was widened and a lunch of oysters and ice cream could be had on Houston Street.

There was no electricity or transatlantic cable and news took six weeks to cross the Atlantic. The country was debating the extension of slavery into the western territories. It was apparent, from reading the newspapers, that New York City was in the midst of an economic and cultural boom, and few, if anyone, imagined that just three years hence, the country would be plunged into crisis and civil war.

Thus the book was born. The process of writing unraveled slowly, much like an archeological dig. There were several mysteries that gripped me as I moved forward. There was an unsolved murder. There was domestic life on Bond Street, an actual street where ghostlike traces of the fine homes are still evident on the walls of the taller buildings today. There was a secret romantic entanglement between the murdered man and the suspect, and there were political and legal rivalries at the heart of the case. Real characters and dialogue from trial transcripts merged with fictional characters as the narrative evolved.

And the city of New York retained a central and fascinating pull, as the setting of its own vanished past.

A book and magazine photo editor, Ellen Horan has worked for Glamour, Vanity Fair and many other publications. She lives in New York City. 31 Bond Street is her first novel. Visit her website to watch a trailer for the novel and find out more information.

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