Behind the Book Archives

by Ashley Woodfolk

Many readers became familiar with Ashley Woodfolk via her contributions to Blackout, last summer’s collaborative YA smash success co-authored by Dhonielle Clayton, Tiffany D. Jackson, Nic Stone, Angie Thomas and Nicola Yoon. In her new novel, Nothing Burns as Bright as You, Woodfolk’s prose blazes like an inferno as she tells the story of two girls whose connection flickers between best friendship and deep, complicated love. Riveting and powerful, it’s Woodfolk’s best work yet. Here, she explores how embracing vulnerability allowed her to craft a novel fueled by pure emotion.

Every writer I know has a preoccupation with a single subject, a thing they can’t help but write about. If you look at any author’s body of work, you can almost always find a thread of thematic sameness permeating their writing, an echo of something that haunts their stories like a ghost. Maybe it’s the impossible pursuit of perfection, and their characters are always striving to be the cleverest or prettiest or best version of whoever they are, but failing again and again. Maybe it’s an obsession with acceptance, and their novels examine all the ways humans can feel excluded and all the desperate things we do to feel worthy of love. As for me, I use my novels to dig into the painful inevitability of loss.

I have always been someone who feels deeply and intensely. Sadness for me is a black hole sucking at the universe; happiness, an endless fireworks display. For years I’d felt like my emotions were too much: too big, too wild or too overwhelming for other people. This was rooted in loss, in a fear of it, because I’d lost numerous friends and partners after I showed them all of me. So I learned to shrink. I cried in secret. I laughed at things that hurt my feelings. I swallowed my fear and dimmed my joy and ignored my own anger. These decisions to hide my true feelings felt like safety. It seemed like this limited, more palatable version of me was the version that made people stick around.

Enter: the pandemic. COVID-19 has forced so many of us to confront loss, literally and figuratively. We’ve lost millions of human lives, job security, money and both physical and emotional closeness with friends and family. We’ve had to cancel plans, to say goodbye to the normalcy that used to govern our lives, and we’ve lost so much time.

“I no longer had the energy to hide the real me, and as people who couldn’t take Ashley-at-full-volume fell away, I saw so many things more clearly.”

Facing loss head-on in this way forced my hand when it came to how much of myself I showed the world. I no longer had the energy to hide the real me, and as people who couldn’t take Ashley-at-full-volume fell away, I saw so many things more clearly. While I know now that my emotions were always valid—that my deep capacity for empathy and full-bodied feelings is in fact a superpower—the world being on fire stoked the flame that had always been burning inside me. And feeling my feelings in all their untamed glory made me braver when it came to my writing.

While I’m proud of all my novels, Nothing Burns as Bright as You has a rawness and vulnerability that, before the pandemic, I had been too afraid to show. My first book, The Beauty That Remains, deals with the aftermath of untimely death. Each character in that book has lost someone close to them unexpectedly, and the novel is threaded through with how music and friendship help them all grieve. When You Were Everything is a novel about a friendship breakup, and what it’s like to slowly lose the person who knows you best, in a way you can’t seem to stop. And in my series, Flyy Girls, each character loses something too: their reputation, a brother, their innocence, a dream.

In all of these novels, I couch the feelings of my characters in very concrete, understandable devices. There is always a reason for their sadness, an explanation for their obsessions, an answer to all their questions. I think this was just another way I was hiding. In my latest novel, I hide nothing.

“Once I let go of rationality and leaned fully into what comes naturally to me—feeling—this book poured out of me.”

The experience of writing Nothing Burns as Bright as You was unlike writing any of my other books. Once I let go of rationality and leaned fully into what comes naturally to me—feeling—this book poured out of me. It is a story that shows what it feels like to be a troublemaker, to be a Black girl, to be in love with your best and only friend. It is about the push and pull of codependency, recognizing toxicity in others and in yourself, learning your worth no matter the cost. It’s about loss—of innocence, of expectations, of relationships you want to last forever. And it examines my own latent queerness, something I had ignored and suppressed for years. With this novel, I was finally able to grieve the queer girlhood I never got to fully experience without the filter that characterized my earlier work. The result is the most emotionally honest novel I’ve ever written.

What I learned over the course of the pandemic, in therapy and through writing this book is that while my feelings are real, they are my responsibility and no one else’s. It is my right to feel whatever I feel fully, but it is also my job to choose how I allow my feelings to affect others. Learning to separate feelings and behavior has been key to identifying and healing some of my own toxic behaviors. I now know it was often my reactions, not my feelings, that played a role in some of my most painful relationship losses, and I hope this book can be equally illuminating for readers.

Emotions don’t always make sense, but before Nothing Burns as Bright as You, I was afraid to write a character who felt as wildly as I did, afraid she would be brushed off or misunderstood. Sometimes you love a person just because they love you, you make decisions because they feel right in your gut, you change the course of your whole life because of a single sentence someone says. I wanted to write fearlessly—to write a novel that was full of pure, maybe volatile, but always true feeling. I hope I succeeded.

Read our starred review of Ashley Woodfolk’s ‘Nothing Burns as Bright as You.’

Author photo of Ashley Woodfolk courtesy of Ashley Woodfolk.

Bestselling YA author Ashley Woodfolk reveals why Nothing Burns as Bright as You is her most “emotionally honest” book yet.

Children's & YA, YA, YA Fiction

How Allison Saft discovered the source of true magic

Behind the Book by Allison Saft

by Allison Saft

Allison Saft’s second YA novel, A Far Wilder Magic, is an enchanting fantasy tale about two young people, Margaret and Wes, who are drawn together in pursuit of a mythical fox purported to hold alchemical power. Throughout the story, Saft creates magic that feels astonishingly real. Here, she offers a deeper look at A Far Wilder Magic and explores how she gave life to the imaginary world of New Albion.

The idea for A Far Wilder Magic came to me in a glimmer of what felt like magic. For much of 2019, writing felt impossible. I’d recently finished revisions on what would become my debut novel, moved halfway across the country and was desperately trying to figure out what my next idea would be. I wrote a quarter of a new book and immediately trunked it. I despaired that I would never fall in love with a book again.

In writing circles, inspiration is often figured as a lightning strike, or else something that seizes upon you at 2 a.m. and refuses to let go. Now that I’ve gone through this cycle a few times, I’ve come to understand it as something that dwells beneath unturned stones. You have to go looking for it. In that fallow period in the months before I began outlining A Far Wilder Magic, I began searching for it in books.

I found it in The Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater. It’s a delightfully odd book and easily one of my favorites. Few other books have managed to capture my imagination in the same way. I reread it every year, weeping inconsolably through the last 50 pages of my yellowing paperback edition.

And it isn’t just me. Every year, on the first day of November, thousands of people share the book’s first line on social media: “It is the first day of November and so, today, someone will die.” TheScorpio Races possesses a powerful magic indeed, to compel its readership to treat the races like an event we can set our calendars by, and I was determined to understand the workings of the spell Stiefvater had woven.

“My job as an author is to convince readers that there is magic in even the smallest things.”

During that 2019 read-through, what struck me most about the novel is that the most magical thing in it isn’t the mythical water horses or the race itself. It’s the atmosphere that informs every choice Stiefvater makes. It’s the way I feel when I close the book each time: like home is a place I have never been before. That was the most important lesson I carried with me as I set out to write A Far Wilder Magic: Magic isn’t a thing, it’s a feeling.

It was something of a revelation, since I most often find myself gravitating toward magic that works like science. In New Albion, where A Far Wilder Magic is set, magic is alchemy. In our (real) world, alchemists strove for purification and perfection. Among their goals were the transformation of base metals into gold and the distillation of an elixir for eternal life. Alchemy was a philosophical pursuit as much as it was a scientific one, and I wanted to capture both of these aspects when I put my own spin on it.

Just as real alchemists did, practitioners of magic in New Albion aim to make sense of the world, to demystify it. Industries have sprung up around alchemized goods, from cosmetics to fashion to military technology, and becoming a licensed alchemist affords social status and political clout. Yet as New Albion modernized, its inexplicable magic began to vanish. All but one of the mythical beasts have been killed, and the last one is hunted each year in a sporting event. When magic is a part of everyday life, when it is in itself mundane, an author needs to create a sense of wonder for the characters—and by extension, for readers—in other ways. That challenge, I think, was what drove me as I wrote.

I’d argue that the true source of magic lies in point of view. The details that a character notices allow me to conjure an entire world. My job as an author is to convince readers that there is magic in even the smallest things. To do this, I think about what associations my narrator attaches to a particular place. What memories does a particular smell awaken for them? What are their eyes drawn to when they step into a room? What gossip have they heard about another character?

”Through the protagonist’s fears, desires and memories, the setting becomes a place the reader could visit, if only they knew the way.”

Page by page, my setting and characters accrue meaning and texture and history. I can convince my readers that my protagonist is someone with a life, one that began before the reader and will continue after they close the book for the last time. Through the protagonist’s fears, desires and memories, the setting becomes a place the reader could visit, if only they knew the way. Books like that fill me with yearning that almost knocks me breathless, a nostalgia for something I’ve never had at all. That, to me, is far more fantastical than any alchemical reaction.

Sometimes I feel as though Margaret and Wes, the main characters of A Far Wilder Magic, are friends I could call. I carried them with me for months, imagining that they walked beside me and wondering how they would respond to the things around me. Envisioning the world through their points of view made me permeable to wonder in a way I’d never been before.

In a way, A Far Wilder Magic is an archive of the things I was enchanted by as I drafted it: the color of a wave when struck by sunlight; the humbling, silent enormity of the redwoods; the whisper of the wind through the grass; the view from a mountaintop; people, from their most insignificant, charming quirks to their immense capacity for kindness and cruelty. And maybe most of all, the things you notice about the person you love.

The title of A Far Wilder Magic refers to a specific line in the book: “Like this, she looks more wolf than girl, like some magic far wilder than alchemy runs through her.” Although Margaret and Wes initially dislike each other, in this moment, Wes sees something pass over Margaret’s face that renders her almost mythic to him. Throughout the book, he can’t stop noticing small things about her, all the little details that build to something unaccountable. Without even realizing it was happening, he’s fallen in love with her. The wildest magic in New Albion isn’t alchemy. It’s something more intangible.

Author photo of Allison Saft courtesy of Lisa DeNeffe.

YA fantasy author Allison Saft explains how she created alchemical wonders in A Far Wilder Magic.

Mystery, Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Mystery

Fly on the wall

Behind the Book by Hannah Morrissey

by Hannah Morrissey

Must have typing speed of 55 words per minute. Must not be emotionally affected by violent or traumatic reports. All hired candidates will be required to swear an oath of confidentiality.

When I first read the job description for a police transcriber, I could hardly believe it was legit. This suspended belief percolated within me even as I applied, tested, interviewed, got hired, and sat down to type my first report.

Hello, Transcriber.

Those two words welcomed me into a world I’d never been privy to before—a world rife with death and derelicts and drugs. So many drugs. In my two years of having lived in that industrial Wisconsin city, I’d been oblivious to the underground economy that flourished there, the biggest players being heroin and crack cocaine. Sometimes prescription pills made their way into the mix. Suddenly, I knew every bad thing that happened before it hit the news. If it hit the news.

In the days and weeks that transpired as I transcribed case after case—suspects in interview rooms, search warrants, homicide investigations, cell phone logs and more—I realized something: I had become the proverbial fly on the wall. I was a nameless, bodiless thing who stole into the police department at 10 p.m. and left before most people punched in for the morning, the only trace of my having been there a stack of perfectly typed reports and completed arrest paperwork.

I slept by day and typed by night, utilizing my in-between hours to write another novel that would ultimately go nowhere. But if nothing else, it kept me afloat during a time when I was untethered and adrift. This dream of becoming a published author was my lighthouse when I feared I might never find my way out of the dark.

Read our review of ‘Hello, Transcriber.’

My office was a terrarium, a narrow space with an outside wall that was a sheet of glass—the only shield between me and the horrors I typed up every night. I learned more in that small space, in that small slice of time, than I learned during any other period of my life.

First, I awakened to the fact that I now existed in two parallel realities: one in which I was oblivious to the murders that happened just a few houses down from mine, the drug deals on the sidewalk, the car chases down Main Street; and the other in which I was the conduit between an investigator’s report and a criminal going to jail. I learned that just because the police arrest a violent criminal one day, it doesn’t mean they won’t be walking the streets the next. It’s up to the district attorney’s office and the judges to make the charges stick.

I also learned that people are people, regardless of which role they’re assigned in a report (police officer, victim, suspect, etc.). The word sonder is a neologism from John Koenig’s Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows that he defines as “the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own.” I think that’s important for writers and human beings in general, having the ability to see things through a different lens. When you do that, you realize how fragile your own circumstances are.

I picked up a lot of spontaneous knowledge, too, such as learning people by voice instead of face and knowing their pet words; thus, however and indicative are a handful that come to mind. I memorized badge numbers for all 216 sworn personnel, and I could guess the nature of the crime based on the length of the report. Car thefts were generally only a few minutes long, and your average search warrants were in the 7- to 12-minute range, unless you got stuck typing the report for the evidence technician. That could land you upward of 40 minutes, depending on how many items of evidentiary value were found. Homicides tended to be longer, especially if there were interviews or a neighborhood canvas involved. And so on and so on.

Finally, I recognized that I had accidentally landed in a writer’s dream position: a unique job with behind-the-scenes access to fascinating stories and all the quiet time in the world to come up with a story of my own. This was the spark for Hello, Transcriber, a book that explores this unique and crepuscular work. Contrary to popular belief, there are professions much more solitary than being a writer. Take it from a former fly on the wall.

Author photo by Alaxandra Rutella.

Author Hannah Morrissey explores how her work as a police transcriber gave her the perfect perspective for her debut novel.

Contemporary Romance, Romance

Romance Contemporary Romance

8 romantic holiday movies

Behind the Book by Belle Calhoune

by Belle Calhoune

In Belle Calhoune’s No Ordinary Christmas, Hollywood action star Dante West returns to his tiny hometown of Mistletoe, Maine, intent on winning back the heart of his high school sweetheart, Lucy Marshall. Calhoune’s romance has a perfect blend of cinematic romance and cozy charm, so there’s no one better suited to put together a list of festive, swoony movies to watch while cuddled up under the mistletoe.

As soon as November rolls around, hundreds of romantic Christmas films begin to air on television. I love them all—the romantic gestures, the upbeat soundtracks, the variety of meet cutes and heartwarming declarations of love. As snow gently falls from the sky and twinkling lights shimmer, it’s the perfect time to curl up on the couch with a big mug of peppermint hot chocolate and indulge in one of my favorite holiday movies.

While You Were Sleeping (1995), directed by Jon Turteltaub

This is my all-time favorite. Lucy, the heroine, is adorable and genuine as she pretends to be the fiancée of her crush, Peter, who has fallen into a coma. With the magic of Christmas swirling around her, Lucy begins to fall in love with her fake fiancé’s family, as well as his charming brother, Jack. This is the ultimate feel-good movie about finding home and being seen for who you truly are.

Last Holiday (2006), directed by Wayne Wang

When Georgia Byrd (played by Queen Latifah) receives a terminal diagnosis, she decides to live life to the fullest by splurging on a decadent Christmas vacation in Europe. Hilarious and heartwarming, this one is pure holiday fun.

Christmas in Connecticut (1945), directed by Peter Godfrey

Barbara Stanwyck is at her best in the role of Elizabeth Lane, who is pretending to be a housewife/lifestyle columnist living in the Connecticut countryside with a husband and baby when in reality she is single, childless and living in New York City. In order to save her career, Elizabeth has to host a Christmas dinner for her publisher and a handsome war hero while keeping up her ruse.

The Holiday (2006), directed by Nancy Meyers

This movie has all the feels—unrequited love, a single dad—plus a charming English cottage. When two women (one living in California and the other in England) decide to swap houses for the holidays after enduring heartbreak, unexpected magic ensues for both of them. Bonus: Jude Law and Jack Black are both swoonworthy love interests.

Love, Actually (2003), directed by Richard Curtis

Set in London, this film depicts numerous love stories, from a childhood crush to a newlywed couple to a politician falling in love with his staffer. Poignant, humorous and achingly romantic, this movie stays with you well after the credits roll.

The Holiday Calendar (2018), directed by Bradley Walsh

Sweet and heartwarming, this friends-to-lovers romance is the perfect movie to watch in front of a roaring fire with a plate of gingerbread cookies.

It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), directed by Frank Capra

This quintessential holiday film is a must-watch movie every year. George Bailey, a loving family man, is in a desperate financial crisis and ready to end it all when an angel named Clarence shows him what an impact his life has made on others. The tender scenes where George and his wife, Mary, fall in love are utterly charming.

Beauty and the Beast: The Enchanted Christmas (1997), directed by Andy Knight

Belle and the Beast’s fairy-tale romance blossoms over Christmas as the magic of the season sparkles and glimmers all around them. My favorite scene? Belle teaching the Beast to skate. So sweet!

Author photo by Venture Photography Greenwich.

Stumped on which holiday movie to watch tonight? Let an expert help you out. Romance author Belle Calhoune has chosen eight perfectly cozy, totally swoonworthy options for you.

Memoir, Nonfiction

Nonfiction Memoir

Publicly excavating the soul

Behind the Book by Katherine May

by Katherine May

In my memoir, The Electricity of Every Living Thing, I write not just about my late autism diagnosis but also about the experience of unearthing a hidden self. This autistic version of me was smothered and buried in childhood, when I saw very clearly and painfully that she was unacceptable to the outside world. I determined to make a bright, shiny new person in her place, one who fit in. I then spent the next 30 years ineffectually covering my tracks.

And yet, once I had a name for what I was, I knew immediately that I wanted to write about it, and to externalize all those parts of my experience that I found so shameful for so long. I wanted to capture the feeling of being profoundly different from most of the people around me, the struggles to cope with everyday life, the canvas of self-loathing and exhaustion onto which I painted my identity. Most of all, I wanted to write about the process of concealing all this, even from myself. I wanted to show what it was like to undergo this unpeeling.

Read our review of ‘The Electricity of Every Living Thing.’

The question I often get asked is: Why? Why would I expose such a raw nerve? Why would I so willingly express my otherness and undermine my chance to be “one of us”? I could, after all, make my own private adaptations and carry on pretending to the outside world that I am perfectly fine.

This archaeology of the soul is common currency in memoir. Like therapy, life writing encourages us to dig through the strata of our experiences to uncover something that glints with fascination. Except that we memoirists undertake this work in public. It is, I’ll admit, an unusual instinct. Memoirists don’t simply manifest their pain. We dig deeper into it, picking at the healed parts until they bleed again.

But this is the offering that memoirists make to our readers. In return for their attention, we offer them contact with our humanity. Good memoir is transgressive because it exposes the secrets we hold in common. It offers both reader and writer the catharsis of shedding shame. Quite often, readers find a mirror of the aspects of themselves that they thought were their own unique burdens. This is an exchange of gifts: By writing, I affirm the experiences of others; by being read, I am affirmed.

“Memoirists don’t simply manifest their pain. We dig deeper into it, picking at the healed parts until they bleed again.”

But I think we defang memoir when we only see it as a therapeutic tool, a simple airing of private experience. It’s also a craft, a creative form within which I practice. I wrote The Electricity of Every Living Thing because I wanted to explore how to tell a story that took the reader on the same journey that I took, the gradual uncovering of the true nature of my mind. I wanted readers to experience coming to love the differences you’ve always despised in yourself, and to finally integrate your sense of outsidership.

This is, of course, political. Memoir usually is. When I started to imagine this book, I knew that it would have to subvert a number of common ideas. For example, it would need to make readers painfully aware that they have probably misunderstood autism, just as I did. To achieve that, I had to show myself being wrong.

As I wrote about walking 630 miles along the South West Coast Path in England, I also sought to undermine the heroic narrative of journeys into the wilderness, to resist the idea that I had to effect some kind of physical triumph to assert my value in this world. This was intended as a sly critique of the male adventurer whose feats of exploration are underwritten by the work of an invisible woman. In my book, I show how difficult it was to get time alone to walk as the mother of a young child, and I make the compromises and conflicts part of the story.

“Not all readers understand that memoir is a literary form rather than an affidavit. I tell what I choose to tell, and the hidden side of that is what I choose to withhold.”

Because memoir tells a true story, the contract with the reader is different: Their attention is drawn by fascination with the real rather than by the promise of a good yarn, in which everything turns out all right in the end. This is absolutely why I write memoir. It functions more like gossip than the hero’s journey, and so it buys me a license to stretch the boundaries of conventional storytelling. I can teach without being didactic. I can show you life in a different mind in a way that feels elemental rather than told.

Of course, when you transform details from your real life into story, the sense of exposure can bite—but that comes most of all when the contract between reader and writer is broken. Not all readers understand that memoir is a literary form rather than an affidavit. I tell what I choose to tell, and the hidden side of that is what I choose to withhold. I grow uncomfortable when people pry further. Memoirists can be fiercely protective of the privacies they choose to keep.

But ultimately the exposure doesn’t trouble me because I already processed my feelings of shame during the act of writing, and now I’m ready to share the product of that time. It’s a particular kind of story, both lived and made, a crafted truth. It was made to change both reader and writer. It was made to share.

Bestselling memoirist Katherine May opens up about the risks and rewards of writing about her late-in-life autism diagnosis.

Fiction, Literary Fiction

Fiction Literary Fiction

A short story for an American visa

Behind the Book by Uwem Akpan

by Uwem Akpan

I can think of a thousand things that inspired me to write New York, My Village. I can tell stories of how my first impressions of the Bronx, New York, during my first visit to America in August 1993 have continued to fertilize my imagination. I can tell you of how my life as a former Catholic seminarian/priest got me to see racism from the unique angle of the Holy of Holies. I can tell you how shocked I was to discover the whiteness and racism of the big American publishing houses as I auctioned my first book, the story collection Say You’re One of Them (Little, Brown, 2008). I can tell you how New York City bedbugs ate up my peace in 2013 and of my fears that I would spread the bugs to the Cullman Center of the New York Public Library, where I was a fellow. I can tell you how a group of African American professionals from Atlanta, Georgia—which the author Anthony Grooms brought together in 2014—encouraged me to set my writing in America so I could write about racism.

But suffice it to share with you how the first two chapters of New York, My Village were inspired by an American visa interview in Lagos, Nigeria, in 2004.

I was living in Nigeria when I landed an admission to the Helen Zell Writers’ Program of the University of Michigan. It meant the world to me. I’d always loved Midwestern America, having studied in Omaha, Nebraska, in the mid-1990s. Though the U.S. visa process in Nigeria had always felt like being dragged to court, I didn’t foresee any major difficulties, since this was going to be my fourth visa.

Read our review of ‘New York, My Village.’

I showed up early in the morning at the embassy. Because of the crowds of visa applicants, I finally got interviewed around 3 p.m. The fact that I was nursing a cold didn’t help matters. Because of the embassy’s powerful air conditioning, I was sniffling and clearing my throat the whole time. But I’d say I was coping well with the extremely tense atmosphere.

The American consular officers can ask you anything. ANYTHING. They can even insult your accent or mock your country if they feel like it. I’ve attempted to capture the terror that is a Western embassy visa process in the developing world in the opening pages of New York, My Village. But that day in the American embassy, decked out in my Roman collar, nothing could have shocked me more than when my interviewer asked me to write him a short story to prove I was a writer.

Thinking this write-me-a-story thing was a joke, I shrugged and giggled and told him the University of Michigan and other programs had already ascertained I was a writer, hence the admission and scholarship offers. He pretended he didn’t hear me and chattily asked why I wanted to be a fiction writer and not a poet. “Maybe someday I’ll also write poetry, sir,” I said as I stood there before his booth. In the silence that followed his nod, I was confident I’d secured the visa. But looking beyond my jubilant face, he slid me a pen and paper, insisting I write a story. When I looked lost, he started typing into his computer.

My fingers began to tremble with shock, then anger. I wanted so much to spit in the face of this consular officer. I kept clearing my throat, though I wanted to blow my nose and pour mucus all over him, his computer and the booth. Yet I wore a pleasant face, because as they say, it’s only when the mosquito lands on your balls that you realize there are ways to solve a problem without violence.

Nobody had ever abused my writing talent like this interviewer! If I remember correctly, this man wasn’t even angry at me. He seemed pleased that he could get fresh writing out of me at visa point—as in gun point. I’d never drafted a short story in a week, much less in a few minutes. My quickest draft took two sleepless weeks and resulted in the shortest story in my collection, “What Language Is That?” And apart from the fact that my fingers were too sweaty to hold the pen, I couldn’t remember the last time I wrote longhand. To be asked to do this, at what seemed like the biggest test of my talent, felt totally cruel.

“Sir, could I sit down to write the story?” I remember murmuring.

“Mr. Akpan, that won’t be necessary,” he said, smiling like he was saving me from being lazy. “Just a short story. Nothing long.”

I tried to write on the booth counter. It would also be the first time I wrote a story while standing up. And I prefer to write at night.

“My stories feel like an unresolvable crisis within me, something I can’t escape from, something I must carefully and sensitively incubate forever.”

Even in the best of situations, my stories do everything to sabotage me. They do everything not to submit to my dreams. I wake up some days without enough faith even to love the “lovely” passages I’ve written. It’s always a fight, a long, drawn-out war whose battles I win one at a time, mainly because I run away to fight another day or week or year.

My stories feel like an unresolvable crisis within me, something I can’t escape from, something I must carefully and sensitively incubate forever, or till I miraculously discover how to show the invisible connections and bonds and spirit between the disparate characters and parts. I must rewrite countless times “to get in the reader’s face,” as Stephen King puts it. I live in admiration of those who publish a book every other year. But during that interview, I doubt even the most productive of authors could’ve written anything.

“Sir, it takes me a loooong time to write a story,” I said.

“No, this shouldn’t take long,” my interviewer said.

“I could show you the samples that got me into Michigan from my laptop.”

“Come on, you can do it!”

He was distracted by a colleague who entered his booth to ask a question. But the impatience in my interviewer’s voice had warned me that, as our people say, he had both the yam and the knife. I was a beggar.

Even my eyes refused to focus on the paper he’d given me. Instead, they focused on my shoes, which seemed very far away or as though they belonged to someone else. I felt stupid, as if this man were trying to prove that I’d scammed my way to Michigan. I was afraid he saw me as a criminal he must stop from reaching the shores of his country. I began to understand those who think that the sole purpose of immigration departments is to keep people out of their countries.

Still my mind was blank. Nope, it wasn’t blank—it was scalded by anger and humiliation and shame. My mind started bubbling with cusses instead of sentences for the opening of a story. I wanted to tell him to go “hug a transformer,” as we say in Nigeria, meaning to go and electrocute yourself with the highest voltage possible. I wanted to cuss the whole embassy: “Efiig ijire nyine . . . may hernia swell your testicles!” (One of my Black characters in New York, My Village says this when white church ushers want to flush him from a New Jersey church.)

The consular officer couldn’t even let me think up a short story in peace; he kept looking at his watch and telling me to hurry up, reminding me he still had many people to interview. He’d become more impatient, more restless. His powers over me meant he also had the luxury to show how he really felt. He tried to make me feel as though I was the one holding up his important job, locking up hundreds of people all day in this embassy. And what options did I have but to stand there and let him torture me? This sense of powerlessness was the height of my violation. Even my cold felt strange, as though the mucus in my nostril was slowly turning into sand and blocking my breathing.

Even when I tried to sublimate my horrible mental state with prayers, they still came out raw. “Oh, the Lord of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob,” I prayed silently, “please, don’t let this f**king asshole of an American destroy my American dream! Oh, Blessed Virgin Mary and all the saints and angels, move and intercede for the grace for me to be calm to write this stupid story. Don’t wait till my situation becomes hopeless, just so that you can dispatch Saint Jude, patron of hopeless causes, that perpetual latecomer!”

– – – – –

But heaven knew I needed this visa more than anything. I had always believed that America would develop my writing. And that afternoon, it calmed me to remember that this America terrorizing me now was the same America doling out MFA scholarships to our army of new Nigerian talents.

Prudence meant I quietly ate the shit of this short story-writing humiliation. After all, I’d already done the hard part, getting admission into Michigan. I’d lived through five anxious months as the MFA program read earlier versions of “An Ex-Mas Feast” and “My Parents’ Bedroom” (both of which made 2005 and 2006 editions of The New Yorker). Now to buoy my spirit, I tried to remember the sweet, welcoming emails from my would-be Michigan writing professors: Eileen Pollack, Nick Delbanco and Peter Ho Davies. They said they loved my writing and would help me become a better writer. They said they loved my imagery and voice—even if I chose another program.

After about 15 minutes of wracking my brain, I managed to come up with two stupid sentences: I could never have known **** was a thief until that night. You would never have believed he could have treated me like this. I didn’t want to show this to him. I believed I’d flunked the interview since I couldn’t write beyond these two lines. But I was tired of him harrying me and worried about the people still waiting to be interviewed, so I held my breath and slid the paper back to him.

“So, Mr. Akpan, what happened next?” he asked excitedly after reading it aloud.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“No, I really want to know what he did.”

“I have no idea, sir.”

“But you can just tell me what he did. Just summarize. It’s really gripping.”

“I would have to create the whole story from scratch and then summarize.”

Disappointed, he shrugged and asked how I was going to pay for my MFA since I’d rejected Michigan’s scholarship offer. I said my church would. But since I’d forgotten to bring the church’s financial statement, he became very quiet and still, his face hardened like he was going to finally nail me. I just kept saying I’d bring it the following day, knowing that providing this paperwork would be less difficult than writing the two-liner. I babbled and begged till he took my passport and said to come for the visa in two days’ time. I thanked him and loosened my collar and sauntered out, whistling a song of gratitude to the Virgin Mary.

Author photo © Aaron Mayes / UNLV Photo Services

An unusual request during a visa interview left Uwem Akpan, author of the bestselling story collection Say You’re One of Them, scrambling to find his voice. It also helped to spark his first novel, New York, My Village.

Fiction

Fiction

Memoirist’s first novel draws from life

Behind the Book by Danielle Trussoni

by Danielle Trussoni

When you open the pages of my novel Angelology, you will enter a secluded convent nestled next to a wide, mirror-dark river; you will climb into a narrow gorge cut deep into the granite of an Eastern European mountain; and you will sit in a shadowy lecture hall filled with students during the Second World War. You will meet a young woman named Evangeline, whose family history has drawn her into a centuries-old hidden society of scholars who practice the ancient discipline of angelology, the theological study of angels. You will become acquainted with nuns; a handsome art historian named Verlaine who rushes into Evangeline’s quiet world and changes her life; and a nefarious group of angels called Nephilim.

As you can imagine, the places and characters in my book are extremely different from my “real life” as a 30-something mother of two. In fact, the world of my novel could not be any more different from my daily life. And yet, looking back over the process of composing Angelology, I see that many of these settings and characters were inspired by places I have visited and people I’ve met. The art of studying how the imagination works is a nebulous one, but it is interesting for me to try to pick through the many experiences that have contributed to Angelology.

One of the main settings of the novel is the convent of the Sisters of Perpetual Adoration. As a girl, I went to a Catholic grade school where many of my teachers were nuns. One of the requirements of my parochial education was attendance at mass each morning at 7:30, and so we were forever going back and forth between the school and the church. My parents went to church on Sundays (their one session per week) and thus I was in church six mornings out of seven, sitting on a hard wooden pew, often gazing at the angels painted throughout the church. I don’t remember a single prayer or hymn from that period of my life, but I do remember the way I felt looking at the golden figures hovering upon the walls. It was as if I might be able to adopt the wings of these heavenly creatures and gain the power to escape the dim church. I found some relief from the sobriety of mass in the beauty of the angels. Perhaps the seeds of my novel began then, as a child daydreaming in church.

I had forgotten about of my interest in angels entirely, however, until I went to a convent called Saint Rose Convent to speak with the nuns who lived there. My great-aunt Drusilla was a Franciscan Sister of Adoration living at the convent, and I had decided to visit her home to interview the Sisters living there. I knew I wanted to write a book that involved the Sisters, but at that time I had no clear vision of what I would write. I spent many days at the convent, following the Sisters through their daily activities. There was a beautiful chapel in the convent where the nuns went to pray. One night, when I was walking back from the chapel, I found myself in the convent reading room, a small space filled with religious books. One shelf of the library was filled with books about angels. I took a stack of books down, sat in a comfortable chair and began reading. Within hours I was aware that angels would be at the very center of my book and that I would use the convent I had visited as one of my primary settings.

While my decision to use the convent as a primary setting was a surprise, using the mountains of Eastern Europe was something that I had long hoped to do. I lived in Sofia, Bulgaria, for four years with my husband, the writer Nikolai Grozni. My husband had taken me to the Rhodope Mountains and I had fallen in love with the stark, craggy landscape. We went together to an underground cave called The Devil’s Throat, an UNESCO site with an amazing waterfall that flows into an underground river, and I knew I would one day write about it. In Bulgarian legend the cavern formed the entrance to the underworld where Orpheus descended to save Eurydice. Some years later, when I was writing the first draft of Angelology, I decided to incorporate the cave and the legend into my novel.

Who can say what alchemy brings such disparate elements as Orpheus, a convent, angels and a cave in Bulgaria together to create a novel, but in the course of writing this book I understood that all of one’s reading, travels, friendships and dreams contribute to the final result. I can only hope that the experience of reading Angelology is as surprising and enjoyable as the experience of writing it.

Danielle Trussoni is also the author of the memoir Falling Through the Earth. Angelology is her first novel, and has already been optioned for film. She and her family divide their time between New York City and Bulgaria, and she is working on a sequel to Angelology.

Photo © Kalin Ruichev.

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Review of Falling Through the Earth

Behind the book: From a sleepless night to “Once upon a time…”

Behind the Book by Roderick Townley

by Roderick Townley

Lights out. Can’t get to sleep. My wife’s voice in the darkness: “Tell me a story.” This happens a lot, and every time Wyatt asks me I feel a touch of panic—performance anxiety, I guess you’d call it. Finally I came up with: “Once upon a time, there was, let’s see, a cobbler who made a strange-looking shoe, a shoe that fit nobody. And yet everyone who heard about it wanted to own it.”

I didn’t get much farther than that, but my mumbling voice had worked its magic. My wife was asleep.

The next morning, Wyatt told me I should write the story down.

“What story? There is no story.”

“Write it.”

I learned to listen to my wife years ago when she forced me to write down another bedtime story. It grew into a book, The Great Good Thing, and was published to blushingly good reviews, optioned for film and translated into several foreign languages.

But I am stubborn. Anyway, I was already mulling another book idea and didn’t want to be distracted.

Still. . .

I see in my journal a notation from that time: “Wrote a couple of pages of a little story about a shoe. Doesn’t seem very promising, but it’s fun and I hope to have a draft to give Wyatt on Mother’s Day.”

Clearly, I was thinking of dashing off a 10- or 12-page fairy tale to enclose with a greeting card. Three years and countless drafts later, the postman thumps a package on my doorstep. It is my author’s copy of The Blue Shoe: A Tale of Thievery, Villainy, Sorcery, and Shoes, published in blue ink and illustrated by Mary GrandPré, the wonderful artist who did all the Harry Potter books.

Getting from confused murmurs in the darkness to the bright daylight of publication was quite a journey, and outward events didn’t make the trip any easier. We put our house up for sale and bought another one. Health issues came up and were faced down. And my editor at Simon & Schuster retired, leaving me orphaned—leaving me, in fact, without a contract and torn between two novels, not fully committed to either one.

Then a curious thing happened. The tone of The Blue Shoe began to get to me. There was something sweet about it, confiding. I found I liked being in the midst of this off-center fairy tale rooted in magic and blossoming into revolution and finally transformation.

I put the other story aside.

Once committed to The Blue Shoe, I gave myself permission to love my characters: Grel the shoemaker; his young assistant Hap; Hap’s feisty friend Sophi; the mayor’s greedy wife, Ludmilla the Large; a villainous taskmaster named Slag; and an enslaved race of trolls who toil in the mineshafts of Mount Xexnax, a peak named for a mysterious goddess last sighted 900 years ago. A work of fantasy, to be sure, but I soon realized it was raising important questions about greed, prejudice, environmentalism and the cost of courage. The boy, Hap, for instance, finding himself deep in the mines of Mount Xexnax, comes to feel that the mountain surrounding him is alive, that it has a spiritual dimension and is “wounded” when men blast away at it, grasping for gems. Is he imagining things, or is he realizing a truth?

By now I was totally absorbed. Who cared if the house we’d just moved into needed a year’s worth of renovations? There I sat at my computer, imagining “the sunny mountain village of Aplanap, famous for its tilted streets, cuckoo clocks and Finster cheese,” while workmen banged merrily away on all sides.

The book was a paradox: it dealt with serious issues while still being fun, even funny. Just thinking about the story made me smile. More to the point, it made my agent smile, and she soon found the right editor at a topflight publisher.

So, when some sleepless night you hear a voice in the darkness saying, “Tell me a story,” don’t stop to wonder if you’re up to the task, just take a deep breath and begin, “Once upon a time. . .”

Roderick Townley’s books have received many stars and accolades. You can read more about him at www.rodericktownley.com. He lives in Kansas.

Behind the book: An author’s personal alternate history

Behind the Book by Jon Skovron

by Jon Skovron

When I finally let my mother read Struts & Frets, she called me up and said, “I’m not an alcoholic.”

“Mom, it’s fiction,” I said.

“Well, I was going to buy a bunch of copies and put them in my waiting room, but I don’t see how I can do that if the mother character is an alcoholic therapist. People might think it’s about me.”

After my friend Ryan read Struts & Frets, he asked, “Why did you make me gay?”

“It’s not you,” I said.

“Is it supposed to be Zach, then?”

“Dude, it’s fiction.”

It seems a lot of people want to know where that line is between fiction and reality. But honestly, in my mind there is no clear line between them. Most stories occur to me as a thought exercise. A “what if” question. It can be as simple as, “What if my grandfather had decided to pursue his passion for music professionally instead of becoming a dentist?” A story like that might have many similarities to my own life. Or the question could be, “What if I were a teenage girl who discovered on her 16th birthday that her mother was a demon?” Clearly, it’s unlikely there would be as many obvious similarities with my own life. But I see no true difference except in degree. I beg, borrow or steal from my own life as needed. I take two people I know and mash them into one character. I take events from one period in my life and plant them in another. I exaggerate, fabricate, idealize, deconstruct or destroy whatever is necessary to follow the story to its conclusion.

In Struts & Frets, the main character, Sammy, says this about writing: “I tried to look at writing a song almost like solving a mystery. The song was there, buried somewhere in my brain. All I had to do was follow the clues until I figured it out.”

I don’t agree with Sammy on everything, but on this we are alike. Because I do believe that all these stories, and all these characters, are somewhere inside me, just waiting to get out. I think that is true for all of us, to a greater or lesser degree.

I think this belief comes from my background as an actor. In particular, a character actor. Back when I was studying acting in college, whenever a director said, “Hey, we need a punk hunchback clown who suffers from Tourette’s,” or “Hmm, this play calls for a transvestite junkie hooker,” the follow-up question was often, “What’s Skovron working on right now?” Well, OK, that’s not really true. Usually they would first ask, “What’s Zachary Quinto working on right now?” and if he was unavailable, I would do in a pinch.

Being a character actor really means that you cannot be typecast, and therefore go into the miscellaneous bin for casting. While that was frustrating at times, it also made things very interesting. I had to be so many different, contrasting people. I had to find a part of myself, no matter how small or warped, that I could use to bring some authenticity to the bizarre procession of roles I played throughout my brief career on the stage.

A few years of playing some of the most outlandish characters imaginable made me rather flexible when it came to the concept of identity. Inevitably, I had to ask myself: while these other “selves” were not real, did that make them any less true? I have not, and will not ever, marry a Chinese man thinking he is a geisha, and yet when I played René Gallimard in M Butterfly, my performance resonated with the audience in a way that no retelling of my real life could have. I don’t think performing a series of pratfalls and pantomime while discussing remuneration in iambic pentameter would win me many friends at the office, but when I did that as Costard the clown in Love's Labour’s Lost, the audience thought it was hilarious.

So is it artifice? Whether it’s fiction or theater, am I lying to the audience in a pleasing and entertaining way? Or am I just telling a different kind of truth? One that is not so caught up in the technicalities of what actually happened, but more captures the spirit of what was, is, or could be possible, if only we would open ourselves up to it.

In the end, does it matter which events in a piece of fiction actually happened, as long as the story rings true? Ralph Waldo Emerson had this to say: “Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.”

Jon Skovron is a music geek who can play nine instruments, but none of them well. Struts & Frets is his first novel. In his spare time, he writes technical manuals and tries to forget about his sordid past as an actor. He lives with his wife and two kids outside Washington, D.C.

When I finally let my mother read Struts & Frets, she called me up and said, “I’m not an alcoholic.”

“Mom, it’s fiction,” I said.

“Well, I was going to buy a bunch of copies and put them in my waiting room, but I don’t…

Middle Grade

Middle Grade

Behind the Book: Ballet, My Enemy

Behind the Book by Annie Barrows

by Annie Barrows

Ballet drives me berserk. There. I said it. I have to go lie down now.

I’m back. Ballet drives me berserk because all I truly care about in this life is story, and when you go to a ballet, the story is constantly interrupted by the dancing. Take The Nutcracker for instance. When I see The Nutcracker, I want that rotten brother to get spanked. I want the rats and the nutcracker to duke it out for a good long time. I want the wacky old toymaker to come back and scare the heck out of everyone. But none of that happens. What happens is a bunch of candies dance around while Clara watches them. It is the most boring thing in the world.

When I sat down to write the sixth Ivy and Bean book, I didn’t know that it was going to be about ballet. I thought it was going to be about squid. I had a great squid idea. A fabulous idea! Unfortunately, I called the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute to check my facts and discovered that—get this!—you can’t put a squid in an aquarium, because squids poison the water! This put a real crimp in my story (the moral, by the way, is don’t check your facts), and I had to switch things around. I needed Ivy and Bean to have a new obsession.

Ballet.

Ballet!

Just the thing!

And, at that point, I broke into a sweat. Why? Because if, after four decades of taboo-busting books, there is one dogma left alive in the world of children’s literature, it is this: Ballet Is Great. There are roughly 9,000 kids’ books featuring happy ballet-dancing children. There are zero featuring unhappy ballet-dancing children. There are maybe four featuring children who are unhappy at the beginning of their ballet class, and then learn to love it, but those don’t count.

At first glance, the survival of balletophilia seems odd. Ballet is pink and archaic and promotes a contorted body image. It seems as though feminism would have swept the happy ballerinas away, but it hasn’t, and there is a good reason for that. Ballet rewards perseverance and patience. In ballet, everyone starts out looking dorky, and if they work hard, they become graceful and successful. Also, ballet is pretty and appealing. Parents adore perseverance and patience and process, and they’re wracking their brains to figure out how to inculcate these virtues in their children. Unfortunately, most lessons in perseverance et al. involve an unattractive amount of hoeing, slopping pigs and trudging through the snow (Hello, Honest Abe!), but the appurtenances of ballet are the stuff that girls’ dreams are made on—which is why the shelves of libraries and bookstores continue to groan under happy ballerina books.

This has been going on for years—I myself succumbed to the allure of ballet upon reading The Royal Book of the Ballet. It was the Good Swan that got me. The Good Swan had a tutu made out of swan feathers, and she had the Prince. What a deal. “I want that!” I said to my mom, and before the sun was over the yardarm, I found myself enrolled at the Gladys Melman Luters School of the Dance. (You got that? The Dance.)

It was terrible. Partly it was terrible because of Gladys Melman Luters, who was 105 and despised children. She looked like a pillowcase with a head and she shuffled around the dance floor with a long wooden stick in her shriveled hand. If you pliéd with your bottom out or failed to bend your elbows in second position, she walloped you with the stick. Not hard, but still.

At least Gladys Melman Luters was exciting, in an anxiety-producing way. The rest of ballet was terrible because it was so utterly boring. To me, that is. Other little girls—girls with arches—adored ballet. They simply loved barre work, and they lived for floor work. They’d happily, determinedly arabesque again and again and again, aiming towards perfect and getting a tiny bit better with each lesson. I hated that. Perfect was impossible and incremental was boring. What was the point?

Obviously, I was not cut out for ballet success. I am not, in general, patient enough to like process, and I’ve never cared about perfect. I felt bad about this when I was a kid. All the books I read indicated that heroines loved ballet. Therefore, hating ballet was a sign of a depraved character. Oh dear. It was really kind of worrying. Sometimes I still feel bad about not liking process (artists are supposed to) and not caring about perfection (ditto). I felt bad about it when I was writing Ivy and Bean: Doomed to Dance. Process and patience and perfection are so clearly, palpably good, that as an adult, it was hard for me to allow Ivy and Bean to be unhappy ballerinas.

Then I realized what had happened. It was the same thing that sends me off my nut when I go to see a ballet: the dancing had interrupted the story. The story of Ivy and Bean is the story of two idealists. Neither one of them has much interest in reality. Of course Ivy and Bean would hate ballet—incremental, phooey! They want Giselle and they want it fast! When faced with a failed experiment, Ivy and Bean don’t try to find a way to make their goals a reality—they cut their losses and think of something new. The fun is in the idea, not the laborious attainment of the goal. And best of all, Ivy and Bean aren’t ashamed of what they want. They don’t like ballet—so what? They move on and make a new story.

An author can really learn a lot from a couple of kids like that.

Annie Barrows is the author of The Magic Half and the Ivy and Bean series for children, as well as co-author of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society for adults.

Photo credit: Brook McCormick.

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Ballet drives me berserk. There. I said it. I have to go lie down now.

I’m back. Ballet drives me berserk because all I truly care about in this life is story, and when you go to a ballet, the story is constantly interrupted by…

Humor, Nonfiction

Nonfiction Humor

Don’t judge a book (or an author) by its cover

Behind the Book by P.S. Wall

by P.S. Wall

"The cover we envision for If I Were a Man, I'd Marry Me will be funny yet poignant, sanguine yet sassy," my publisher says. "Bailey White meets Bridget Jones with a dash of Sex in the City."

"There's no way I'm jumping out of a wedding cake," I say.

"But the focus group loved it," she says.

I am not your "funny photo on the front of the book" kinda girl, but by the end of the conversation, my publisher has me convinced that if Cannery Row were published today, there would be a picture of John Steinbeck on the cover lying in a sardine can. He'd hand out Goldfish crackers as a promotional.

I finally agree to let my publisher do a computer mockup, superimposing my face on the body of a model wearing a wedding dress. I get a call from the publisher's computer wizard, Dell, wanting to know my weight, height and vital statistics. When he starts breathing heavy, I draw the line.

"So, like, what are you wearing?" he giggles nervously.

"Listen, you little perve . . . . "

"Your book is, like, funny."

"You read my book?"

"That story, 'The Mattress Authority,' really rocks."

"I'm wearing a pink teddy with matching garter," I lie. "What did you think of chapter two?"

Two days later we get the photo proofs via Federal Express. The photo shows my gigantic head perched on top of a teeny tiny body. Think Michelle Pfeiffer in an off the shoulder Vera Wang with Winston Churchill's head.

"You look like a Pez dispenser," Sweetie says, staring down at the photo. "Exactly how much did you tell them you weigh?"

"So, what happened to the rest of the model?" the FedEx guy keeps repeating, as he taps the bottom of the envelope.

I immediately set out to correct the situation.

"Dell," I whisper, hand cupped over the phone, "shrink my head." The final version is so realistic, my publisher assures me, "No one will ever notice" that the "ghost body" isn't really mine.

The next thing I know, I'm sitting in a radio station for my first book tour interview.

"Very funny book," the DJ says.

"You read my book?"

"The cover is really. . . ." The dead air space sucks a vacuum as the DJ's head swivels back and forth from my body to the cover of the book.

"That's not your body on the cover," he announces to the entire radio free world. "Your . . . feet are much smaller." This from a man who has Barry White's voice and Pee-Wee Herman's body.

P.S. Wall is the author of the syndicated humor column, Off the Wall. If I Were a Man, I'd Marry Me is now available in paperback.

"The cover we envision for If I Were a Man, I'd Marry Me will be funny yet poignant, sanguine yet sassy," my publisher says. "Bailey White meets Bridget Jones with a dash of Sex in the City."

"There's no way I'm jumping out of…

Fiction

Fiction

One author’s insecurities: your prose is bigger than mine

Behind the Book by Martin Clark

by Martin Clark

I'm fumbling around in a Mississippi bookstore, waiting to do my reading gig . . . tugging on my necktie, sipping bottled water, and trying to decide whether or not I've locked myself out of my hotel room. It's hot outside, the air a little wetter and the land a little flatter than I'm accustomed to.

I look along the walls, take in the spines of a thousand books, and it occurs to me this is about six stops into my book tour that there's a good deal of commerce and lucre bound up in this art. More precisely, it occurs to me that there is a phenomenal amount of competition on the shelves. I'm starting to go through the opiate progression of publishing; in the beginning, you're after just a tiny taste, and when the taste is pleasing, you want that much more. Two years ago, I simply hoped to see my book in print and would've been happy to have sold it out of the trunk of my car. Now I want to throttle Harry Potter. It's like the Springsteen lyric: Poor man wants to be rich, rich man wants to be king, king ain't satisfied till he rules everything.

So I decide to check out the competition's wares, to see what else people can spend their money on. At random, I pull down a book David Gates's The Wonders of the Invisible World. I'd read one of his novels before, and I remember liking it, although I read it for sport and entertainment back in those days, not to see who had the biggest prose. I thumb through a short story and turn miserable. The writing is perfect, the rhythms and tone flawless, the story so good I end up going back to finish it before I leave. David Gates's book is better than mine. I spot check a few more hardbacks all well written, it seems and get this visceral, black surge of disappointment. You know the sensation . . . expectations torn down and razed, that flushed, febrile feeling you get standing in a cafeteria while some guy with sideburns and a job and a Camaro asks your 10th grade crush to homecoming. I decide to jolly myself up by skimming through The Rock Says . . . , the wrestling tome. Thank goodness this one won't be on the short list in Stockholm.

Standing in this store with a best-selling book on professional wrestling in my hands, I've just realized that the book business is much like many other things that are vaguely artistic and subjective. Luck is often a finer muse than skill, and timing, publicity, and the backing of good people are the three Graces of a writer's world in the year 2000. A lot of exceptional writing and music is buried because it didn't arrive in the store with a poster and cardboard display. I mean, is Britney Spears really 12 million CDs better than Robert Earl Keen? I doubt it. Okay, I'm sure of it she's not.

I do my reading and head back to my hotel; I have in fact lost the key to my room, and the clerk at the front desk gives me another one. I go to bed feeling fortunate to be traveling around the country with my writing, grateful that people have plugged my novel and that reviewers have said kind things about it, thankful to a superb publishing house and a bright, diligent publicist, and pricked by a little guilt, a bit like the "B" student who gets into Yale because of his family's deep pockets and good connections.

Also, I'm told there is an interest in such things, so here's my take as a neophyte touring author on some folks and places that deserve high praise: Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi; Carytown Books in Richmond, Virginia; Fact and Fiction in Missoula, Montana; Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Nashville; the Mysterious Bookshop in New York; and New Dominion Bookstore and Barnes ∧ Noble in Charlottesville, Virginia. And since I've mentioned him, Robert Earl Keen provides the perfect background for two-hour drives between cities. His CD No. 2 Live Dinner is the finest recording on the planet.

Martin Clark is a Virginia circuit court judge whose first novel, The Many Aspects of Mobile Home Living, was published in April by Alfred A. Knopf.

Mystery & Suspense, Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Suspense

Behind the Book: It’s all about the evidence

Behind the Book by Tim Green

by Tim Green

It’s been a decade since I wrote my first legal thriller. Like many authors, I was caught in the updraft of John Grisham and Scott Turrow. The Letter of the Law was the first novel I’d written that became a bestseller, and it changed my career. Since my first legal thriller—a story about Casey Jordan, a tough, resourceful female lawyer—was the catalyst that propelled me to a new level as a writer, my editor thought revisiting that character might prove itself again. I’ve done that with my last two books, Above the Law and now False Convictions.

As I did when I first wrote about Casey Jordan in The Letter of the Law, I went to my wife for inspiration. I needed a story that would entertain and inspire. Since my main character was a woman, I needed a woman’s perspective. But I also needed a subject rooted in the legal system, a subject that anyone could relate to, and that also carried with it the weight of life or death. My search began with a simple conversation about the law, about crime and punishment.

My wife has an uncompromising view of the justice system: if someone is guilty, he should be punished. The death penalty? Well, that’s okay, too. Some crimes are so bad they deserve the death penalty, if the person really did it.

There’s the rub.

“But how do you ever know that for certain?” I ask.

“Well,” she says, “just in the cases where you really know, like someone saw them do it or something, or if they get the DNA. Those people should never get off.”

While I agree with her ultimate goal, the lawyer in me argues about her certainty.

“What if the witness is lying?” I ask.

“DNA and a witness,” she says. “That’s proof.”

And a great setup for a thriller.

The O.J. Simpson trial first opened the public’s mind to the possibility of corrupted DNA, throwing back the curtain on the magic of science. The defense brilliantly called into question the validity of the processes and the people who give us the 13 matching loci that constitute a match with a billion-to-one certainty.

When we think about human manipulation, so many things become possible, and the switch between right and wrong is easily flipped. Of course, those with the power or the opportunity to flip that switch need motivation. For the rich and powerful, it’s often greed that motivates them and money that fuels their mission.

We regularly hear about prisoners who’ve spent 20 years or more in jail being set free. The mechanism is DNA testing where physical proof directly refutes the evidence that led to their conviction. Many times these people were unjustly convicted by witnesses who, for one reason or another, lied or were mistaken. The DNA may have been taken from the murder weapon, some matter on the victim’s clothes or person, or some other object from the scene of the crime, proving that it was someone else who committed the act instead of the convicted prisoner.

Twists and turns drive suspense novels to make the story fast-paced and hard to put down. The obvious is a story about a lawyer working hard to overturn an unjust conviction in order to free an innocent man from nearly two decades of imprisonment. We’ve seen thousands of those.

As a writer, I can turn up the heat by giving reasons why other people would want the accused to pay for the crime instead of the real criminal. And I can create a close-knit, politically charged small town where nearly everyone will present an obstacle to the lawyer because she is a mistrusted outsider. However, the real twist comes from the unexpected, from challenging people’s perceptions of reality: can a smudge of matter from 20 years ago prove guilt or innocence? And, if it can, how can we know for certain that the smudge is what someone says it is? Where did the smudge come from and how do we know?

I love that DNA can free men wrongly imprisoned for decades. I’m hungry to lock up murderers, rapists and pedophiles and throw away the keys and know that modern forensic science can help. Still, at the end of the day, contrary to my wife’s wishes—even with the power of DNA—the ultimate arbiters are imperfect humans. The guilty don’t always get the punishment they deserve and the innocent don’t always go free.

A former lawyer and pro football player, Tim Green is the author of several legal thrillers, a memoir and a children’s chapter book series. When he’s not writing, he is hosting the ABC show “Find My Family” or spending time with his wife and five children at home in upstate New York. You can find more information on his website.

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