Author interviews archive

Molly Ivins

Interview by Alden Mudge

It has the subtitle Politics in the Clinton Years. Trouble is, in the week since first arranging to talk with newspaper columnist Molly Ivins about You Got to Dance with Them What Brung You, politics and Clinton both have done a wild 360, and neither Ivins nor anybody else knows if the truck stops here . . . or keeps on spinning.

Brash, funny, sharp-penned, and liberal, Ivins has never been happy defending Clinton. "If left to my own devices, I’d spend all my time pointing out that he’s weaker than bus-station chili," she writes. "But the man is so constantly subjected to such hideous and unfair abuse that I wind up standing up for him on the general principle that some fairness should be applied." Besides, Ivins adds, "No one but a fool or a Republican ever took him for a liberal."

Now she tells me that in light of Clinton’s recent troubles, she’s rewritten the book’s introduction. "Remember that metaphor that the Republicans keep trying to hang Clinton but the rope keeps breaking? It may be that this rope isn’t going to break. I thought I should go back and acknowledge that."

It’s not the only tough-minded acknowledgment Ivins makes in this vastly entertaining collection. In a piece called "What I Did to Morris Udall," she remembers an unfair profile she wrote about Representative Udall during his 1976 presidential bid, and concludes, "My continuing regret is that what I wrote was accurate, but it wasn’t true. I was trying too hard to be a major-league, hard-hitting journalist that I let the real story go hang itself."

Why don’t her colleagues seem to share her regard for truth and accuracy? "We are seeing the effect of the fractionization of the audience," Ivins says. "Because the audience can be divided into those who needlepoint and those who knit and those who like monster trucks and because they all have separate channels, we’re getting television that appeals to the lowest common denominator. I hold Rupert Murdoch largely responsible for that. But it’s also a function of the way technology and the market works: when you get tabloid television, it drives what we used to call the establishment media."

Often, says Ivins, both the media and politicians "assume that people are dumb. When you dumb down public discourse on the theory that people are just a bunch of boobs who don’t know anything, you do real harm to people. There are two mistakes made in politics. Usually they take a very complex subject and oversimplify it. Every now and again, they take something really simple and make it sound complicated. I don’t do that. Part of what I try to do is prove that this is fascinating stuff. It’s hilariously funny, full of high drama — and low drama — and it affects your life."

The pieces collected here pretty much prove Ivins right. Culled from the hundreds of articles and columns she has written over the past four years, they cover everything from the disastrous effects of Timothy McVeigh’s poor taste in literature to the need to teach Bob Dole to smile. For good measure Ivins also includes a couple of wildly funny pieces on Texas politics and the general weirdness of people in all parts of our great nation, as well as some touching "tributes to souls passing." Never dull, usually hard-hitting, and always vividly written, they leave no doubt why she gets fan letters from truck drivers — as well as political foes.

"My all-time favorite fan letters began: ‘Dear Miz Ivins, I’ve been reading you for ten years now and this is the first time I ever agreed with you,’" Ivins says, then adds, "Great! Keep reading and it might just happen again."

If there’s an overriding theme to You Got to Dance with Them What Brung You, it is the need for campaign finance reform. "Money was always part of politics," Ivins says, "It’s just that in the last decade or so the amount has become staggering. I’m convinced this is the root of the rot in American politics. The quality and kind of legislation we’re seeing reflects increasingly how indebted politicians are to the people with money. It’s really fouled up democracy."

Ivins is someone who "actually likes politicians, which is so socially unacceptable these days that I’m looking for some other perversion — perhaps inter-species breeding — so that people might not look at me so askance." But politicians "spend half their lives kissing somebody’s rear end. It’s a dreadful situation for a public servant to have to be in. It is a little ironic that they won’t get off the dime and help themselves out, since they know what the penalties are."

One of those penalties is to feel the scorching heat of Ivins in high-dudgeon. But for all her sharp-tongued barbs, Ivins says, "I have never been able to permanently piss off a politician. It used to amaze me when I first started writing about the legislature for a small progressive publication called the Texas Monthly. I would regularly cuss legislators out and say things like they were egg-sucking child molesters who ran on all fours. I actually hoped to become a martyr for journalism. I couldn’t wait to be horsewhipped. But all that ever happened was that I would see them in the capitol the next day and they would cradle the article in their arms and croon ‘Isn’t that nice? You put my name in your paper.’ They were discouragingly civilized."

In conversation, so is Molly Ivins. She’s also a "congenital optimist" who thinks "we should be cheerful about the here and now on the principle that it can always get worse and then we will never have been cheerful at all."

But the true key to her success? "One of the things that probably makes me worth reading is that I stay the hell away from Washington, D.C. It’s a city where everybody says exactly what everybody else says. And I don’t have to spend more than ten minutes in Washington before I find myself saying exactly the same thing too."

So let the campaign begin: For the sake of journalism, for the sake of that odd endangered species — the American liberal — and for the good of the nation’s political funnybone, keep Molly Ivins the hell out of Washington, D.C., and deep in the heart of Texas instead.

Alden Mudge is a writer in Oakland, California.

Nonfiction

Jon Krakauer

Interview by Alden Mudge

"His voice sounded like a record played at half speed. It was slow and creaky. I was three thousand feet below him. I was lying in a tent inside a sleeping bag with everything I had on, and I was unable to get warm. Just think of what he must have suffered that first night in those hurricane force winds. With no oxygen. With the wind chill at, I don't know—160 degrees below zero. It was horrifying to think of him up there. It was sad. He was our leader."

That's journalist Jon Krakauer recalling one of the more wrenching and surreal episodes in last year's disaster on Mount Everest. Krakauer's own voice slows as he talks about the radio transmissions from head guide Rob Hall, stranded and slowly freezing to death at 28,700 feet. "Rob Hall was a great person and, by all accounts, the best guide up there. . . . That this happened to him is a sad and cruel irony."

In all, nine climbers perished on Mount Everest in the second week of May 1996. Since then, numerous magazine and newspaper accounts have appeared, including Krakauer's own initial firsthand report in Outside magazine, completed just five weeks after his return from Nepal. Versions of events have varied. Climbers and commentators have pointed fingers, traded accusations, absolved themselves of responsibility.

Krakauer's extraordinary new book about the disaster, Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster, does something different. Meticulously researched and exceptionally well written, Into Thin Air avoids the hype and easy condemnation that have infested other accounts. The book offers instead vivid details told matter-of-factly, almost quietly. The result is a deeply moving narrative that honors the courage of the people on the mountain while raising profound and possibly unanswerable questions about human behavior in a crisis. "People performed badly at times," Krakauer said in a recent phone conversation. "But like everything in life, it's more complicated than that. Everyone up there was a complicated personality. There were no heroes and there were no villains. It was just this really sad disaster."

Of course there were contributing factors, errors and weaknesses that compounded the effects of the "rogue storm" that blew across the mountain, catching the climbers high on the peak unawares. Recent attention has focused on the fact that the clients on this expedition had paid as much as $65,000 each to be guided up the mountain, the belief being that these "trophy climbers" were unworthy and unprepared for the lofty summit.

But even here Krakauer holds to his complicated view. "No matter how much you pay, even with all the assistance the Sherpas and the guides provide, it's still an incredible amount of work. No one can haul you up Everest. You can't just buy the summit. You've got pay with sweat and puke and maybe with your life. That is worth some grudging respect."

In fact, nothing is more evident from reading Into Thin Air than how physically and mentally debilitating the extreme altitudes near Everest's summit are for all climbers. "I've done a lot of hard climbs," says Krakauer, a passionate mountaineer since boyhood, "but climbing Everest was by an order of magnitude the hardest thing I've ever done. It's mostly just slogging up slopes that aren't particularly steep, but it's day after day of hard painful work and putting up with headaches and throwing up. "On May 10, the day we set out for the summit, most of us were in such bad physical condition that if we had been home we would have been in bed, wouldn't have gone to work, wouldn't have answered the phone, would have just been lying there in agony. And here we were, having not slept or eaten in a couple of days, setting out for what is probably the hardest physical thing we've ever done. You really have to have this puritanical streak, this belief in the nobility of suffering and work, or you'd never do it. The drive to climb is extremely irrational. It defies logic."

But even skill and a fine madness are not enough for Everest, according to Krakauer. "The statistics I quote at the end of the book are constant: for every four people who summit, one dies; for every 30 people who even attempt the mountain, one dies. Being a brilliant climber doesn't ensure your safety; as many brilliant climbers have died as stumblebums. Much of it is the roll of the dice."

And the most spectacular roll of the dice last May was that of Dr. Seaborn Beck Weathers. One of the wealthy clients, a voluble doctor from Texas whose conservative politics were in stark contrast to Krakauer's own, Weathers was stricken on the mountain during the storm. After a night without shelter or oxygen, he fell unconscious, was judged too weak to survive, and was abandoned by his companions. "He remained comatose for more than twelve hours," Krakauer writes in the book. "Then, late Saturday afternoon, for some unknowable reason a light went on in the reptilian core of Beck's inanimate brain and he floated back into consciousness." Not only that, he staggered into Camp Four and somehow survived the horrible complications of severe frostbite.

"It's an incredible tale, and Beck's an incredible guy," Krakauer says. "He lost a hand and all his fingers, and he just tells it like it is. He doesn't try to embellish his story or put a spin on anything. His story is horrible but it is also uplifting. It may be the one uplifting part of this whole sordid mess."

As for Krakauer's own sense of why things went so horribly wrong? "We had never climbed together, there was a disparity in strengths among us, so, wisely, we were taught to rely on the guide if things went wrong. Not only that, we were never ever roped together. Everyone climbed independently, at their own pace, which was good. But when you're roped to someone you develop this weird intimacy; every time you take a step, they have to take a step. You develop a bond that was just lacking on Everest. We weren't encouraged to look after our fellow clients and certainly not after the guides.

"And that's inexcusable to me. It's the thing that eats at me most. If I'd been up there with a bunch of friends, instead of guides and fellow clients, I can't imagine that I would have left [guide] Andy Harris up there in a storm when I clearly should have seen that he wasn't feeling well. And having gotten down to the South Col, I just wouldn't have crawled into my tent and into my sleeping bag without accounting for each of my partners. Climbing is a subculture that prides itself on the purity of its ideals. It has these weird rituals and rules that most people wouldn't understand. Some of it is kind of sick, because it idealizes boldness and risk-taking to such a degree. But its ideals about respecting your partner and about 'how you climb being more important than what you climb' are really good. I betrayed those ideals. For that I really beat myself up," Krakauer says sadly near the end of our conversation. "I can't think of a single good thing that came out of this climb."

No single thing, perhaps, except this extraordinary book.

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

Fiction Historical Fiction

Howard Bahr

Interview by Alden Mudge

Time has moved in mysterious ways for writer Howard Bahr. It wasn't until 1973, when he was 27 years old, that he became a college freshman at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, "so deeply moved by the writing of Mr. William Faulkner that I wanted to be where he had written about." He then spent much of the next two decades working at Rowan Oak, Faulkner's home, and writing "a real cheap imitation of Mr. Faulkner's baroque prose." He then spent a good deal more time learning how not to write like William Faulkner. And finally, last year, well along in life, he published his first novel, The Black Flower: A Novel of the Civil War, a darkly radiant work, released this month as a Henry Holt Owl paperback. It blossomed in the shadow of the extravagant success of another first novel set in the South during the Civil War, Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain.

About these and the other odd turns his life has taken, Mr. Bahr is philosophical. "Nothing happens before it's supposed to," he tells me during a telephone call to his home in Tennessee, where he has lived for the last five years, teaching English at nearby Motlow State Community College. "It just took me all this time to get ready, to prepare, to learn enough to be able to do it."

The "it" in question — The Black Flower — is a wonderfully compact novel with authentic emotional power. Set during the Battle of Franklin (Tennessee) in November 1864, the novel's action spans barely a single day and ranges over a narrow corner of one of the bloodiest battlefields of the Civil War. At the story's center is Bushrod Carter, a 26-year-old veteran soldier from Mississippi, and his two boyhood friends, Jack Bishop and Virgil C. Joining them in the line of battle are two conscripts, the memorably evil Simon Ropes and the dull-witted Nebo Gloster. There is humor in Mr. Bahr's depiction of the friendship of the soldiers, and a terrible beauty in his description of the chaos of battle and its effects on his characters. But The Black Flower only reaches its full force when the armies have moved on and the wounded Bushrod Carter meets Anna Hereford.

According to Mr. Bahr he had always wanted to write "a realistic but pretty Civil War story," working on The Black Flower as a short story for nearly three years. "Then I got to a certain point — specifically where Virgil C. gets shot in the back of the head — and I ended it there. But the characters were not finished. They kept clamoring and clamoring. And so I commenced to writing some more, and pretty soon Anna showed up. She's based on a student I had here that I loved very deeply and who was eventually killed in a car wreck. When Anna showed up I didn't have anything but trouble after that. The characters started taking off in all directions, and suddenly I had a novel. Suddenly after three years."

Mr. Bahr's manuscript was rejected — apparently unread — by several reputable publishers. He sent it finally to the Nautical and Aviation Publishing Company, a small press that usually specializes in military nonfiction but was seeking first novels about the Civil War and other historical topics. The Black Flower was published with excellent reviews and limited sales, and almost simultaneously with Cold Mountain, the runaway bestseller and National Book Award winner.

The comparisons are inevitable: both are love stories, both take place during the Civil War, both are written by writers with an ear for language.

Mr. Bahr has the formal, gracious manners of the 19th-century South, using "Yessir" and "Nossir" to reply. He refers to writers who have influenced him as "Mister" — Mr. William Faulkner, Mr. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Mr. Loren Eisley, Mr. T.H. White, and Mr. Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose The Scarlet Letter includes the sentence that gave Mr. Bahr his title, "Let the black flower blossom as it may."

"Cold Mountain is a beautiful book," Mr. Bahr says without reservation. "But the two books are about two different things. His is a journey novel, not a war book at all. His [central] character is much different from mine. He is so much more attuned to nature and the Indians, and he doesn't believe in God. He's an almost New Age person. So while I thought Cold Mountain was a lovely book, I would not trade books with Mr. Frazier."

In fact, Mr. Bahr is entirely proud of his book's authenticity. "I believe it to be a true representation of the human experience, of people in a bad situation finding redemption and love." For its details, Mr. Bahr walked the Franklin battlefield, explored the McGavock house — around which most of the fictional action takes place — drew on 20 years of experience as a Civil War re-enactor for his vivid depictions of smells and sounds of battle, and mined his own experiences of the Vietnam War to capture the startling disassociations of battle.

"There is a mystical quality to the experience because it is so awful. When people are in a situation like that, their minds push away from it. The Archbishop of Canterbury [a character who loses his mind on the battlefield] just refuses to accept it and shifts to another identity. And when Bushrod gets into battle, his 'other' takes over. Although I was never in really bad combat, whenever we'd get in ticklish situations, I found that to be true. It was like I was watching somebody else doing it. Only later did I realize, or remember, that it was me."

But the most remarkable achievement of The Black Flower may be the 19th-century sensibility that informs it. This is due to an oddity of Mr. Bahr himself. He is certain that he would have been more comfortable in the last century than his own. He adheres to "what Mr. Robert Penn Warren called the threshold principle: in my own house I have the world the way I want it." That means no television and no computer, something he considers "a great evil." He even has a rotary phone. "But," he adds dryly, "not long ago I did buy caller ID because I realized that it is the greatest weapon against technology I have ever encountered."

"I have never felt comfortable in my own time," Mr. Bahr says. "Now in the late 20th century I sometimes feel like I'm on another planet. But eventually you tell yourself you've got to accept the world you've been given — because there's no alternative. And I do find plenty of wonderful things in this world."

Lucky thing. Because with the paperback release of The Black Flower, and with a little good fortune, Mr. Howard Bahr's time may have come at last.

Alden Mudge is a writer in Oakland, California, and a frequent contributor to this publication.

Fiction

Jane Smiley

Interview by Ellen Kanner

Jane Smiley doesn’t do autobiography. You won’t find her in Ginny, the narrator of her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, A Thousand Acres, or in any of the ensemble cast of her wicked academic satire, Moo. "I don’t write to investigate my own life or sensibility," says the tall, elegant author. "I write more to investigate the world."

Specifically, Smiley investigates America, both its inner and outer landscapes, and never more so than with her new novel, The All-true Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton. The author calls this book a look at "the intersection of ideology and violence in America." It’s a daunting subject, but as always, the author gives it a very human face. The face belongs to Lidie Newton, a gangly young widow who recalls all that happened a year ago, in 1855.

It begins when Lidie meets Thomas Newton, an abolitionist passing through on his way to his claim in the Kansas Territory. Lidie has no strong moral feelings about slavery but is intrigued by Thomas, who declares it to be "evil incarnate." When he proposes marriage, she agrees. "He’s appealing and he likes her," says Smiley. "She doesn’t have many prospects and so she sets off the way we all do — why not?"

Lidie’s sense of "why not" defines her. Marrying a man she barely knows and moving to a strange, dangerous place seems no more to her than an adventure, and Lidie loves adventure. She is, after all, the only woman in her home town of Quincy, Illinois, to swim the Mississippi River. She isn’t, however, the first wild spirit in fiction to do so. First came Huck Finn.

"I was conscious, of course, of Huckleberry Finn. Huck Finn grows up in the same period she does, grows up across the river, and they swim in the same river. But I was also conscious of Uncle Tom’s Cabin," says Smiley, who in her 1995 Harper’s article, "Say It Ain’t So, Huck," asserted Beecher depicted slavery more realistically than Twain. Smiley sighs. "The American myth is that things work out. But if we look out on American history, they didn’t work out. The real typical slave escape is that [the slave] doesn’t get away and everybody has to deal with that."

For Lidie, her stand on slavery, which people slyly refer to as "the goose question," is only one more part of the complicated life she finds in Bloody Kansas. She and Thomas face hardship, hatred, and violence as the free-staters clash with the slave-holders of Missouri.

Smiley, who immersed herself in research, is encyclopedic on the subject. "Ideology and violence came together with pioneers and getting rid of the Indians and making claims and claims jumping — all the forces of American history are present in Kansas," says the author. "All along the Kansas-Missouri border was something we would recognize now — Bosnia and Rwanda and guerrilla-type wars."

Bloodshed and hate, believes Smiley, are part of American heritage. Though they’re nothing new, they’re always devastating. The week Smiley began her book tour for Moo, she found another link between the past and the present, another manifestation of American ideology and violence — the federal building in Oklahoma City blew up.

Such random slaughter occurs midway through Smiley’s novel, when Thomas is gunned down, leaving Lidie alone in a wild place. "I had lost every single thing, including . . . my very name and history. . . ." says the narrator. "I was a new person, one I had never desired or expected to be."

Grieving and in shock, Lidie discovers that like Thomas’s murderers, she, too, is capable of rage. "I wanted to kill something, preferably a Missourian, preferably more than one." She cuts off her hair, dresses like a man, and sets out into hostile Missouri to avenge her husband’s death. But Lidie’s plans unravel when she falls ill and is taken in and cared for at a beautiful southern plantation.

Lidie, who has never paid much attention to slaves before, meets Lorna, a strong-willed slave, a woman rich in humanity. Though the plantation owner treats his slaves well, "the mere fact of being a slave is galling and appalling to Lorna, and it should be," says Smiley. "That’s why I didn’t do a Simon Legree sort of thing — we don’t have to ponder the worst case in order to ponder the moral outrage." When Lidie decides she must move on, Lorna announces, "Well, you is takin’ me wid ya."

Just as Lidie assumes disguises, The All-true Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton is a call for freedom and tolerance dressed as page-turner, a ripping good read. "Every novel I write is political," says the author. "It’s not possible to suspend your critique of the world and enter into some sort of pure apolitical realm. Your political views and your moral views connect you in a responsible way to other people, to society."

Connection to others, to what is real, resonates with Smiley. Winning the Pulitzer, she admits, was nice, but it didn’t change her life. "It made me famous, but that’s something that exists in other people’s minds. Becoming a mother at 43, buying a horse at 42, that changed my life." Indeed, Smiley’s affinity for horses comes through in the novel with Jeremiah, Lidie’s own beloved gray.

Being a mother and a raiser of horses has taken Smiley away from working in her head to an awareness of herself. "I went from being a teacher of literature and a writer to being a student of a whole different set of life questions — a student of riding, a student of [the] body, a student of fear, of horse psychology, horse care. I went from being in the advanced class back to being in kindergarten, which is not what I thought was going to happen," says the author, still surprised. "It has been wonderful and it has been painful. It opened me up. It changed who I was."

This is where Smiley, who does not do autobiography, turns out to have something in common with lanky, guileless Lidie. They share the same why-not attitude. "I think her voice is similar to mine. I certainly felt comfortable writing in her voice," admits Smiley. "And I’m tall."

Ellen Kanner is a writer in Miami, Florida.

Jane Smiley doesn't do autobiography. You won't find her in Ginny, the narrator of her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, A Thousand Acres, or in any of the ensemble cast of her wicked academic satire, Moo. "I don't write to investigate my own life or sensibility," says…

Audio

Jeff Shaara

Interview by David Madden

Jeff Shaara’s The Last Full Measure brings a unique and monumental father-son trilogy to a triumphant conclusion.

Michael Shaara’s powerful novel, The Killer Angels, appeared in 1974, winning critical acclaim and the Pulitzer Prize. It did not, however, gain wide appeal until the movie version, Gettysburg, was released in 1994, six years after the author’s death. With Gods and Generals, published in 1996, Shaara’s son, Jeff, continued the story of the same generals. This sequel was an immediate bestseller, and filming is now underway.

With The Last Full Measure, Jeff Shaara sustains a major achievement that distinguishes this trilogy from most other Civil War novels: He gives a balanced experience of the temperament, sensibility, and character of generals on both sides of the battle lines. Shaara also proves once and for all that, though influenced by his father, he has a voice and talent all his own.

The author spoke with BookPage from his home in Missoula, Montana.

BookPage: You strike me as a natural born writer. With no training or experience, you took up the challenge of writing Gods and Generals. At what point did you realize that you had the ability to do the job?
Jeff Shaara: From the time I tried to do it all the way through the book tour after it was published, I didn’t know. I was scared until I showed to my wife the first couple of chapters of The Last Full Measure that focus on Lee, and she said, "This proves you can do it on your own." Then I knew.

BP: Reading The Last Full Measure, I sensed that in General Grant you had discovered your own special subject.
JS: I’m glad you felt that way. I loved writing about that man. I wanted to shatter the myths about him and tell his story fully and truthfully. I liked being able to bring out the differences between Lee and Grant. People are emotional about Lee, a beloved figure, an inspiring figure. But Grant is cool and aloof, so I wanted to bring him alive for the reader. Writing about him was a little like writing about Stonewall Jackson in Gods and Generals — exciting, discovering the man as I tried to recreate him as a real person, not just an awesome legend. Both men were hard to get close to in life.

BP: Of all the generals in the trilogy, who is most like your father?
JS: Two men, not just one. As a man, my father was most like Joshua Chamberlain. I think my father felt an affinity with him. My father was idealistic (although he became a cynic in his later years), an intellectual, a scholarly kind of man, like Chamberlain. . . . And then the other side of my father that I was quite aware of as I wrote comes out in General Hancock. Hancock is very good at what he does. After Reynolds died, he was perhaps the greatest Union general in the field. Like Hancock, my father had no patience for incompetence, stupidly, inefficiency. You know that scene [in Gods and Generals] in the newspaper office when Hancock reaches across the desk and grabs the newspaperman by the throat? I felt my father guiding me as I wrote that scene.

BP: As you wrote Gods and Generals, did your father’s style influence your own?
JS: Definitely. How else would I have known how to write? My sister Lila said to me, "This novel is being written by the ghost of our father." But then the style changed toward the end.

BP: Like your father, Grant is a great stylist, which is partly why Hemingway declared Grant’s autobiography to be one of the masterpieces of American literature. As you wrote from Grant’s point of view in The Last Full Measure, did Grant’s style influence you?
JS: My father modeled his own style on Hemingway’s, by the way. But yes, I tried to catch the simplicity and the flow of Grant’s style when writing inside Grant’s mind, and I worked to change my style to be more appropriate to Lee when writing from his point of view.

BP: As in Gods and Generals, you continue to use your father’s background and structuring devices.
JS: Yes. A conscious decision. My wife told me that she, who didn’t know all that much about the Civil War, needed the kind of background material my father provided, and, you know, most of my readers are like her. Also, I wanted all three novels to have the same basic features.

BP: But in The Last Full Measure, I see a difference in your handling of the structure. As an omiscient author, you venture into fewer minds than you and your father did in the first two novels.
JS: I agonized over that. I worried that there might be an imbalance between Union and Confederate points of view, but I really couldn’t think of a Southern general of great enough stature or interest for me or the reader. Longstreet gets wounded and is no longer of use to Lee. Stuart gets killed. I go into their minds once only to show that everybody is fading out, leaving Lee alone. It’s subtler in General Gordon’s one chapter because he can see, as Lee cannot, the futility of opposing Grant. One by one, all the great generals go — Jackson is already dead — and Lee misses each of them. So of the Confederate generals, I decided to show Lee’s mind isolated. Lee, who was the symbol of the whole war, of the whole confederacy, is out there by himself, facing Grant.

BP: This coming July will mark the 135th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg. People often ask you, I’m sure, why you think Americans are so intensely interested in an event that took place so long ago.
JS: It’s not that there is a general interest in Civil War history — the facts and figures — per se, but an interest in character, which my father helped to create and which I am trying to carry on — a demystifying effort to help the reader see that the generals are just like us. Grant and Lee didn’t start out as Grant and Lee the mythic heroes; they evolved in crisis action. It is through seeing them as like us that we truly realize how great they are.

BP: It’s always interesting to compare fictional renderings of famous people with biographies. Have you read the latest biography of Grant?
JS: No. For both novels, I didn’t want to read any of the great books by recent writers because I didn’t want to be influenced. I wanted my interpretations to be my own. I read very few books written after about 1920.

BP: I wonder whether you will someday write a novel or a memoir about your relationship with your father?
JS: Oh, yes, that’s very likely, and it’ll probably be a memoir. But in the meantime, there is this documentary movie in four parts that looks at the Union generals, the Confederate Generals, and the role of the Irish. The fourth part is a biography of Michael Shaara, and in that there is some sense of our relationship.

BP: The scenes between Mark Twain and Grant at the nnd of the novel are so appealing and moving. The two of them are like aged versions of Huck and Jim on a raft on the Mississippi River.
JS: I love this element, the contrast between the two characters. When I learned that Twain commissioned Grant to write his autobiogra1hy, I was ecstatic. Twain is such a public icon, he’s worked into Westerns, even science fiction movies, as a character. And so, yes, the parallel between Twain and Grant talking together with Huck and Jim on a raft on the Mississippi River rings true to me.

BP: The early scenes in Grant’s point of view moved me to tears, not out of sentimentality but out of appreciation for your artistic achievement. I knew then that you had demonstrated the steadfastness of your talent and that we can await, with no apprehension, your third novel. What will that one be about?
JS: It’s about the Mexican War, and I’m in the research phase. I get to write about General Scott. I love that old man.

Sharpshooter: A Novel of the Civil War is David Madden’s 11th work of fiction.

Jeff Shaara's The Last Full Measure brings a unique and monumental father-son trilogy to a triumphant conclusion.

Michael Shaara's powerful novel, The Killer Angels, appeared in 1974, winning critical acclaim and the Pulitzer Prize. It did not, however, gain wide appeal until the movie version,…

Fiction Women's Fiction

Judy Blume

Interview by Ellen Kanner

"I must still be a girl approaching puberty," says Judy Blume, creator of Blubber, Margaret, Deenie, and Fudge — some of the most enduring characters in young adult fiction. Blume may be 60, but she has the heart of a girl and a childlike wonder that comes through in the way she writes and lives. She can't get over the purple bougainvillea blossoming around her winter home in Key West, Florida, or the fact that it's always warm. "I love summer. That's why I'm here."

Summer figures prominently in Blume's newest work, Summer Sisters, her 21st novel and third book for adults. Summer Sisters traces the lives of Vix and Caitlin, two friends who summer together on Martha's Vineyard. Vix is the shy one. Caitlin swears in class and gets away with it. Their first summer as "summer sisters," "they clasped hands, closed their eyes and vowed they would never be ordinary." Blume takes them from adolescence — "'You're really growing,' Caitlin said, focusing on Vix's chest" — into adulthood, from friendship to forgiveness, with a healthy mix of drama and wry humor.

An effortless, enjoyable read, Summer Sisters was less so to write. "I call it my book from hell," says Blume. "This book was very tough to get right because these two young women were on my mind for a long time." The idea for the story came to her back in the early '80s but kept eluding her. It took over ten years and twice as many drafts to get right, a confounding experience for a prolific author whose previous works came to her whole. Why did she stick with it? "It haunted me, I had to go back and do it. I couldn't let the characters go, they were so real."

They're still real to Blume, who speaks of them as she would about friends. "Caitlin plays games. I love her, but she's really hard to take sometimes. Still I'm glad she was there to encourage Vix to try her wings."

The two women will be real to her readers, too, some of whom, like Blume, identified with Margaret in Blume's young adult classic Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. Summer Sisters is the least autobiographical of her books, but Blume admits, "Caitlin represents one side of me, and Vix another. I was the good girl but excited by the idea of being the bad girl."

Of all the characters in Summer Sisters Blume feels she has the most in common with Abby, the stepmother Caitlin resents, the loving, nurturing figure Vix wishes her own mother could be. "My husband doesn't like Abby. He says it's the worst of me, the leftover New Jersey in me." She laughs, but it's not all a joke. When Blume was young, "there was no one like that for me. You're lucky if you have an Abby in your life, who really cares about you."

A whole generation of readers have looked to Blume the way Vix looks to Abby, for assurance, acceptance, and guidance. Readers feel less alone reading her books. They feel a tremendous bond with her. Many have written her letters telling her things they couldn't tell their own families — something Blume finds to be both an honor and a responsibility. In 1986, she published Letters to Judy, a collection of readers' letters confiding in the author everything from guilt over sibling rivalry to drug use. "I didn't know how to deal with it, and I let it paralyze me, the responsibility overwhelmed me. I had to get help to find out what I could do," she says. "I wanted to save all those needy kids."

Blume has created an easier forum to connect with her readers — her own Web site (http://www.judyblume.com). Upbeat and colorful and designed by her husband — "George is so high-tech" — it's visited "by all these people in their 20s and 30s who come to share things. I get about 200 hits a day. I am approachable. I like people. Everything I have today is because of my readers. We have something to give each other. There's a connection, you know, and it's so sweet."

Blume says her publisher would like her to use her Web site to promote her work, even though sales of her books exceed 65 million copies. But that isn't why she created it. "It's about giving information to my readers, it's not there to sell something."

The way her work is sold is a long-standing issue for the author. Blume captures the weird, exciting time known as puberty better than any other writer, and as a result, publishers have pigeonholed her as a young adult author. An outspoken opponent of censorship and more sensitive than many to the pangs of adolescence, Blume knows that no teenager is going to walk into the children's section of a bookstore for a book.

"If Catcher in the Rye were published today, would it be published young adult?" she asks. When a novel like Salinger's or Summer Sisters has a younger protagonist, Blume thinks the responsible thing is to "publish it adult. The kids who want to read it will find it. The only difference between an adult novel and a young adult novel is the voice and the characters. There isn't any difference in the process, just the experiences."

What makes her want to write about adolescence and childhood is the energy and ardor of the age. "Everything's new and fresh, everything is a new experience. You haven't done it all yet."

Still, being an adult has its own advantages. "You get to make your own decisions. Nobody can tell you what to do. I'm on my way to being an older adult, and I feel this great sense of I don't have to prove anything. I'm not angry, and life is good."

Blume manages to have the best of both worlds. She tootles around Key West on an old bicycle that reminds her of her girlhood Schwinn. "Being here is the best," she says. "I'm a kid and I get to play and nobody tells me what to do and when to go home."

Ellen Kanner is a writer in Miami and a frequent contributor to BookPage.

"I must still be a girl approaching puberty," says Judy Blume, creator of Blubber, Margaret, Deenie, and Fudge -- some of the most enduring characters in young adult fiction. Blume may be 60, but she has the heart of a girl and a childlike wonder…

Audio

John Irving

Interview by Alden Mudge

"I hold a novel accountable for a good story," says John Irving during a conversation about A Widow for One Year, his ninth and most intricately crafted novel yet. "And by a good story, I mean one that’s a little too complicated and twisted and circumlocuitous to be easily encapsulated in a newspaper or television story."

It’s no surprise, then, that A Widow for One Year defeats easy summary. In fact, so lush and energetic is the branching and leafing of plot and subplots (which take us from Long Island in 1958, to Amsterdam’s red light district in 1990, to Vermont in 1995), and so tightly woven are the stories and stories-within- stories, that Irving and I can actually differ on what the book is really about — and both be right.

"I wanted to write about a woman’s sexual past and the choices in her sexual past that make her uncomfortable," Irving says, recalling the development of the novel’s central character, Ruth Cole. "I wanted to deliberately choose things that, were she a male, would discomfort her hardly at all. I wanted, in other words, to work on that double standard that Ruth herself is so aware of. I wanted to keep positioning Ruth vulnerably — sexually vulnerably — while giving her considerable esteem for her toughness, her work ethic, her success in her career. I wanted her to be a thinking woman and a self-critical one."

Irving also wanted to return to telling a chronological story for the first time in 15 years. "The Hotel New Hampshire and The World According to Garp were linear narratives, and I felt very strongly that I wanted to write a linear narrative again." This time, he decided to "structure the story in the manner of a play, with three distinct and separate moments of time: We see Ruth as a four-year-old girl, we see her as a 36-year-old unmarried woman — successful in her career but struggling in her relationships — and we see her five years later when she is a 41-year-old widow with a child who, not coincidentally, is the exact age Ruth was when we first met her and when her mother abandoned her."

But, Irving says, he did not hit upon the novel’s comic masterstroke — making Ruth Cole a writer — until quite late in his work on the book, until he had populated A Widow for One Year with almost everyone in it. Then, with one of those typical inventive exaggerations that endow his books with so much of their energy, Irving made almost everyone else in the book a writer, too. Ruth’s father, Ted, writes and illustrates haunting little children’s books and seduces the lonely mothers of his young models. Ruth’s mother, Marion, abandons her husband and four-year-old daughter and eventually writes well-received mystery novels in which she mourns the deaths of her two teenage sons. Marion’s 16-year-old lover, Eddie, grows up to be a good man who writes bad novels about the love between younger men and older women. Ruth’s best friend, Hannah, is a journalist who writes celebrity profiles and is lonely and sexually self-absorbed. Ruth marries an editor but falls in love with a reader.

"I wrote Garp when I was a decidedly unfamous writer and a writer who always expected to support myself by teaching and coaching," Irving says. "I’ve often found it puzzling that I wrote that book about not just one famous writer, but two — Garp and his mother — when I didn’t give being a famous writer a second thought. Once I decided to make Ruth a writer, I had a lot of fun with areas of being a writer that I didn’t know anything about when I wrote Garp. I didn’t know publishers had publicists until my fourth novel was published. I didn’t have book tours. Nobody interviewed me. The public life as a writer, which Ruth is so uncomfortable with, is something I wasn’t able to give attention to before because I hadn’t had the experience. That and Ruth’s obdurate denial that there is any truth to Hannah’s accusation that Ruth is an autobiographical writer. It is enduringly fascinating to me how simplistically that subject is treated, both by writers themselves and by people writing about writers. When the writer is any good, it’s complicated. It’s a subject I think can be fascinating — and very funny."

Of course, this barely scratches the surface of a novel whose sorrows and delights depend heavily on time and the anticipation of its passing. "From the very beginning," Irving says, "I was aware that I was writing a love story, and that it was a dual love story. It was Marion and Eddie’s love story, and it was Harry and Ruth’s love story. But I wanted that love story to feel so distant and take so long to get there, that you don’t know what it is until it’s almost over. . . . You want the reader to guess what’s going to happen next — and guess it right. But not always. You want things to happen that they don’t see coming. The balance between the two is very delicate. It has to do with the interconnectedness of people’s lives, and that has to do with plot and with carefully making a character stay true to himself or herself."

"Composing a novel," Irving concludes, "is like constructing the interior architecture of the house you live in. Other people will pass through and say, ‘Oh, it’s a nice house but what a hideous window over the kitchen table.’ Only a writer really lives in a novel. So much of what works best about it are things that people who come to dinner never know about or see."

It’s a fitting analogy. A Widow for One Year is wonderfully constructed, and its characters and their interrelationships are, indeed, even more interesting on return visits.

Alden Mudge is a writer in Oakland, California, and a frequent contributor to BookPage.

History

Gary Kinder

Interview by Alden Mudge

Late last year, when Gary Kinder read about some guy named James Cameron and a forthcoming movie called Titanic, he was devastated. It wasn’t just that Cameron had decided to embellish the actual story of the sinking of the Titanic by adding a romance between two star-crossed lovers, but he’d also framed his story with a tale of high-tech, modern-day treasure hunters. Cameron’s fictionalized account mirrored the true-life story Kinder had just spent the last 10 years scrupulously researching and getting down on paper. "I figured it was going to destroy everything I’d done," Kinder says.

By the time we talk in late April, Kinder seems to have accepted his agent’s assurances that the success of the movie can only add luster to Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea, Kinder’s book about the 1857 wreck and recent recovery of a ship carrying gold from the California Motherlode. Kinder has even been to see Titanic with his mother and his two daughters (who have seen it twice!) and loved it. But he’s not quite ready to trust the early praise for Ship of Gold, which likens it to such riveting accounts of peril and adventure as Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air and Sebastian Junger’s The Perfect Storm.

In Ship of Gold, Kinder interweaves two dramatic stories. The first is the story of the S.S. Central America, a sidewheel steamer that shuttled passengers and cargo between New York and Panama, taking California-bound goldseekers on the outward journey and making the nine-day journey back to New York with those who had struck it rich in the goldfields, as well as those who had struck out. Between 1853, when it was launched, and 1857 Kinder discovered, the Central America "had carried one-third of all consigned gold to pass over the Panama Route." Not to mention the untold millions in gold dust, nuggets, coins, and bars that had "traveled aboard her in the trunks and pockets and carpetbags and money belts of her passengers."

On the fateful journey from Panama to New York in September 1857, the Central America carried its full complement of 500 passengers. Among them were newlyweds Ansel and Adeline "Addie" Easton (sister of one of the richest men in California); Judge Alonzo Monson, who was legendary for his gambling losses in the gold fields; and a disappointed young goldseeker named Oliver Manlove, who had recorded in his diary every mile of his journey west. The ship was captained by William Lewis Herndon, a legendary sailor and explorer who several years before had written a classic of 19th-century adventure, Exploration of the Valley of the Amazon, about his experiences in South America.

Kinder estimates that he read hundreds of contemporary accounts, interviews, diaries, and reminiscences of Central America passengers to construct an almost moment by moment account of the ship’s encounter with a hurricane off the coast of the Carolinas; the heroic efforts of passengers and crew to keep the ship afloat (for hours and hours and hours, male passengers formed a bailing line to keep the rising water away from the steam boilers); the desperate transfer of some of the women passengers in storm-tossed waters to ships that had come to assist the foundering Central America; the heartrending separation of the Eastons; the steely last moments of Captain Herndon, who went down with his ship; and the horrible days adrift of the few others who ultimately survived. It is a wrenching and thrilling account, and any writer would be proud of the power of its telling.

But, as fascinating as it is, the story of the sinking of the Central America is not Kinder’s main story. Instead, it is the search for the wreck and the recovery of its treasure that make up the bulk of Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea. And in Kinder’s hands, this story — even with all its technological and legal details about deep sea recovery efforts — is at least as riveting as his historical account of the sinking.

As Kinder tells it, after he had finished writing his previous book (a bestseller about a man who claimed to have had contact with aliens), he was looking for a project that would involve him physically. Kinder had gone to law school in Florida and learned to scuba dive there, and somehow these facts made him tegin to think about treasure hunting as a subject for his book. When he first heard about the Central America, he says, "it didn’t interest me even a little bit. I wanted something sexy. I wanted lots of jewels and gold reliquaries and the romance of the high seas in the 1600s and 1700s."

But that was before he met the team and crew of the Columbus-America Discovery Group, led by the extraordinary Tommy Thompson, whose personality dominates Ship of Gold just as it dominated the ultimately successful efforts to find the Central America and its cargo. Thompson was both the technological innovator, who could think his way through the awesome dangers and difficulties of working at great depths in the ocean, and the steely operator, who could stare down his competitors during tense encounters on the high seas and direct the Herculean efforts of a large recovery team of experts and crew members.

"The biggest problem I had in writing this book," Kinder says, "was trying to tell this story exactly as it happened without making Tommy seem too perfect. It was a very, very big problem, because everybody I talked to said Tommy was perfect. I began to wonder how to make this guy seem real."

Of course, Tommy has his defects. He exercised rigid control on the project, for example, not allowing certain crew members to even see the gold and artifacts as they were being brought to the surface. That engendered some deep anger, Kinder says.

Thompson eventually allowed Kinder unprecedented access to the project records and personnel, and Kinder has put that access to good use. His account is informative, dramatic, and even funny. It didn’t come without effort and a big dose of frustration. The book was scheduled to be published for the last three or four years, but publication had to be delayed while competitors’ lawsuits against Thompson and Columbus-America wound through the courts. Kinder used the time to rework the book. "As things turned out, it ended up being a much better manuscript," he says with characteristic grin-and-bear-it good humor.

As Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea at last arrives in bookstores all across the country this month, Gary Kinder sits in Seattle (where he runs a business teaching lawyers to write) waiting for his ship to come in.

Alden Mudge is a writer in Oakland, California, and a frequent contributor to BookPage.

Late last year, when Gary Kinder read about some guy named James Cameron and a forthcoming movie called Titanic, he was devastated. It wasn't just that Cameron had decided to embellish the actual story of the sinking of the Titanic by adding a romance between…

Romance Paranormal Romance

J.R. Ward

Interview by Lois Faye Dyer

Ardent fans of The Black Dagger Brotherhood have been waiting impatiently for the story of Rehvenge, half-vampire and half-sympath, an outlaw among outlaws. And New York Times best-selling author J.R. Ward doesn’t disappoint in Lover Avenged, her first hardcover. Ward returns to her romance roots while pushing the envelope on the suspense side in this tale of good vs. evil. Not surprisingly, the drug dealing bar owner named Rehvenge, with a history of shady dealings and bad blood, becomes a certifiable Hero in the telling.

As always in this wildly popular paranormal series, there are secrets to be revealed and tantalizing glimpses of books to come. Rehvenge’s story is everything this reader had hoped for—and then some. Sit down, fasten your seatbelt and get ready for a non-stop roller-coaster ride of thrills and chills.

The world of The Black Dagger Brotherhood is firmly grounded and exceedingly well developed. Did you imagine the particulars of the vampire society in Caldwell, New Jersey, before you began writing the books, or did the details evolve as you wrote the individual stories?
First of all, thank you for the opportunity to talk about the Brothers! As for the world… well, to be honest, the whole Brotherhood universe just presented itself as is. The way it works for me is that the stories and the places and the people in the books just flood into my brain and the writing for me is recording what I'm shown. Certainly, there has been evolution, however, as the repercussions of what happens resonate throughout the BDB world.

There is a clear sense of right and wrong in the Brotherhood books and a strong sense of honor exhibited by the Brothers and their mates. Did you purposely choose stories that allowed you to explore the concept of a Homeric battle of good vs evil, (i.e. The Brothers vs. the Omega?)
Again, I truly feel as though I make no choices and have no part in the stories. They come to me as movies do, already composed. For example, there are things that I wish or want to have happen, but the instant I try and muscle the stories around in any way, I get writer's block. So I've learned to sit back and watch it happen and record things as faithfully as I can. I will say that for me, the honor that is exhibited by the Brothers and their mates is one of the most satisfying parts of the books—because I get to write about people I respect.

Though each of the books in the series is a complete story on its own, there are plot threads that develop from book to book. Do you have a chart on a wall somewhere that plots this development or some other system that allows you to juggle the many details?
I don't—for the most part, it's all in my head! But I do have a fantastic research assistant who I use as a resource if I want to double check to make sure I'm recalling things correctly.

The world of the books is very urban. What drew you to this gritty urban setting? And to paranormal characters?
I've always been a huge Dracula fan and a big Stephen King reader. So horror and mystery and suspense is kind of in my hard wiring. As for the urban stuff, I love pop culture and fashion and cities so again that's all something I'm drawn to. But the stories and where they're set picked me, they really did!

This series achieved a landslide of early acclaim from readers. What do you think it is about the Brotherhood books specifically that caused the instant buzz and fierce reader loyalty? Were you surprised by the level of reader engagement?
I have been totally and completely blown away by the reader support (and very grateful.) The thing was, when I started out, I kind of made an agreement in my head that I would write these stories exactly as I saw them and that I would do it for me, as kind of a private thing. I had to set that stone so that I wouldn't try and force rules or conventions on the pictures in my head. As a result, I think the BDB books read raw and a little fierce in places and clearly people like that- although again, I'm just baffled and very very appreciative of everyone's support.

What’s a typical writing day like for you?
I'm very disciplined. I'm up and at the computer at eight a.m. and I work until one and then go for my run. Then it's back to work until dinner—although usually on business stuff. After dinner, it's more time at the computer writing. I write seven days a week, 365 days a year, no excuses, no whining, just planting my butt and getting it done. When I'm on deadlines, I'll increase the hours to up to 18 a day. The thing is, though, this is what I love to do. So not writing is harder than writing, if that makes any sense?

How does your family feel about your superstar status in the writing community?
Oh my gosh they don't care in the slightest! (And geez, you're making me blush!) My family knows me as the boxers and t-shirt wearing space cadet who puts aluminum foil in the refrigerator by mistake and talks to the dog. They love me for me and know that writing makes me happy and that's why they like what I do. It's never about bragging rights for them, although they are proud of me . . . (okay, I’m getting a little teary . . . next question!)

Rumor has it that you’re planning a new paranormal series. Can you tell us a bit about it?
I'm all about fallen angels and Harley Davidson motorcycles at the moment—not bad for a job, huh! The new series focuses on the seven deadly sins and a reluctant hero who has to influence people's lives so that they end up in a better a place than where they begin. It's paranormal romance and loads of fun—I'm just finishing up the first book as we speak!

What type of books/stories do you see yourself writing in 10 years?
Frankly, I'd like to still be doing the Brotherhood books- I can't see letting them go. There's just so much to explore in that world and I love the people. I also have another paranormal series in addition to the angels I'd like to get to write . . . and I would love to finish a contemporary romance series I've started. More than anything though, I hope to still be writing for a living. That's up to fate and the readers, however—all I can do is get up everyday and sit at my computer and be grateful that I'm living out my dream of being an author, you know?

Memoir

Jimmy Buffett

Interview by Tom Corcoran

Anyone who’s observed Jimmy Buffett’s music career and heard his song lyrics knows that his main product is carefree optimism. But Jimmy has a little secret: he’s been a workaholic for 30 years. As we learn in his memoir, A Pirate Looks at Fifty, he works just as hard at having good times as he does earning them.

The book is a travelogue with flashbacks — and not the kind you might fear. Insightful and entertaining, this detailed instruction on how to live a rewarding life might well be deemed the ultimate self-help manual.

We spoke to Mr. Buffett recently, just after he’d spent several days in New Orleans, "revisiting his youth."

Tom Corcoran: In A Pirate Looks at Fifty you say that you squeeze 36 hours into every day. How did you find time to create a 400-page book?
Jimmy Buffett: I had a deadline! I’d started a novel before I got involved in the musical production of Herman Wouk’s Don’t Stop the Carnival. That was fun, but a creative sidetrack. I still owed the publisher a book. I pulled out my old journals and took a lesson from David Niven, who wrote a wonderful non-tell-all biography called The Moon Is a Balloon. It was informative, yet entertaining to the point of near-fiction in which he’d made himself a character. I decided to write about a journey during which I reflected on events in my life. A lot of it was already on paper. Plus, that deadline . . .

TC: How much of your wanderlust can we attribute to your reading?
JB: Almost all of it, from my youth up till today. I hate to mention age, but I come from an era when we weren’t consumed by technology and television. My mother insisted that her children read. To describe my scarce leisure time in today’s terms, I always default to reading. It didn’t hurt that I came from a Gulf Coast storytelling tradition. I went to the Caribbean because my grandfather sang calypso songs. Simple as that.

TC: You state in this book that you’ve tried to follow your instincts and keep your sense of humor. Creativity aside, how much of your success can you attribute to instinct and humor?
JB: Ninety percent of it. Instinct taught me 20 years ago to pace a song or a concert performance. That translates into pacing a story, pleasing a reading audience. I don’t know where I got it. It must be instinct. Humor has bailed me out of more tight situations than I can think of. If you go with your instincts and keep your humor, creativity follows. With luck, success comes, too.

TC: A Pirate Looks at Fifty demonstrates your fascination with many people, not necessarily for what they do, but how well they do it. Do you judge yourself the same way?
JB: I remember the excruciating school task of writing a three-page term paper. But, oh, that feeling when I was done! I think I drive myself for that feeling of accomplishment. Herman Wouk told me, "Write a page a day. It will add up." So I make sure to do it. Whether it’s a letter, song lyrics, part of a novel, or instructions on how to fix a kitchen sink, it’s writing. You keep your craft honed, you acquire the discipline to finish things. You turn into a self-taskmaster.

TC: Twenty years ago you were sailing the Caribbean. For the past decade you’ve been flying all kinds of aircraft, all over the hemisphere. How do you foresee your introduction to "A Pirate Looks at Sixty"?
JB: I’m inspired by people who keep on rolling, no matter their age. I’ve talked recently with Harry Belafonte and with Mose Allison, two musicians who continue to enjoy performing and life. Quitting doesn’t enter my mind. I want to keep going as I have, to travel, read, perform, write, and enjoy my family. I’ve promised myself only this: no more Laundromats, no more two-shows-a-night, and no more deadlines. I’ll work at my own pace.

Anyone who's observed Jimmy Buffett's music career and heard his song lyrics knows that his main product is carefree optimism. But Jimmy has a little secret: he's been a workaholic for 30 years. As we learn in his memoir, A Pirate Looks at Fifty, he…

Memoir

Da Chen

Interview by Alden Mudge

Five or six years ago, Da Chen got badly bitten by the writing bug. He had finished Columbia Law School and moved on to the Wall Street firm of Rothschild, Inc. Then he started reading John Grisham and, like any number of other dreamy, ambitious young law students, he thought he would try his hand at writing a legal thriller. "I got 200 pages into it and realized I didn't have a Bruce Willis character," Da Chen says with a rueful laugh. He gave it up.

The problem was, the writing bug wouldn't let go. Perhaps Da Chen moped a bit. Perhaps he stared a little too longingly at the blank yellow legal pads he hoped to fill with character and action. At some point his wife, a physician, suggested that he write about his childhood.

Da Chen grew up in the tiny Chinese village of Yellow Stone in the 1960s and 1970s, during the tumult of the Cultural Revolution. He sometimes told his American-born wife wild tales from his childhood—about dogs eating snakes, and men eating dogs. "It was humorous to make her feel disgusted," Da Chen recalls. "She was fascinated—and sort of disturbed—by the stories I told. My childhood was so very different from hers. She met me after I graduated from law school. I came to her as a suit, nothing else, and a suit hides a person. The present is always a disguise for the past." There were stories he had not told his wife, stories he could barely tell himself.

His wife continued to urge him to write about his childhood, if not for the readers of the world, then at least for his own children. He tried, but it was difficult to know where to begin. His great grandfather had passed a very difficult civil service test and eventually became the regional governor and a large landholder. Should he begin with him? Or with his grandfather, who quartered Red Army troops during the Communist Revolution, thereby escaping the fate of his wife's wealthy brothers, who were all executed? Or with his father, a disgraced landlord, who was hauled into labor camps with each shift of the political winds in faraway Beijing? Or with his remarkable grandmother? Or his equally remarkable mother?

"Least of all with me, right?" Da Chen says. "A first person story is very rare in Chinese literature. China is such a country of tradition, it is very hard to put yourself at the center. I struggled with that a lot at the beginning."

Eventually he found a path and a structure, and the pages of the book that would become Colors of the Mountain began to pour out of him. Then something happened. He came to describe a moment in the third grade when his teacher, one of the ignorant, vicious, petty tyrants set loose upon the land by the Cultural Revolution, stripped him of his identity, began calling him "the guy in the corner," and made Da Chen, son of a landlord, open game for every sort of cruelty.

"I would lock myself in our little spare bedroom," Da Chen recalls, "and I would write and I would cry. I can't believe how much anger I had. I buried this huge depression and sadness until the moment I began to write the book. I rarely told people about this experience because I always felt that I must have done something wrong to cause it. Now, after writing Colors of the Mountain, I feel, wow, it was not me. The whole society was dysfunctional at the time."

It is almost impossible for the Western reader to understand just how dysfunctional Chinese society was. We tend to see the Cultural Revolution as a distant abstraction, in broad political and sociological terms. In Colors of the Mountain, Da Chen presents the impact of the Cultural Revolution on a small village, far from China's political epicenter, as seen through the eyes of an exceptionally bright, sensitive, and artistic boy.

"I didn't want to go into too much detail about the political background," Chen says. "I just want people to imagine and to understand that this is what happened to me. The book is more from the heart than the mind. I was only nine years old. I didn't know what made sense and what didn't make sense. All I knew was what I had to go through."

Naturally not everything he went through was a hardship. Chen describes warm friendships with a rough bunch of boys he fell in with when the other children in the village rejected and tormented him. He describes the sanctuary of love and warmth he found at home with his parents and siblings. He describes a beautiful, "sparsely populated, very pastoral" region where "you could go and write great poems—if you weren't forced to plow the fields." He also vividly describes the extraordinary change that came over the country when Mao died in 1976.

"It was a very strange feeling," Chen says. "Here was this guy I was supposed to hate forever, which I do. But Mao was the heaven; Mao was the earth—and everything in between. That's how big he was. When he died it was like a whole dynasty had died, and I felt that China might die with him."

But instead of dying, China was swept by a passion for education. Even the remote village of Yellow Stone was carried along by college fever. Caught up in the national mood and shouldering the aspirations of his family, Da Chen proved to be a disciplined and brilliant student, scoring so high on his exams that he was admitted to the prestigious Beijing Language Institute. Colors of the Mountains ends with Da Chen boarding a train, the first train he had ever ridden, for the 50-hour trip to Beijing.

"In the United States, people everywhere go to college. It's expected. But for me, nothing in my life can ever compare to the moment I left Yellow Stone to go to college. It was like being liberated from a dungeon. For much of my life I felt like a frog trapped at the bottom of the well, looking up at beautiful passing swans. A quick glimpse and they were gone. Suddenly I felt that the swans I so admired had dropped into my well."

Da Chen thinks that even though Colors of the Mountain is set in China and is about a Chinese boy, "it is really about every boy and every girl. Everybody has gone through something like this." I doubt that his American readers will agree. Colors of the Mountain is about an extraordinary journey that, thankfully, most of us will never need to endure.

But Da Chen is exactly right when he says Colors of the Mountain "is about hopes and dreams. It's about hope even when you are hopeless. It's about making dreams come true."

Alden Mudge works for the California Council for the Humanities in San Francisco.

Fiction Women's Fiction

Connie May Fowler

Interview by Ellen Kanner

For Connie May Fowler, stories are medicine. There is might and magic in them. "Speak or write the words down, and the world becomes a clearer place. Sometimes it even changes the world," the author says.

Mattie, the narrator of Fowler's fourth novel Remembering Blue, feels the power of the stories as strongly as her creator does. "That act of memory and telling the story is something that Mattie is absolutely compelled to do. It's a life-saving act for her," says Fowler.

Mattie, 25, wants to tell the story of Nick Blue, her husband, a shrimper who loved the sea and who has vanished. But in speaking of him, she must also tell her own story, of the shy, broken creature she was before they met and how his love helped her grow and blossom. The themes of love and loss are timeless, and Fowler makes them even more resonantly so by setting her story away from modern distractions, in the present, but on an island off the coast of north Florida.

Cut off from the mainland, life on the island with Nick puts Mattie in touch with herself and with what's elemental in the world. "On my last few trips into Tallahassee I was lost. I mean, lost in my heart," says Mattie. "Cities don't make sense to me anymore. Yes, I was once a city girl. But now I am wild. I'm salvia and sea oat."

The island, Lethe, takes its name from the spring of forgetfulness in Greek mythology that the dead would drink from in order to live again. On Lethe, taken in by Nick and the boisterous Blue family, Mattie forgets her past unhappiness and learns to forgive. Fowler, whose previous novel Before Women Had Wings won the 1996 Southern Book Critics Circle Award, makes myth a palpable force in Remembering Blue. As Nick explains to Mattie, there's a legend in his family that "'some of us . . . used to be dolphins. And if we're dolphins, we're free, see? But when we're men, we're not.'" Mattie gently explains, "'myths are just stories we create to make our pain go away,'" but Nick believes in the story's power.

In a way, so does Fowler. The "quiet magic" of Nick and Mattie's world is drawn from model as well as from myth. While walking along the beach near her home, Fowler spotted a dolphin close to shore. It kept pace with her as she walked up and down the sand. On impulse, she called to it. "It nearly came out of the water, shot like a torpedo . . . It was so astonishing, maybe for all of us. That started the mythology part for me, creating someone who had a connection with another species."

Readers may not recognize the part of Florida Fowler writes about in Remembering Blue. It isn't the south, though it's very close to Georgia. It's not the tropics, though it's in the same state as Key West and Miami Beach. Lethe, with its "shell-scattered shorelines building and receding in response to storms not yet spawned. Infinite vistas of open water that at high noon cannot be looked upon because of the blinding glint of the sun. . . ." is fictitious, even mythical, but Fowler's rich descriptions of it are real. She lives outside Tallahassee in north Florida and is passionate about that connection with place.

"I kind of fell in love with the people and landscape and water in this part of Florida. I wanted a story where I had a character immersed in that, but also needed a character who was new to it, who could learn about it through others."

Fowler depicts the unspoiled beauty not just of the region, but of the people who live there. To make Mattie's experience authentic, she spoke to local shrimpers' wives. "They love their life and love where they live. They really wanted me to do it right. They opened up their world to me. They took me in, they didn't withhold anything. They were so giving."

Fowler responds to such generosity of spirit because she didn't get a lot of it as a child. She grew up knowing abuse, poverty, and neglect, but like Mattie, the daughter of "a withholding woman" and a "booze hound" father, Fowler shrugs off self-pity. She transmutes her pain into stories, and did it so movingly in Before Women Had Wings that Oprah Winfrey made it into a film. Fowler herself wrote the screenplay.

It was like a Cinderella moment for her, and "I didn't want that moment to go by without doing something to help other people." She created the Connie May Fowler Women With Wings Foundation, which serves battered women in Florida and gives them safe places to go to, like Tallahassee's Refuge House.

"If my mom had had a Refuge House in her life, things would have been drastically different for all of us," Fowler said. "I became really committed to raising funds so the women and children in this area could be taken care of in grace and safety."

Appearing on "Oprah" has given Fowler more readers, but has also made her popular in a way she can't fathom. "People are all the time calling me, asking me how to get on her show. Once you're on TV, people think you're somebody, which is the oddest thing. Once you buy into that, then you're in a lot of trouble."

Celebrity for its own sake doesn't appeal to Fowler at all. She believes people want to be on TV talk shows because they crave a forum for telling their stories. "They just want to share their stories and hear someone say, I understand," she says. "It goes back to Remembering Blue — that act of sharing your story is really empowering. I understand very acutely the power of stories and myths, of religion in that context. That's one of the things I deal with — how do we retain any sense of myth, of the fantastic, of transcendence in a technological, postmodern age?"

For Fowler, the answer lies not in technology, but within us and the world around us. Mattie says it for her. "Everything that I want . . . to understand is right here. The mystery is in the sand. And in the water. And in the air we breathe." And in stories like Remembering Blue.

Ellen Kanner writes from her home in Miami, Florida.

Mattie, the narrator of Fowler's fourth novel Remembering Blue, feels…

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Anne Rivers Siddons

Interview by Alice Cary

Many have likened novelist Anne Rivers Siddons to Margaret Mitchell, a comparison that prompts a chuckle in Siddons, the author of such blockbusters as Outer Banks, Colony, and Peachtree Road. "We don't write remotely about the same thing," Siddons says, only to reconsider, "Well, she wrote about the profound loss of one society and the need to live in another one, and I have too a little bit, but we really are not the same. I guess it's because we're both from Atlanta and we both write long books."

However, they won't be from the same city for long. In November, Siddons, her husband, and their four cats will move from Atlanta to the heart of historic Charleston, South Carolina. "It's an enormous move," Siddons admits. "I have lived in this area for seven generations and in this house for 30 years. I may end up in Prozac City. Who knows? We have lots of friends in Charleston, but it's going to be an enormous shock."

Readers can get a hearty helping of the Charleston vicinity in Siddons's latest book, a page-turner called Low Country, about the perennial war between natural beauty and coastal development.

Low Country's heroine, Caroline Venable, has one precious thing left in her life: a pristine island inherited from her grandfather. In addition to the family cottage, it's home to a small Gullah settlement, a band of wild ponies, and other wildlife, including a mysterious panther. Caroline's husband, Clay, has made a fortune developing resort communities in various locales, but when his empire faces bankruptcy, he is convinced that financial salvation lies in developing Caroline's island. For Caroline, this is unacceptable, which means she must face one of the biggest challenges of her life.

The seeds for the plot were born years ago when Siddons worked as a copywriter for the first island resort on Hilton Head, South Carolina. "I watched the land turn from almost primeval forest to what it is now, which is Manhattan South," Siddons remembers. "It isn't that any developer sets out to ruin a place, it's just that even the best and most ecologically sensitive plan requires something fragile to be lost. I have always wanted to write about this clash."

Once Siddons knew she was moving to Charleston, she began spending a lot of time in the surrounding islands, especially in the vicinity of Ace Basin. Describing the area as primeval, she says: "It's a real experience to go out on a warm summer night. You come back thinking you've been back to the dawn of the millennium. It's one of the wildest places I've ever seen. And the idea that someone might build a Disney World-type place there is just abhorrent. I really would like to do what I can to help the area stay intact."

Specifically, she applauds the efforts of a group called the Carolina Coastal Conservancy for buying and preserving large tracts of wetlands. Meanwhile, she preserves the feel of such natural treasures in her fiction, having Caroline, who has faced great tragedy in her life, find solace on her island, where she is free to relax and paint.

Ironically, when Siddons herself seeks peace, she heads north instead of south, to a peninsula on Maine's Penobscot Bay, a summer retreat that's been in her husband's family for years. "I'm very drawn to that severe, cold, rocky beach [of New England]," Siddons says, "and I'm equally drawn to that blood-warm water [of the South]. But I'm never so happy as I am on the waters of Maine. I have a sense that whatever is looming or bothersome can be put off until I get home. Also, it's physically a long way from any other entanglements I may have, so if anybody gets upset and needs to be comforted, it had better be good."

Why do islands have such prominent roles in her novels? "I think it's the idea that they're totally apart from the world," Siddons explains. "An island has some sort of magnetic pull. It makes all these promises that it will keep you safe and nurture you. Of course this is not true, but I still never sleep as soundly as I do on an island or on our little peninsula in Maine."

Caroline, like several of the author's heroines, risks losing the core of her existence. "I think my heroines will always be ordinary women who have made a journey," Siddons says. "Maybe it doesn't happen so totally and drastically to most of us, but I haven't seen many women fall into middle age without losing something that has always been a very important part of their lives, and either having to make a life around that, or find a way to go on, or change in order to go on. It seems to me that women are left to do the changing and accommodating."

Siddons's own transforming journey occurred 15 years ago, when she battled severe depression that lasted three years, leaving her unable to write. "It was mostly a matter of brain chemistry, but I didn't know what it was. It was totally crippling. I could hardly exist. We finally found a drug that worked and a wonderful woman therapist. It felt like one of those things you either survive or you don't — there aren't too many in-betweens."

Finally, she had an idea for a book, and slowly, hesitantly, began to write. "If I couldn't write, it would have killed me," she says, "but I had to try." The result was Homeplace, followed by a string of additional bestsellers.

Siddons has not only survived, but flourished. She excitedly talks about the prospect of moving into the antique Charleston single house, which is one room wide, two stories high, and about eight rooms deep. "The idea of living in a city with that kind of resonance and beauty is so exciting," she muses. "I feel spoiled to be able to keep that much of everything I love about the South. It's like a fairy tale."

Alice Cary writes from her home in Groton, Massachusetts.

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