All Interviews

FictionWomen's Fiction

Anita Diamant

Anita Diamant has faith in one thing the connection between women. She explored and celebrated that connection, that powerful bond of sisterhood, in her 1997 novel The Red Tent.

In a world where "women’s friendships are unspoken and undervalued," as Diamant says, her novel came as a gift to women, and women returned the favor. Though The Red Tent came out with virtually no fanfare or reviews, women bought the novel, recommended it and even started Red Tent reading groups. From its dead-in-the-water beginnings, Diamant’s novel began inching up the New York Times bestseller list and has since sold over a million copies.

"You can’t market to reading groups," says the author, speaking from her home in West Newton, Massachusetts. "They’ll pick and choose what they like and that’s a wonderful testament. They liked the book and recommended it to each other in a big way. It’s such a women’s phenomenon, it’s almost entirely women’s experience."

Women’s experience also drives Diamant’s new novel, Good Harbor, which intertwines the stories of two women. Joyce, a writer in her early 40s stuck in a lackluster marriage, buys a vacation home in the Massachusetts beach town of Cape Ann, where she meets Kathleen, 59. The two women discover, as Diamant writes, "an endless supply of things to talk about. Headlines, bathing suits, books, and story by story, themselves."

Like Diamant, who rented a cottage on Cape Ann while she wrote, Kathleen loves Good Harbor, a stretch of beach outside the town with its "straight line between the sea and the sky. . . . [T]he size of it all . . . does put things in perspective," as Kathleen says. Eventually, the bond of sisterhood the women find in each other becomes a good harbor in itself.

While the story of The Red Tent came from the pages of the Bible, the plot of Good Harbor, set in the present, comes from the pages of Diamant’s life and the lives of the women she knows. "The issues of midlife are on my plate and on the plates of most of my friends," she says. The book examines one of the biggest issues when Kathleen is diagnosed with breast cancer.

"Breast cancer is one of the great fears of women of our time. We’re all waiting for it to happen to us," says the author. "Almost every month, I hear of someone I know, a friend of a friend who’s been diagnosed."

Diamant’s portrayal of Kathleen’s bravery, her terror and the awful, debilitating routine of radiation treatment comes not from first-hand experience, but as the result of research and a novelist’s capacity to plumb the human heart. The author spoke to medical experts and listened to the stories of friends who were diagnosed. But to create a real physical sense of what Kathleen goes through, "I went to an oncology clinic. I got on the table. This is not something you want to do," says Diamant. "But it gives you a physical sense of what that’s like, a little of that experience."

Oddly enough, life at the oncology clinic gave her hope. "Most women survive breast cancer. When I started writing, I thought Kathleen was going to die, but breast cancer doesn’t have to be a death sentence — and I liked her too much [to kill her off]," she says.

Although she likes Kathleen, the author identifies more closely with Joyce. "I share some of her sense of humor," a wry attitude covering up the fact that Joyce, at 40, is floundering for direction. The feeling came from Diamant’s own experience. It’s what drove her, after 20 years as a journalist and author of nonfiction, to change gears. "I wanted a new challenge, something I had not done before," Diamant says. As a result, she turned to fiction and created The Red Tent.

Fiction is indeed a challenge, she finds. "It’s more open-ended. I have confidence in my nonfiction — I’ve written six books. I know what that kind of book is shaped like. With novels, you don’t know where they’re going to go. All writing is a process of learning. I learned you have to cut and cut and cut. Big sections were in Good Harbor that died a healthy death, a good death, but it took me a long time to let go."

Diamant spent four years writing Good Harbor, years that would have been hectic even without taking on such a project. During this time, she also wrote How to Be a Jewish Parent, revised her book The New Jewish Wedding and toured extensively for The Red Tent. "I overdid it," admits the author, who hasn’t let Red Tent fever go to her head. "My husband Jim and daughter Emilia rejoice in my success with me, but it’s been a slow, steady change for us, no overnight stardom. It’s been a process rather than an event, and I think that helps a lot."

Diamant is now pondering her next novel. "It’s historical, set in the early 19th century in America," she says. And the protagonists are likely to be women. Diamant doesn’t want to limit herself, though. She learned a lot in writing Good Harbor — about fiction and about herself.

"There’s some of me in every character, even Buddy and Frank [Kathleen and Joyce’s husbands]. The women’s experiences are closest to my life experiences — they’re married with children and I’d like to think I’m as good a friend as both of these women try to be with each other," she says.

One thing she doesn’t share with Joyce and Kathleen is their rudderlessness, the isolation that draws them together in the first place. "Both of them were experiencing a lack of closeness, of friendship in their lives," says Diamant. "I’m lucky. I have a ton of friends. I feel very, very connected."

 

Ellen Kanner is a writer in Maine

Anita Diamant has faith in one thing the connection between women. She explored and celebrated that connection, that powerful bond of sisterhood, in her 1997 novel The Red Tent.

In a world where "women's friendships are unspoken and undervalued," as Diamant says, her novel…

Science Fiction & FantasyFantasy

Tom Cross

Wizards are typically portrayed as mysterious and secretive beings, but readers now have a chance to enter their enchanted world. With Tom Cross' The Way of Wizards, the curious can embark on a magical journey led by the author's alter ego, an apprentice mage named Penelo.

Lavishly illustrated, The Way of Wizards is a full-color, large-format book that uses more than 200 illustrations to depict the fantastical world of wizards. Penelo, as narrator, describes everything from a wizard's garb to elemental sources of power to the enchanted places that are a wizard's realm. At times, the book resembles a tome from a wizard's library.

Wizards is a project Cross began nearly 20 years ago, at a time when books on otherworldly creatures like gnomes and fairies were wildly popular. "We had pursued the idea of doing a wizards book, and then as things go, they said the market went soft,' he explains. Cross, a noted ecologist and artist whose work has been exhibited in galleries from Florida to Japan, continued to produce magically themed art until wizardry caught the public's imagination again, in part due to the phenomenal popularity of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series. Cross believes that other factors also led to the resurgence of interest in magic.

"Fantasy seems to be an outlet during good times and a safe harbor during poor times."

"Fantasy seems to be an outlet during good times and a safe harbor during poor times,"  he says, noting that Lord of the Rings author J.R.R. Tolkien wrote much of his Middle Earth saga during the 1930s and '40s times of worldwide turbulence. As he researched wizards and mages for his book, Cross noted a recurring theme of harmony with nature that resonated with his background as a coastal ecologist. "A lot of what's in this book is researched folklore,"  he explains, "and every culture has its take on nature's phenomenon that couldn't be explained, and they almost always point their finger at a gnome or a fairy or a shaman or a witch doctor or a medicine man. If you think about it, every culture has wizards, whatever they call them. It's usually been the guy or the woman who was most in tune with nature."

In striving to synthesize magical legends from many cultures, Cross accessed material through the Internet, which jibed with his vision of the magical tome. "I had a very wild hair about the book basically being the material version of the real thing, a two-dimensional version of what's real,"  he said. What would a real wizard's book consist of? "It'd be hypertext, interactive, click here, click there, every word takes you somewhere, every image takes you somewhere. The Web is probably the best manifestation we have of what wizardly communication really would be."

Just as a wizard combines elements for a spell or potion, Cross blended ancient technique and modern technology to produce the images in his book. "The book is a very interesting evolution of technique, he explains. "The early stuff and particularly the things that are on the old book pages are handwritten or pencil and watercolor, and the major art pieces are all digitally done. So I pretty much have evolved as technology has allowed me to. Cross wrote some of the text in a page layout program that let him combine words with images and manipulate their appearance.

"It was neat. The page, the spread, became my palette, he said. "It was a bit of wizardry in that sense.

Gregory Harris is a writer and computer consultant in Indianapolis.

 

Wizards are typically portrayed as mysterious and secretive beings, but readers now have a chance to enter their enchanted world. With Tom Cross' The Way of Wizards, the curious can embark on a magical journey led by the author's alter ego, an apprentice mage named…

Cookbooks

Anthony Bourdain

Since the publication of his surprise bestseller, Kitchen Confidential, Anthony Bourdain has become a kind of spokesperson and inspiration for the rowdy, subversive, slightly deranged subculture that inhabits the kitchens of many of the world’s great restaurants. Bourdain’s opinionated confessional exposed the goings-on behind the swinging doors of professional kitchens, with tales of sex, drugs, rock and roll and, of course, great food.

"People feel obliged to behave badly around me now," Bourdain says during a call to his home in New York, where he still works as the executive chef at the brasserie Les Halles. "People want to get me drunk and show me that their crews are at least as bad as mine."

By "people," Bourdain of course means his people—the chefs and line—cooks he imagined as his readers when he conceived of Kitchen Confidential and again when he decided to write his new book, A Cook’s Tour: In Search of the Perfect Meal. "I was thinking of people like me, who hadn’t been too many places in the world and who might be interested to know what Vietnam smells like, what music is playing in the background, what’s cooking."

That Kitchen Confidential had an appeal that stretched far beyond the line cooks of the New York tri-state area still stuns Bourdain. It shouldn’t, for as he points out, he comes from "a long oral tradition in kitchens of storytelling and bullsh–ting. You know, amusing one’s fellow cooks with language."

The idea for A Cook’s Tour was for Bourdain to travel to exotic parts of the world on a kind of quixotic quest for the perfect meal. "I had unreasonable expectations. I’ve always had this attraction to Graham Greene characters, failed romantics shambling around the world in a dirty seersucker suit. I guess I’m not afraid to make myself look silly."

Silly or not, his publisher liked the idea. So did the Food Network. Which is strange, because Bourdain basically savaged the Food Network’s pretty and precious cooking programs in his earlier book. And he tweaks their noses again in A Cook’s Tour, the difference being that he is the host of 22 episodes on the Food Network, which begin airing in early January, and is therefore at the center of the ridiculousness. "They’ve certainly never had anything like it on the Food Network, he says. "There must have been a lot of hair pulling and misery at some of the stuff they saw. I’m reasonably proud of the show, but I didn’t want a TV career before and I don’t want one now."

For both the book and television, Bourdain traveled to Portugal, France, Spain, Morocco, Japan, Vietnam, Cambodia, Russia, Great Britain and Mexico. He sampled the deadly puffer fish in Japan, ate lamb gonads with Bedouins in the desert, devoured haggis in Scotland, spooned up borscht in St. Petersburg, tried an inedible vegan meal in Berkeley and swooned over the meal of a lifetime at the French Laundry in the Napa Valley. He got too stoned in Fez to perform for television, took a harrowing trip among the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and found Vietnam and Vietnamese food uniformly remarkable, while reminding us that Ho Chi Minh worked for years in the professional kitchens of Paris and was a particular favorite of the great Escoffier.

Bourdain writes with vitality and a sort of antic humor about the people, places and food he is experiencing. And he is clearly not afraid to be opinionated. "When I was 12, Hunter Thompson was my hero, he says. "That kind of impassioned, deranged, first-person rant said to me, hey, I can actually write the way I think, and piss people off while I do it."

But A Cook’s Tour is more than storm and lightning. Bourdain arrives at a number of important insights about food. "The thing that stunned me the most was how good and how fresh so much food is in countries with almost no refrigeration. I was shocked by that. And humbled. Because people don’t have the luxury of refrigeration, preparing meals becomes a much more time-consuming project, which is societally not so bad. In Vietnam and Mexico I was struck by how food brought people together."

"Meals make the society, hold the fabric together in lots of ways that were charming and interesting and intoxicating to me. The perfect meal, or the best meals, occur in a context that frequently has very little to do with the food itself."

Alden Mudge, a writer in Oakland, California, has just returned from a trek to Mt. Everest base camp (or thereabouts) in Nepal.

Since the publication of his surprise bestseller, Kitchen Confidential, Anthony Bourdain has become a kind of spokesperson and inspiration for the rowdy, subversive, slightly deranged subculture that inhabits the kitchens of many of the world's great restaurants. Bourdain's opinionated confessional exposed the goings-on behind the…

Fiction

David Guterson

David Guterson peers out at Miami's lapis Biscayne Bay as though straining to see something else-an island off Washington's dark Puget Sound, his home and the place of his haunting novel, Snow Falling on Cedars. "I'm not an urban person," he confesses in a crowded outdoor restaurant. "And I've been in cities endlessly for the past five or six weeks on this book tour. Cities produce in me melancholy or a tension I don't need."

Guterson, 39, received the 1995 PEN/Faulkner Award for Snow Falling on Cedars. "It is such an incredible honor," he says, but what coaxes forth his first smile is the thought of returning home to his wife and four children. "What sustains me is to be with my family and to write."

Amid laughing people in tropical colors, the author wears an olive jacket. It brings out his pale green eyes which still search the water. This quiet passion extant in Guterson shines through in Cedars. Set in 1954 on Washington's remote San Piedro Island, the novel begins with the mysterious death of a local fisherman. It rouses the community's postwar distrust of their Japanese-American neighbors, and the island's Kabuo Miyamoto is accused of the fisherman's murder. The incident also awakens feelings within Ishmael Chamber, the town's newspaperman who has long loved Kabuo's wife, Hatsue. What results is a taut, many-angled story, both rich and satisfying.

Guterson looks to Anton Chekhov and Jane Austen as models of style and structure, and though he has set his story in the past, is not old fashioned. "My book is traditional. It runs counter to the post-modern spirit. A lot of writers are concerned with life in the '90s," he says, "I'm not. Post-modernism is dead because it didn't address human needs. The conventional story endures because it does. I'm interested in themes that endure from generation to generation. Fiction is socially meaningful. Every culture is sustained by certain central myths. At its heart, fiction's role is to see these roles and myths are sustained."

The author has also written the nonfiction book Family Matters: Why Home-Schooling Makes Sense and the short story collection The Country Ahead of Us, The Country Behind, being released in paper this spring (Vintage, $10, 0-679-76718-5). Guterson wrote the stories before his novel, and now when he looks at them, he feels "removed from them to the degree I feel removed from who I was in my twenties when I wrote them. The stories reflect my concerns at that time. Snow Falling on Cedars is the work of someone in his thirties."

It's true. Whereas Guterson's stories possess an emotional edge, his novel has a certain maturity, sweeping the reader away with its lush physical description. "The tide and the wind were pushing in hard now, and the current funneled through the mouth of the harbor; the green boughs and branches of the fallen trees lay scattered across the clean snow. It occurred to Ishmael for the first time in his life that such destruction could be beautiful."

Guterson's gift of evoking a sense of place comes from his love of it. The islands off Puget Sound bear an almost mythic weight for him. "Hemingway said the only way to write about a place is to leave it. There's a certain nostalgia and romance in a place you left. But I don't need to leave to write about it. I don't think anyone but a native could have written this book."

One could argue, then, that with its graceful, restrained images of Japanese-American life, no one but a Nissei could have written it. A former teacher, Guterson conducted extensive research and interviews with the area's Japanese-Americans and so writes with authority about the Miyamotos and the other Japanese-Americans who were herded into internment camps. "It was made real to me. It's part of the history of where I live."

But Snow Falling on Cedars goes beyond ethnicity. Guterson explores humanity, penetrating the core of the human heart. "My work comes from inner disturbances, from seeing injustices and accidents and how they affect people's lives in a tragic way."

Guterson agrees one can make almost anything political, including his book, but he hopes it transcends both politics and history. With its evocatively Japanese title and its elegant, restrained prose, Snow Falling on Cedars reveals Guterson's affinity for Asian philosophy. "The sense that this world is an illusion, that desire is the root of suffering, the awareness of cause and effect-I have a great respect for all that," he says.

He endows his character Hatsue with this sense of tranquillity. "Hatsue explained her emotional reserve . . . didn't mean her heart was shallow. Her silence, she said, would express something if he would learn to listen to it." The same might be said for the author himself. "I think of myself as a really happy person," says Guterson, allowing himself his second fleeting smile of the afternoon. "What some people interpret as brooding melancholy is serenity. I don't feel required to grasp all the time."

What he does feel, what he works toward, is a sort of stillness, the stillness he creates for Hatsue, the stillness he needs to write. Guterson would rise at five a.m. to work on his novel, facing the blank page when it was still dark and the day's intrusions were distant.

While he has enjoyed writing nonfiction and short stories, Guterson is at work another novel-the medium he feels best suited to in terms of temperament. He will still rise at five o'clock, but otherwise wants this new book to be nothing like his last one. "It must succeed in its own terms," he insists in the fading glow of afternoon. "It has to be just as powerful, though. It must have an impact on people."

It should resonate for readers the way the landscape of his home resonates for the author. "I grew up in Seattle, but I always knew I wanted to leave," says Guterson. "The greenness of the world, the play of light and living things, stretching endlessly and regenerating season after season-to have that in daily life is so much more satisfying than buildings and people."

David Guterson peers out at Miami's lapis Biscayne Bay as though straining to see something else-an island off Washington's dark Puget Sound, his home and the place of his haunting novel, Snow Falling on Cedars. "I'm not an urban person," he confesses in a crowded…

YA FictionYA

Neal Shusterman

What would it be like to assume another person’s pain? The author of more than 30 books, Neal Shusterman explores this question in Bruiser, his haunting new novel for teens.

“Bruiser” is the nickname of Brewster Rawlins, voted “Most Likely to Receive the Death Penalty” by his high school classmates. When twins Brontë and Tennyson befriend Brewster, they realize that the bruises on his body belong to other people; when someone he cares about is injured emotionally or physically, Brewster takes on the friend’s wounds. Though Shusterman tackles a heavy topic, his language is lyrical and even filled with occasional humor. Both teens—boys and girls—and adults will be moved by this story.

To get a behind-the-scenes look at the novel, BookPage talked to the award-winning author about his memorable characters and the joy that comes after pain.

Bruiser alternates among four points of view: Brontë, Tennyson, Brewster and Cody, Brewster’s brother. Why did you tell the story in this way?
I’m always looking for new ways of telling stories—or at least ways that I haven’t tried before. I liked the challenge of coming up with four distinct voices that combined into a coherent whole.

The chapters narrated by Brewster are in verse, mixing up the rhythm of the book and providing a strong visual shift on the page. What do you hope this style conveys about the character’s thoughts and personality?
I wanted to show the contrast between the way he’s perceived vs. who he really is—his outward vs. his inner life. I felt that the verse was a way of making his character not only unique, but rich in ways we never expected.

Brontë and Tennyson’s parents are literature professors—hence, the literary names. Of all authors and poets, why do you refer to two people from the 19th century? Do the names reflect on the characters?
Growing up, I knew a kid named Tennyson, and I always wanted to name a character that. Until now, there never seemed to be a character who felt like a “Tennyson.” When I began to write the book, and realized that this kid is an athlete from a very literary family, I knew I had to name him Tennyson. Almost instantaneously, I knew his sister would be Brontë. It just kind of felt natural. For once I didn’t have to struggle to name the characters!

Brewster has two unusual abilities: he has a remarkable memory, and he takes on the pain of people he cares about. Are these abilities related?
Yes, they are related. His ability to take on the pain of others is an extension of the ability to “take in” everything around him.

Your novel deals with serious issues such as domestic abuse and extreme pain, and Brontë refers to psychology to help her deal with Brewster’s difficult situation. While writing Bruiser, did you study any real-life cases of teens dealing with violence? You have a degree in psychology—did that inform your writing?
I think a degree in psychology always informs my writing . . . as does my degree in drama. My stories all tend to be psychological in nature, and fairly dramatic! I did do research on kids dealing with violence—but more than that, I really tried to get into the minds of the characters experiencing it. Research can only tell you facts—it’s putting yourself in the place of the characters that makes it real. I also really wanted to address divorce: the pain involved, and also the healing. Having gone through a divorce myself, and having seen my own children deal with it, I wanted to tell a story for the many, many kids out there who have had to face such a change in their family. And I use the word “change” very intentionally. In spite of the fact that 40% of all families will experience divorce, society tends to demonize it, with expressions like “broken family.” Divorced families aren’t broken, but they are changed, and with that change comes pain . . . but hopefully pain from which everyone, parents and kids alike, can grow.

Tennyson changes drastically over the course of the novel, from a bully to a sympathetic person. Does he change because he’s “addicted” to how he feels when Brewster assumes his pain? What else contributes to his shift?
The moment in which he has the epiphany that he’s been a bully all his life, it leaves him ripe for change. His change doesn’t come easy, because no matter how hard he tries to do the right thing, self-interest intrudes, as does his “addiction” to Brewster’s power. My goal with Tennyson was to have the reader really care about him, yet also be angry with him for the wrong decisions he makes along the way. . . . Hopefully that’s outweighed by all the right decisions he makes, though.

Tennyson notes that pain is “rightfully ours, because everyone must feel their own pain—and as awful as that is, it’s also wonderful.” Can you elaborate on that statement? Do you think teens recognize the truth in the oxymoron?
Things can only be defined in relation to their opposite. The idea of being “happy” 24/7 is ridiculous. How would we even know what “happy” is, if we haven’t experienced unhappiness? How would we ever be able to appreciate joy, if we’ve never been in emotional pain? Our society is so much about either hiding or denying emotional “bad stuff,” I wanted to point out that it is our experiencing of the full range of human emotions that makes us complete human beings. So often teenagers feel that, when they go through dark times, it’s the end of the world. I want to remind them that “this too shall pass,” and if there’s something that brings you pain, always remember that it is merely setting the stage for something else that will bring you joy.

Many of your books seem to take very real feelings—such as being ignored (The Schwa Was Here) or understanding others’ pain (Bruiser)—and elevating the concept to an extreme level. Are there other feelings or issues you plan to address in future novels? What are you working on now?
Thank you for pointing that out! Yes, I like to take feelings and explore them from as many different perspectives as possible. I have several projects in the works, and in the wings. In addition to the third book in the Everlost series (Everfound), a sequel to Unwind and a third “Antsy Bonano” book, I’m also working on a novel called Challenger Deep, which uses the unimaginable depths of the Marianas Trench as a metaphor for mental illness. (Anyone interested in keeping up with the various projects can always visit me on my website, www.storyman.com, and can sign up as a fan on my Facebook page.)

Related content:
Review of Bruiser.

What would it be like to assume another person’s pain? The author of more than 30 books, Neal Shusterman explores this question in Bruiser, his haunting new novel for teens.

“Bruiser” is the nickname of Brewster Rawlins, voted “Most Likely to Receive the Death…

Fiction

Robert Olen Butler

Freud posited that the keys to mental health are work and love, and if he was right then Robert Olen Butler is the sanest man on the planet. It doesn’t always look that way. Sane isn’t the first word that comes to mind when describing Butler’s idea to write a short story online in real time webcam, mike and all. But Butler, who teaches creative writing at Florida State University, doesn’t care about the looks of things. A prolific and protean writer, he goes beyond the safe and superficial in order to tap into what he calls dreamspace.

"Art does not come from the mind," he says, speaking from his 1840 plantation home in Tallahassee, Florida. "It comes from the space where you dream, the unconscious." This dreamspace has been the source of a dozen books including his 1993 Pulitzer Prize-winning A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain and the latest, Fair Warning Its narrator Amy Dickerson, a glamorous Manhattan auctioneer, understands her affluent clients’ need to possess. "I know about desire," she says. "It’s my job to instill it blind, irrational desire in whole crowds of people."

Fair Warning, with its startling opening line, "Perhaps my fate was sealed when I sold my three-year old sister," began as a short story. It was originally published in Zoetrope, Francis Ford Coppola’s literary magazine, and the dreamspace Amy came from was not Butler’s alone, but also Coppola’s. "Francis had seen Sharon Stone act as an auctioneer one night and was enchanted," says Butler. The director asked the author to develop that moment into a short story. "When the suggestion was made, it attached itself to some character in my unconsciousness," says Butler. "It struck a chord somehow or I couldn’t have done it. I just loved Amy." Others did, too. The short story version of "Fair Warning" won the 2001 National Magazine Award for fiction.

The voice Butler creates for Amy is sensual, sly, funny and real. Even as she flirts with wealthy collectors, she’s still trying to outrun her Texas cattleman past. "I love voices," says the author. "I’m very character-focused, very voice-focused. I feel often when I write as if I’m channeling more than creating." He often writes in first person, which allows him to create the voices he loves, voices as madly diverse as Amy, Tony Hatcher, a Eurasian boy torn between Saigon and New Jersey in The Deuce (1989), and 13 different Vietnamese voices in A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain.

A linguist for the Army during the Vietnam War, Butler spoke fluent Vietnamese, which led him to "encounter the Vietnamese people in very close and intimate ways." He learned the details of their lives and 20 years later, re-created that intimate and complex world in his book which won the Pulitzer.

To create the voice of Amy, Butler also drew from experience. "I’ve known a lot of women in my life," he says. "I’ve been married four times, though only recently for real," to novelist Elizabeth Dewberry. But for Butler, understanding other lives is the thin part of a writer’s responsibility. The rest comes from deep within, from "the dreamspace, the unconscious, a place where you’re neither male nor female, Muslim, Christian or Jew, black, white. The human truth that transcends these superficial differences, if you write from that level of authenticity, is not only possible, but is the profound duty of the artist."

He concedes that the sheer diversity of his work, as he nimbly goes from the stream-of-conscious sensuality of They Whisper (1994) to short stories drawn from real tabloid headlines in Tabloid Dreams (1996), can make people uncomfortable.

"We like our writers to be characterizable entities, and I’m not. I keep following the muse wherever it leads." That’s what led him to Fair Warning and to write "Aeroplane," his online short story (check out the story and web archives at www.fsu.edu and click on Inside Creative Writing). Butler, who’s taught creative writing for 17 years says, "You have to teach [writing students] to access the deeply nonrational parts of themselves. The best way is to let them sit with you and watch the process. Now for the first time, that process is accessible through the Internet. This is the next step, getting naked in front of your computer and letting people watch." Pretty risky stuff, but Butler, who channels other voices in his work, is absolutely at ease in his own skin. It was not always thus. When he began writing, he wrote what he thought people wanted to read. "I courted approval," he admits. "All that stuff was having a bad effect on my writing."

Butler has published 12 works. He has written 17. He laughs. "I wrote five of the worst novels you could ever read and never will, 40 truly dreadful short stories, a million words of dreck, before something clicked," he says. "The click was where I stopped writing from my head and started from my unconscious. I discovered there was something else in me the impulse to create works of art, which requires a total disregard for those other matters. Only after I learned to just write the books that are there and not think about anything else, that’s when I started writing well and getting published. Then I won the Pultizer Prize and I don’t have anything to prove to anybody anymore."

The professional sense of comfort came long before the personal. After three failed marriages, "I finally found a soul mate," says Butler, who after seven years still sounds moonstruck. "I found and married Elizabeth Dewberry, an amazing writer. I’m now the second best writer in my household." They read to each other from their work and encourage rather than compete with each other. "That has made a big difference. That sense of connection has shaped my work as well as my life," he says. "Home is with Betsy. Home is the unconscious, too, the dreamspace. You carry your dreamspace around with you."

Since the September 11 terrorist attacks, Butler believes accessing the dreamspace is more important than ever. "Art has always responded to the deepest travails of the human spirit," he says. "Mohammad Atta flew that jet into a building in search of a self. More than ever, we need artists to tell us what it means to be human, to live, to die, to seek a self, an identity. Artists must look into the cauldron of their own souls to find what is happening to our world."

Ellen Kanner is a freelance writer in Miami.

 

Freud posited that the keys to mental health are work and love, and if he was right then Robert Olen Butler is the sanest man on the planet. It doesn't always look that way. Sane isn't the first word that comes to mind when…

Mystery & SuspenseSuspense

Brad Meltzer

When he was just out of law school, Brad Meltzer quickly joined the ranks of John Grisham and Scott Turow with his nail-biting debut thriller, The Tenth Justice. Four bestsellers later, he’s still reveling in a job that gives him inside access to the Supreme Court and the White House.

"I love digging around for the details. They are the most fun," Meltzer says from his home in Washington, D.C. "Hollywood lies so much to us that when you take the time to get it right, it becomes amazing." He researched his latest thriller, The Millionaires, for more than two years, but the topics he explores couldn’t be timelier. Crafting a story of two brothers on the run for stealing way more than they intended, Meltzer dove into subjects now on everyone’s mind: how people can change their identity and just disappear, and how the super-rich keep their millions hidden.

"It is so pathetically easy to change your identity in this country that it’s not funny," he says. "I thought it was going to be hard, [requiring] masterful, evil villain thinking, and it’s not. It’s simple. And that’s what’s truly scary." The Millionaires centers on Oliver, a rising young associate at a swank private bank in New York, who discovers that his boss is sabotaging his plans to get into a top MBA school. In a fit of anger, he agrees to his brother Charlie’s plan to steal $3 million from an inactive account about to be turned over to the government. To Charlie and Oliver’s thinking, no one will ever miss the money since the owner is dead. But it turns out quite a few people want the money, and the two boys are soon on the run as they try to figure out who’s chasing them, and how $3 million turned into $313 million.

Meltzer threw himself into his research and in no time learned how to get a fake Social Security number and passport. He discovered the art of garbage reading and the wonders of Nice N Easy hair color to create a new appearance. "Sometimes the dumb things and the easy things are the most effective" when trying to disappear, he says.

Meltzer even hired a private eye to put him under investigation. With just his name, he told the detective to find out everything she could on him. For an author who admits he’s paranoid, the results were scary.

"Within two minutes, she had everything," he says. "She had my Social Security number, my address, my former addresses. She had all of my relatives and my neighbors. She had my phone number, and once she gets your bank info, she can get your credit cards. In no time at all, she had my entire life laid out in front of her." But to Meltzer, The Millionaires is about more than stealing money and finding privacy in a world where everyone can see you.

"It’s about what we dream of as dreamers," he says. "It’s about what you think you want from life and realizing that sometimes it’s OK not to get it."

The journey for Meltzer’s characters inevitably hits close to home. "Every book that I write, I finish it and say, That’s the most personal character I’ve written." Meltzer sees part of himself in the serious, hardworking Oliver who struggles with money and class issues in a world of wealthy entitlement. "Our backgrounds are very similar," he says. "It’s always been the thorn I step on."

At 13, Meltzer was suddenly uprooted from Brooklyn when his father lost his job and did a "do-over of life" by moving the family to Florida with just $1,200. His parents lied about their address so Meltzer could attend the rich kid’s public school, and suddenly he was surrounded by families with more than one car and kids planning to go to college.

"In terms of feeling like you’re the outsider looking in on the rich person’s life, I felt like that was my entire life when we moved to Florida," Meltzer says, adding "That’s what Oliver was based on the kid who wants more."

Now 31, Meltzer still populates his thrillers with young protagonists with grand plans and plenty of idealism. Usually in their 20s, the wannabe lawyers and bankers have their lives all planned out, until, invariably, everything goes wrong.

"It’s just a magic time. I think it’s the best time to write about. And maybe this is just my belief in how power really works," Meltzer says. Meaning that without the "little people" to drive the cars, send the faxes and work the computers, the big shots would be up a creek. "I feel like in some ways I’m forever trapped there in the low part of the totem pole," he admits, "but thankfully so."

Meltzer, like one of his young, eager characters, thought he had his future mapped out. With one year to go before starting law school at Columbia University, he took a job in Boston at Games magazine. And like one of his twisting, turning thrillers, nothing went as planned. The job turned out to be awful, and Meltzer remembers thinking, I have one year and I can either watch a lot of television, or I can try and write a novel. "I know it sounds insane," he says now, "but it just seemed like the most logical thing to me."

Maybe his plan was crazy, because Meltzer eventually received 24 rejection letters for his literary novel Fraternity. But he fell in love with the process of writing and early into his first year of law school, the idea came to him for The Tenth Justice. Being a paranoid person, Meltzer says, writing thrillers came naturally; he had found his niche. The Tenth Justice was so successful that after finishing law school, he devoted himself to writing full-time and never practiced law.

Although he made his mark by writing about lawyers, Meltzer wanted to take a new direction with The Millionaires. "I did not want to forever rely on the big Washington power structure to scare the reader," he says. So he moved the action to New York, left out the lawyers and tinkered with the thriller structure.

"Usually you always know who the villain is and why the character is in danger. And in this book, I said, Let’s know neither of these things. Let’s see what happens when the character doesn’t even know why he’s in trouble, if he can figure his way out of it," Meltzer explains.

He charged into unknown territory, but didn’t lose an ounce of the Meltzer magic. The 482 pages fly by with pulse-pounding suspense, and the unraveling secrets chase you to the end. Joey, the female insurance agent in The Millionaires who’s smarter than both the bad guys and the good guys, sums Meltzer’s style up best: "The best games always keep moving."

 

When he was just out of law school, Brad Meltzer quickly joined the ranks of John Grisham and Scott Turow with his nail-biting debut thriller, The Tenth Justice. Four bestsellers later, he's still reveling in a job that gives him inside access to the…

Children's & YAMiddle Grade

Ingrid Law

You don’t need a big travel budget to have adventures—just ask Ingrid Law. The author has taken many a day trip from her home in Boulder, Colorado, to nearby small towns, excursions that inspired the settings for her Newbery Honor book, Savvy, and the new companion novel, Scumble.

“When I was writing Savvy, I’d [already] cut back my hours working for the government so I could spend time with my daughter,” Law recalls. “I had chosen a certain level of poverty, so we didn’t travel much, and certainly not on planes!”

But road trips suit this author’s tastes just fine. “There’s really so much around us, and I’m not a terribly demanding person when it comes to seeing the sights,” she says. “We went to Kansas and Nebraska, saw the largest porch swing, added twine to the largest ball of twine. . . . I have great memories of these trips, and the people I met.”

In Scumble, the Kale family travels to Uncle Autry’s Flying Cattleheart ranch in Wyoming—just nine days after Ledger’s 13th birthday (and nine years after his cousin Mibs’ adventures in Savvy). It’s an auspicious time for any young person, but a particularly challenging one in this family: The new teens learn what their savvy, or special power, will be, and things tend to get a little wild before they get their new abilities under control.

Ledger’s new power seems to be a destructive one, and he inadvertently turns the sheriff’s truck into a pile of rubble (oops!). Once at the ranch, the hijinks continue, thanks to twin cousins who can levitate objects, among other fantastical goings-on.

Young readers will eagerly turn the pages of Law’s magical novel to find out what will happen next—just as 13-year-old Sarah Jane Cabot is eager to share the story via her newspaper, The Sundance Scuttlebutt. Ledger’s struggles to keep his family secret, figure out why he finds Sarah Jane both annoying and irresistible, and scumble (or manage) his savvy into something positive keep him more than a little frustrated.

The challenge of fielding life’s curveballs is one every reader can relate to, but in Law’s hands, it becomes the stuff of tall tales. This mix of quotidian and outrageous has always intrigued her. “I knew early on, before Savvy, that I wanted to write about magical kids without using the word magic. Not necessarily to create a new kind of magic, but to create something that reflected a sense of Americana,” she recalls.

To create a uniquely American sense of magic, she explains, “I use a lot of small towns, and fall back on the tradition of tall tales, stories that are larger than life, with a conquering-the-wilderness idea. It’s an emotional element of becoming a teenager, needing to tame the external and internal.”

Thanks to a summer stay at his uncle’s ranch, and assists from his quirky extended family, Ledger realizes there’s another side to making things fall apart: He has a gift for putting them together—and a knack for creating new and beautiful things, too.

It’s no coincidence that Ledger’s artistic awakenings emerge as he learns to scumble his savvy. Law, who’s long been interested in linguistics, says, “I stumbled across the word scumble in a writing book. I loved the way it sounded, and one of the definitions seemed appropriate for the idea of controlling this element that’s taking over.” In this definition, scumbling is a painting technique that tones down a bright color so that the hues are more evenly balanced.

The art-infused nature of Ledger’s journey can be traced back to Law’s own creative background. “I come from a family that always appreciated and was involved in the arts,” she says. “So I grew up drawing and painting, and learned about fiber arts and quilt arts.”

Law says she found her writerly voice when, after a decade of ill-fated manuscripts, she decided to ignore her doubts and go where her characters took her: “I decided I would pull out all the stops, not judge what I wrote, and push my voice to the limit.”

It worked—she wrote Savvy in just over four months, an agent offered representation, three weeks later she had a book deal, and soon after, film rights sold. “My life was turned upside down,” she recalls.

When Savvy received a Newbery Honor, Law says, it was “a wonderful, amazing thing, but also really frightening for the next book!” Although writing and revising Scumble was a much longer process, the author’s voice remains steady and true.

Or, in the loopy language of her fun and funny books: It’s clear that Ingrid Law has scumbled her savvy.
 

You don’t need a big travel budget to have adventures—just ask Ingrid Law. The author has taken many a day trip from her home in Boulder, Colorado, to nearby small towns, excursions that inspired the settings for her Newbery Honor book, Savvy, and the…

YA FictionYA

Nikki Grimes

Unwed mothers are nothing new. But in today’s reality TV-fueled world, their plight is often glorified, and the very real challenges they face are diminished amid the spotlight. That’s not the case, however, for 14-year-old Mary Rudine (aka the girl named Mister). Just one handsome young boy, one breathless failure to say “no” and Mary’s life is turned upside down.

Addressing teen pregnancy—especially for a tween and teen audience—takes a mix of masterful writing, accessible format and a raw, honest voice. That’s just what author-illustrator Nikki Grimes delivers in A Girl Named Mister, a free verse novel just published by Zondervan.

“You have to really capture your reader immediately; that’s just a reality,” Grimes says. “Our lives are so busy now, and books are written so much differently than they were years ago.”

You know a character is good when it keeps you up at night, eager to turn the next page. But you know a character is great when it keeps its author up at night, eager to get her story on the page.

“This character would wake me up,” says Grimes, a New York City native who now lives in Southern California. “I could not get rid of her.”

Grimes, who among her accolades has received the Coretta Scott King Award and Honor (for both text and illustration) several times, has tackled tough and realistic topics before—such as life in foster homes (Jazmin’s Notebook), a subject she knew firsthand.

“It can’t help but influence you,” she says, referring to her own troubled childhood, in which she was shuttled between relatives and foster homes. “For me, reading and writing were my survival tools,” adds Grimes, who wrote her first poem at age 6.

Among all the topics she has touched on in her books, Grimes believes the subject of unwed mothers is a particularly important one, especially in light of the inaccurate or misleading messages often portrayed in the media. “[The book] is the only way I could respond to what’s happening in society,” she says.

Her approach, however, wasn’t just to relay Mary Rudine’s thoughts, fears and challenges. Rather, Grimes—a Bible scholar for more than 20 years—interweaves a secondary, yet parallel, story. In chapters presented in a different typeface, Grimes tells the story of another Mary—the biblical Mary—and her initial shock and awe at being an unwed mother in a time when that could have resulted in her stoning. (Interestingly, Grimes’ 2005 Coretta Scott King honor book, Dark Sons, also juxtaposes a Biblical tale—the father/son relationship of Abraham and Ishmael—with a modern story. The book has just been reissued by Zondervan in a new paperback edition.)

In A Girl Named Mister, the two Marys’ stories are similar, yet each is tempered by the social mores of the time.

Readers see the Biblical Mary question her miraculous pregnancy and what it will mean for her, for Joseph and in the eyes of her community. Likewise, the contemporary character, Mary Rudine, seeks acceptance and answers and prepares for her uncertain future—hoping that someone will help her make the right choices.

Initially afraid to tell her mother about her pregnancy, Mary soon realizes that her mother had a hunch something was wrong—but, even though they are close, both were simply too nervous to tell each other their concerns.

Mary stays at home and in school during the pregnancy—taking the looks and comments that come her way—and mentally tries to ready herself for the birth and aftermath. Grimes’ portrait of the teen is both realistic and believable, both in the way the teenage father all but disappears (figuratively and literally) after he learns of the pregnancy, and in the way Mary reacts to the pregnancy—with initial disbelief, then fear, then resolve.

“Her voice is strong,” Grimes says of the modern Mary. “She does struggle, so the message isn’t that there’s no struggle.” But, she adds, “There is a way to triumph.”

Triumph has different resolutions for both young mothers, but, ultimately, Grimes feels she has done the topic justice.

“My tendency is to leave a story open-ended,” she says. “Life is open-ended; there's always more to the story."

Unwed mothers are nothing new. But in today’s reality TV-fueled world, their plight is often glorified, and the very real challenges they face are diminished amid the spotlight. That’s not the case, however, for 14-year-old Mary Rudine (aka the girl named Mister). Just one handsome…

YA FictionYA

Maggie Stiefvater

Maggie Stiefvater’s first book in the Wolves of Mercy Falls series, Shiver, came out in the summer of 2009 to acclaim from both reviewers and readers. (At BookPage, we called it “a perfect indulgence for readers of all ages.”) Though it garnered the inevitable comparisons to Twilight and other recent supernatural romances, Stiefvater’s elegant writing lifted Shiver above the rest of the crowded field.

 

Now in Linger, Stiefvater expands the story to include not only Sam and Grace, the star-crossed lovers of Shiver, but also Sam’s werewolf pack and Grace’s friend Isabel, who has her own connection to the wolves. Stiefvater’s writing is as lovely as ever, and Linger will leave readers quivering in anticipation for Forever, the third and final book in the series.
 
We contacted the 28-year-old author at her home in Virginia to ask about werewolves, happy endings and the upcoming film version of Shiver.
 
Supernatural romance seems to be the genre of choice right now. Do you think about your readers’ tastes when you’re writing, or do you simply move forward with the story you feel compelled to write?
I’m very dubious about writing to the market. It’s one thing to tweak a current book to be more marketable (like removing all of the f-bombs from Shiver, for instance) and another thing entirely to write what you think is the next big thing. I think a story that you write for yourself, that you love, that you connect with on a thematic level—it’ll last longer. Readers can tell if you’re playing marbles for keeps.
 
I’ve always loved contemporary fantasy so it was a no-brainer as to what I’d end up writing. Growing up, I was the kid in the library with my head turned sideways, looking for the unicorn/fantasy stickers on the spines of the library books.
 
Have you always had a fascination with werewolves, or did you have to start from scratch in researching your chosen subject matter?
Actually, I always felt certain I would never write about werewolves or vampires. I thought they were trendy monsters and you would never catch me being trendy, oh no! But then I was tossing around this idea of writing a bittersweet love story for teens, and it just happened to coincide with a short story competition for YA werewolf fiction. Events conspired to bring together that idea of a bittersweet mood, a bad werewolf short story and a well-placed dream.

 

After that, it was researching I went. Not so much about werewolves, because I didn’t want all the slobbering and shedding that had gotten attached to the lore. Since I was used to writing about old, old faerie lore, it was great to be able to dive back in and see where the wolf legends started. I would say I spent much more time researching real wolves than the jeans-wearing sort. I want the real bits to be true.
 
If you had to choose only one category for the series, would you say the books are more fantasy or romance? Which category is more important to the stories?
I guess I’ll go with romance out of the two—although I think when you say “romance,” readers assume there is a happy ending, and I don’t think that’s a promise I’m willing to make. But I’d rather people paid attention to the coming of age, not the paranormal elements, if they were going to pay attention to one over the other. The supernatural bits are always a metaphor for something real.
 
What do you think about the fact that the film rights to Shiver have already been purchased? Do you worry that the film version won’t be able to live up to the version you created?
I am amazingly calm about it, considering how neurotic I can be about projects. I think it’s because, at this stage, I have no influence over the film at all, so I don’t feel any personal responsibility over what the final product looks like. In my head, I know what I want the film to look like—a really simple, moody piece filled with small gestures and pretty photography more than explosions and sweeping romantic subplots. But that’s if I made it. I’m cautiously optimistic that they’ll come up with something that might not be the same, but might be pretty darn lovely in its own right.
 
You added two more points of view in Linger (those of Isabel and Cole). Will there be additional points of view in the third book, Forever?
I think four is a personal high for me. Any more voices in my head than that and I think it’s time to call in professional help.
 
Your web site notes that Forever will be the final book in the series. Are you planning to wrap everything up, or will you leave a few things for the reader to question?
Don’t think I don’t spy you dancing on the edge of spoilery! I don’t think I’ll ever wrap up an ending entirely. I think the endings that have stuck with me over the years are the ones that leave a question or don’t give you everything you thought you wanted.
 
Why did you choose Rainer Maria Rilke as Sam’s favorite poet?
I had a very limited knowledge of Rilke when I started out—just some of his more common quotes and poems—but as I delved more deeply into Sam’s backstory, it made sense to give him an interest in something that tied together some of the German language backstory and his interest in lyrics and poetry. Also Rilke examines a lot of the same concepts that Sam does. It got me into reading a lot more German poetry, in translation and not, and annoyingly, I had to abandon a lot of poetry that I liked because it just didn’t fit in with Sam’s character. I try to find poetry that fits with Sam’s voice: introspective, wistful and simple. No rhyming couplets for our werewolf hero.
 
You composed the music for your books’ trailers, and of course Sam’s lyrics are a big part of the books, as well. Have you ever published any poetry or had any of your song lyrics recorded?
Actually, the closest I’ve come to having any of my poetry published is the snippets of poetry that appear at the beginning of each chapter in Ballad, one of my faerie YA novels. They are attributed to a fictional poet briefly mentioned in the text, and I’ve gotten dozens of emails asking if the volume they supposedly come from really exists. I had never thought myself actually capable of writing poetry until that moment (with the exception of a rhyming poem about a chiropractor I wrote when I was 15).
 
I am afraid that the most I have done with my lyrics is to record myself (badly) singing werewolf songs on YouTube for the amusement of my readers. I’ve played with several bands with several different instruments, but I think my talents—in a twist I realize is incredibly ironic—extend to the non-verbal.
 
That’s right. That’s me saying that sometimes, New York Times best-selling authors are better when they leave the words to other people.
 
Maggie Stiefvater’s first book in the Wolves of Mercy Falls series, Shiver, came out in the summer of 2009 to acclaim from both reviewers and readers. (At BookPage, we called it “a perfect indulgence for readers of all ages.”) Though it garnered the inevitable…
FictionHistorical Fiction

Jean Auel

Let's dispense with the gossip straight away: Jean Auel lives. Speculation concerning her demise by various, even nefarious, means has dogged the 66-year-old Portland, Oregon, novelist throughout the 11 years it has taken her to complete The Shelters of Stone, book five in the projected six-book Earth's Children series that began with The Clan of the Cave Bear in 1980.

"None of the rumors are true," Auel sighs good-naturedly over the phone. "I have not been killed by farm equipment. I have not been assassinated. I have not had every disease known to man. I have not had a fight with my publisher. I have not divorced my husband; as a matter of fact, we're coming up on 48 years." She well appreciates the concern of fans who have waited what seems like an Ice Age for the next generous helping of the prehistoric adventures of Ayla, a tall, blond Cro-Magnon medicine woman, and her dashing soul mate, Jondalar. Every time a tentative publication date would lapse, another round of dire rumors would circulate on fan Web sites around the world.

The Shelters of Stone, all 700-plus pages of it, will land like Stone Age tablets in bookstores worldwide on April 30. What's more, fans will be delighted to learn they won't have to wait another 12 years for book six.

"One of the things that took some extra time was that I actually did a rough draft to the end of the series so I could see where I was going," she says. "Some of it is fairly finished, none of it is absolutely finished, some of it is just suggestive, but I have actually now realized that the ending of the series is going to be different than I originally thought."

In Shelters, weary travelers Ayla and Jondalar finally arrive at the Ninth Cave of the Zelandonii, Jondalar's home, after making their way through The Valley of Horses (1982), spending a season among The Mammoth Hunters (1985) and completing the perilous journey across The Plains of Passage (1990). Having reached the Cro-Magnon version of the Big Apple, Ayla finally meets the in-laws and prepares for her formal mating with Jondalar at the Summer Meeting. Ayla faces intense scrutiny by his people; her ability to domesticate her horse and pet wolf intrigue them but her upbringing as an orphan among Neanderthals scares them. Likewise, she finds their language, customs and stone cave condos equally exotic. Together, Ayla and Jondalar must work to find their place among the Zelandonii and prepare for the birth of their first child.

It has been 22 years since Auel (pronounced owl) first hit the bestseller lists with The Clan of the Cave Bear. At the time, no one was looking for fiction set in the Stone Age, much less 200,000 words on the subject by a first-timer.

Is Auel surprised to find herself with a cult following today? "Wouldn't you be?" she laughs. "Actually, if I had planned to write a bestseller back in 1980, would I have picked a Paleolithic caveman? No, I would have done some Hollywood glitz or some mysteries. Nobody expected it. They said yes, we think it's a good story, but we just don't think anybody short of [James] Michener should write books that long. They just didn't think it would sell enough." She certainly proved them wrong. The series has sold 34 million copies worldwide.

Auel clearly tapped into a post-feminist appetite for strong, independent female role models. Forget equality; Ayla's got the power throughout these books, a fact best reflected by the growing list of babies named after her.

Self-determination, will and perseverance are all qualities Auel shares with her prehistoric heroine. Married at age 18 to her high school sweetheart Ray, Auel had five children before she was 25 years old. She wanted more from life than housework, but wasn't sure she had what it took. After a chance reading of an article in Life magazine, she took a home IQ test. One year later, she was accepted into Mensa, whose membership represents the smartest two percent of the population.

Back when she had the time, Auel liked attending Mensa gatherings. "I used to love it because this was one place where you could just talk to anybody about anything," she says. "Sometimes there'd be a whole bunch of people in the kitchen telling dirty jokes, but using plays on words and puns, not gross ones." She worked her way up in a Portland electronics plant from keypunch operator to circuit board designer, technical writer and credit manager. She took night school classes in physics and math at Portland State and earned her MBA from the University of Portland in 1976 at age 40.

That's when the idea for a short story about a prehistoric orphan girl changed her life. As Auel steeped herself in the Pleistocene epoch (roughly 25,000-35,000 years ago), the story grew into a 450,000-word "outline" for six books based on Ayla's adventures.

"I've always had this over-arcing story to the series; it's never been gee, Clan was successful, so let's write Clan 2 and Clan 3 and Rocky 4. I always realized I had more than one book," she says.

Through the years, Auel has maintained an upside-down work regimen one might expect from, say, Stephen King or Anne Rice. Her typical day? "For one thing, it's a typical night. I am, by nature, a night person. I have always been a night person, even when I had to get up and go to work on a regular basis, even when I had to send children off to school. I am worthless in the morning. The sun goes down and the brain turns on. It's not anything that I try to do; in fact, I fight to maintain a day schedule; I have to set alarms, I have to really do without sleep in order to stay on a day schedule.

"I often see the sun come up, at 7 or 8 in the morning, and then sleep until 2 or 3 or 4 in the afternoon, then get up and make what is my breakfast and my husband's dinner and we have evenings together and then about the time he goes to bed, I go to work. It works for us. And actually, that's when I can get the most work done."

Fans may not like the one surprise in the final book that Auel is willing to share: Ayla will not be reunited with Durc, her son from a Neanderthal rape. "Ayla is going to find out something about him, but I can tell you straight out, frankly no, she will never see her son again," she says. "That's her tragedy. I know people want her to, and it's the sadness that she always has in her life, but people have those kinds of tragedies."

Fortunately, Auel isn't one of those people. Her five grown children and 15 grandchildren, most living in the Portland area, keep her plenty busy. Which is not to say she plans on drawing Earth's Children out another dozen years. She has other books she'd like to write, perhaps a contemporary mystery. "[Book six] shouldn't take as long. I don't want it to take as long," Auel admits. "I'm not getting any younger; I need to finish this. I've got Ayla sitting on my shoulder saying let's get on with this. Besides, yeah, there are some other stories I would like to write."

Jay Lee MacDonald is a writer based in Naples, Florida.

Let's dispense with the gossip straight away: Jean Auel lives. Speculation concerning her demise by various, even nefarious, means has dogged the 66-year-old Portland, Oregon, novelist throughout the 11 years it has taken her to complete The Shelters of Stone, book five in the…

Mary Roach

Quirky science writer Mary Roach opens up about her latest book to tackle the curiosities of the human body and the bizarre world of scientific discovery.

Can I have your job please?
You may definitely have these parts of it: self-doubt, anxiety, unanswered email to researchers, access issues, nasty reviews. I will wrap those right up for you with a big bright bow! The rest of it, we’ll have to work out some kind of time-share. I’m pretty fond of it.

OK, for real: What would you pack for a trip to Mars?
Extra lip balm, because things are always floating away and getting lost on spaceships (and because I’m a lip balm addict). A bottle of hot sauce. A full e-book reader. Earplugs. Patience.

What would you miss the most during an extended space mission?
My husband Ed, my stepdaughters, my friends, our home, the usual Hallmark stuff. Food: al pastor tacos from my favorite Fruitvale taco truck, Vietnamese pho soup, fresh snap peas that taste like the Earth. Privacy, sex. Smells: jasmine and honeysuckle in bloom, meat grilling, asphalt after it rains. Sounds: the surf, thunder, the wind in trees, birds. The comforting monotony of the known world.

What surprised you the most about space exploration and the world of zero-G research?
Having spent 10 glorious minutes in weightlessness, I was very surprised to learn that astronauts often tire of this state. They complain that you can’t set anything down without it floating away, that their hands float up and get in their way. To me it was the most delightful, exhilarating experience I’ve ever had. To them it’s a bother! Similarly, it surprised me to learn that one of the biggest problems of living in space long-term is boredom. One of the Apollo astronauts commented that he “should have brought some crossword puzzles.”

I was also surprised to learn about the bed-rest facility at UT Galveston—where NASA pays people to lie in bed 24/7 (to mimic zero gravity and study its effects on the body). When you don’t stress your bones and muscles, the body starts to dismantle them. Let it go long enough, as on a two-year Mars mission, and you’d get the sort of muscle and bone atrophy that a quadriplegic faces.

Given all the time you spend pondering the human body, do you ever gross yourself out while researching a book?
As an author, I’m usually an observer, and my sense of curiosity overrules any feelings of disgust. I can watch anything. But if you hand the scalpel or forceps over to me, that’s when I start to lose it. The other night my husband asked me to tweeze a rogue back hair (on him, not me), and for some reason I struggled with this. David Sedaris once defined love as the ability to pop a pustule on his boyfriend Hugh’s buttock, and I have to say I agree with that definition.

I’d imagine your books attract an interesting crowd—are there any fan stories you’d like to share?
My books attract the most wonderful, smart, funny, quirky people. My readers are all people you’d want to be seated next to at a dinner party. I love them. It’s rare that someone unsavory contacts me or comes to a talk. Though I did once get an email from France, from a man who asked me about the best way to dispose of a body. I wrote back, “Pierre, have you killed someone?” He didn’t reply.

Related content:
See our review of Packing for Mars.

Quirky science writer Mary Roach opens up about her latest book to tackle the curiosities of the human body and the bizarre world of scientific discovery.

Can I have your job please?
You may definitely have these parts of it: self-doubt, anxiety, unanswered…

FictionHistorical Fiction

Karen Essex

In novels like Kleopatra and Stealing Athena, Karen Essex has brought some of history’s most interesting women to life. With her fifth book, Dracula in Love, the award-winning journalist takes on a literary icon: Mina Murray, the consort of the world’s most famous vampire. In Essex’s hands, Mina becomes a woman with unusual gifts and powers, and she must learn to use them. “You must become who you are” is the book’s epigraph, and, as Essex says, it is a quote that can be applied to “all of us, whether male of female. Otherwise, a great deal of suffering ensues.”

 
Essex took some time to answer questions about her version of one of literature’s most compelling stories. Read on for a discussion of headstrong characters, the difference between Stoker’s vampires and the vampires of literature today and the projects Essex is itching to work on.

Most of your previous books have focused on powerful women (countesses, queens)—what was it like instead to turn your talents to a more outwardly average woman?

The privileged characters in my other books lived, by and large, outside of society’s rules, or at least had the money and the power to escape some of those constraints. Mina is not privileged. She is an Irish orphan living in England, trying to assimilate the sort of persona that will yield her a decent life. Traditionally, this is the way it has been for women: play by the rules and we will protect you; step out of line and you will be punished. Mina must choose between protecting herself with her own power and being protected by giving that power up. This story plays out even today in many cultures—subtly in our own culture, and not so subtly in others. For example, the Taliban will protect a woman if she covers herself up and lives in total obedience to their rules.

What inspired you to tell Mina's story?

There were many reasons. I wanted to free the female characters from the good girl/bad girl paradigm and see what happened! I wanted to rebalance the story and tell it in a way that portrayed the reality of women’s lives in that era. I also wanted to take the vampire out of the good versus evil religious paradigm he’s been trapped in for 113 years. Also, being an historian and a mythology freak, I wanted to explore all the different mythological creatures and the blood-drinkers of history that influenced Stoker’s creation of the vampire.

It is surprising to many that most of these creatures were female. In Stoker’s (brilliant but) Victorian hands, the victim became the female and the predator the male. This reflected the very real fear of unbridled female sexuality. The vampire became the symbol of the wicked, corrupting male who took the ladies’ innocence. In contrast, I wanted to explore and restore the lost landscape of female mystical power to vampire lore.

You have mentioned that Mina was a very difficult protagonist to write. How did the Mina on the page differ from the one who originally lived in your head?

Oh, she foiled me from the beginning. When she first started talking to me, I resisted her. I didn’t know her or like her. I thought that Mina would want to be “liberated,” but no, she told me that she was in line with Queen Victoria, who did not approve of all this emancipation and thought that suffragettes should get a good spanking! Mina and I battled it out for a while until I realized that I had to let her evolve at her own pace and her own discretion. In the end, she was right and I was wrong. The poor woman goes through her paces in search of her real self. She realizes her power, but man-oh-man, has she paid her dues!

Were there any special challenges when it came to writing about the Victorian era?

The late Victorian era was a time of tremendous change, and society always responds to radical change with great resistance. This was a challenging era to portray. If you make a cultural study of the 1890s, you find that art, architecture  and design were beginning to look quite modern; in most aspects of life, what we think of as Victorian was giving way to modernity. Feminist thought was everywhere and was a constant topic of discussion in legislative bodies, in the media and in the home. In reaction to the freedoms and parity women were demanding, “society” or “the patriarchy” or whatever you want to call the keepers of the cultural norm, kept insisting that “good” women were feeble of mind and body and could not handle things like intellectual inquiry, physical exertion or, God forbid, the vote. At the same time, opportunities for women’s education were increasing rapidly because, frankly, they were needed in the exponentially expanding economy and the industrial workforce. Balance this against the fact that women were also being incarcerated in mental institutions for having what we today consider normal sexual desire. It was a time of great paradoxes.

Though they haven't ever really gone away, in recent years vampires have seen a vast increase in popularity. Do you have a theory about why this is so?

Vampires used to reflect our fears but now they reflect our fantasies. My theory is that while every generation has longed for a fountain of youth, today we have many youth-extending tools that enable us to reject the very idea of aging. It seems to me that humans today downright abhor the idea of mortality. And who can blame us? We live in a youth-seeking, youth-worshipping society—on steroids. We have stem cell treatments, hormone therapies, cosmetic surgery both invasive and noninvasive, and loads of medicines that can keep us alive past our expiration date. I sometimes run into people who look younger than they looked 20 years ago! So the vampires of today are not the monsters who corrupt and destroy, but the magical creatures that provide what we lust for—eternal youth and immortality.

We are vampirizing ourselves and at the same time, humanizing the monsters. For example, the vampires of the Twilight series are “vegetarians,” only eating wild beasts and devoting themselves to protecting human life. They are de-fanged, so to speak, and far from losing their immortal souls, have highly evolved consciences. They are not to be feared but emulated.

All of your novels so far have been historical. What is the appeal of the genre for you?

I am fortunate enough to be able to write historical fiction, and I am even more fortunate in that I love every aspect of the work. I love learning, which is a good thing because I practically get a Ph.D in every era I write about. My great passion, however, is to travel to the actual locations and interact with different cultures. The work is exhaustive, and there is no way I could do it if I were not in love with the process.Have you ever considered writing a contemporary story?

I have many, many history-based ideas that I have yet to explore in book form. When I run out, I might tackle a contemporary story, but I doubt it.

When you're not writing novels, you're writing or adapting screenplays. What skills from this have you brought over to novel-writing, and vice versa?

My novels are very cinematic. I’m just rereading my Kleopatra novels, and I am surprised at how cinematic they are. I was not aware of that when I was writing them. The early readers of Dracula in Love tell me that it’s very cinematic as well. I do “see” in scenes when I am writing.

I also think that screenwriting has taught me to plot . . . I do believe that bringing a screenwriter’s skills to my novels have made them better and more engrossing. Honestly, the process of writing the two mediums is like night and day, using entirely different parts of the brain. Writing a novel is like painting a lavish landscape, and writing a script is like carving a sleek sculpture.

What are you working on next?

I am working on a screenplay but the producers and I have decided that we are not going to talk about it just yet. So that is my secret project. I am toying with the idea of writing another book about Mina and the Count, a love story that takes place in parallel time periods. And I am also itching to write nonfiction, perhaps some narrative women’s history that would involve me going in search of certain female historical characters. That sort of book would also satisfy my travel lust. I am never at a loss for ideas. They fight for attention in my brain, which sometimes drives me crazy. In fact, I pray every day that I live long enough to write all of them.

 

In novels like Kleopatra and Stealing Athena, Karen Essex has brought some of history’s most interesting women to life. With her fifth book, Dracula in Love, the award-winning journalist takes on a literary icon: Mina Murray, the consort of the world’s most famous vampire. In…

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