All Interviews

FictionHistorical Fiction

Diana Gabaldon

You seem to have an enormous correspondence on the Internet. How many folks are you in contact with, and how often are you online either answering email—pesky interviewers, especially—or participating in the online literary forums?
Well, I have accounts on CompuServe and AOL. I keep AOL mainly because there are several areas on AOL with “folders” discussing my books—in the Writers Club Romance area, in the Science Fiction Realm, in the Book Nook (under Fiction Romance and Historical Fiction), in Book Central (there’s a “live” Outlander discussion group starting up in their Cafe Books), and probably a few I haven’t heard about yet.

I try to drop in on the folders dedicated to my books, at least every few days, and answer questions as best I can.

CompuServe is more or less my electronic “home,” though; I got onto it by accident some 10 years ago (in the course of a software review I was writing for InfoWorld), and never left. The conversation and the company are stimulating—great depth and sophistication—and it is in fact where I made the contacts that eventually got me an agent and a publisher (I told you all that stuff, I’m sure).

Anyway, I’m now “staff” on CompuServe; I’m co-section leader of a section in the Writers Forum, called Research and the Craft of Writing; we address esoteric questions like how deceased animals are disposed of in Great Britain (just what do you do with a mad cow? You evidently don’t just get out the backhoe and bury it in the back yard), or whether striped peppermint candy was available in the American colonies in 1793, or what kinds of voice substitution are possible for a person with a tracheotomy, or exactly what would happen—in physical terms—to the body of a person who had cut their wrists in a cabin in the woods in high summer, who wasn’t found for several days…and also questions concerning writing technique: what are the advantages and limitations of telling a particular story in first person vs. third person? What’s the best way to introduce backstory without boring the paying customers?

Occasionally people will put up brief snippets of work (not long pieces; we have formal workshop sections for those who want critiques of stories or chapters) and ask whether X works, or if anyone can see why Y doesn’t work, or can anyone suggest what to do about Z?

To get back to your question—I average maybe 80-100 e-mails (that’s private correspondence) on the two services per week, plus as many threads (topics of conversation) as I have time to participate in on the public areas—I probably post 50-60 messages a week in public areas. E-mail reaches me through the Internet, as well as from the online services. Normally (as though there was such a thing), I spend about an hour online in the morning answering mail and minding my CompuServe section, another in the late evening, before I start work. I’ll log on from time to time during the day—to CompuServe—but just to collect messages and read them as a short break; I don’t normally take time to respond then.

Has the Internet played a role in your ever-increasing popularity?
Yes, I’m sure it has. As my editor is fond of saying, “These have to be word-of-mouth books, because they’re so weird you can’t describe them to anybody!”

There’s no better means of spreading word-of-mouth than the various pathways of the Internet. I’ve often “eavesdropped” on sections of AOL that I don’t publicly participate in, and found people recommending my books to their friends, for example. It’s also very common for people who drop by my CompuServe section to enjoy the conversation, then ask if I have anything published, and when I say yes, and describe it, to go out and get one of the books. And as a publicist at Delacorte once told me, “If you can get anybody to read the first one, it’s just like pushing drugs–they’re hooked!”

Drums of Autumn seems to me a gentler book in some ways than its predecessors: Jamie and Claire are basically together, Jamie wants very much to put down roots (that’s a very moving scene in which he points out that despite his age, he doesn’t even have a place to call home). Yet, the undercurrent of violence that is a part of the times is there: the threat of the Indians, the pirates, the Redcoats, and the simple rigors of living in a wild place. What are your thoughts about including such graphic scenes? They do make harrowing reading.
Well, it was a violent time, though the violence was often sporadic and unexpected. Daily life on a small homestead was frequently pretty dull—except that a bear could easily come by during the night and scare your pig under your bed. Or an Indian could stop by and die of measles in your corncrib.

My husband tells me that the books overall have something of the rhythm of daily life; not that I necessarily give a rundown of every detail of the day (it just seems like that sometimes), but that you get the feeling of interest in small details — the salamander that runs out of the wood in your fireplace, the ticks that bite you while you sleep, the difficulty of taking a bath—underlying the more dramatic events, throughout.

That is of course deliberate, and one of the characteristics that causes people who write to me to say that the stories are so vivid, they feel as though they’re actually living in another time and place. It’s a technique I call “underpainting,” and it’s very tedious to do—but worthwhile.

However, while the detailed background and sense of daily routine is the mortar that holds the book together, the interest of the storyline as a whole—the dramatic “shape”—is dictated by the more startling events and interactions.

As to harrowing…(shrug). If something happened, I just describe it. It would, however, be wrong—aesthetically—to gloss the more unpleasant events, while giving every detail of the pleasant ones. None of the scenes you mention are gratuitous; all are integral to the story, and in several cases, there’s an underlying literary purpose, beyond the dramatic.

That’s what usually bothers me about sex/love scenes in most novels (spy thrillers as well as romance, though it’s naturally more prevalent in romance novels)—in most, the acts described could be taking place between any two persons with the necessary genital arrangements. Not in my books; any such act could only take place between these specific individuals—consequently, it’s the interaction and relationship between the characters (and how it affects them) that’s important; not titillation contingent on spinal-cord reflexes.

Ditto (re: literary purpose) the priest’s execution by the Mohawk. You’ll notice that Jamie remarks that he has seen precisely similar acts performed by French (i.e., highly “civilized”) executioners—the only thing he finds shocking is the subsequent step of cannibalization.

And in Dragonfly in Amber, the hangman, M. Forez, gives a harrowing, step-by-step description (much more graphic than this “hearsay” description of the Mohawk torture) of the same process.

What we’re doing here—and it’s stated earlier, in more explicit terms, during their first encounter with the Tuscarora—is pointing up the fact that “civilization” is largely a matter of perception.

Your books are romantic but not romances; thrilling but not thrillers; historically rich but not history. If you had to categorize your books, where would you shelve them?
How would I categorize these books? I wouldn’t. I didn’t have any genre or category in mind when I wrote them—and they’re all different from each other, in terms of structure, approach, and tone. While it was a sensible marketing strategy to call them “romance” in the beginning (they do have a lot of romantic elements; they just have a whole lot of other things you don’t normally find in romance novels), that label is both limiting (insofar as a lot of people wouldn’t even look at something called “romance,” feeling that they know exactly what that sort of book is, and they aren’t interested) and misleading (I get a lot of romance readers, who write to me, figuratively bug-eyed, saying, “But you can’t do that in a romance!”).

They sell under any number of classifications: I’ve found them shelved under Romance, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Historical Fiction, History (nonfiction) [Really. Foyle’s, in London, keeps them in the nonfiction History section.], General Fiction, and—on a few memorable occasions—Literature.

I see Ingram is listing Drums of Autumn as General Fiction (defined as “any book that does not fall into another specific category”), which seems OK to me. I suppose I might call them “Historical Fiction,” just to make it clear that they do have a historical setting.

Who’s your favorite character? Why?
Goodness, I couldn’t pick one—I love them all (including Jack Randall and Stephen Bonnet), or I couldn’t write them.

Where do you write? Have you written all your books in the same place and way?
Anywhere (I have a laptop computer), but most frequently in my office. I used to write where my desktop computer was (before I had a laptop)—either in my University office (on lunch-hours), or my home office (a converted garage.) After I sold Outlander, though, we bought a new house, which has a real office). I’ve written on planes, in hotel rooms, and sitting in the middle of Discovery Zone (one of those places you take kids and turn them loose), though.

After all your research into the 18th century, would you want to return to that period?
Nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there.

 

We swapped bytes with Diana Gabaldon a couple of weeks ago. Here are her comments on such items as the writing life on the Internet, grisly scenes and gratuitous sex. You betcha!
Children's & YAPicture Book

Eileen Spinelli

Eileen Spinelli is not afraid of commitment. She has belonged to the same Wednesday-morning book group for 20 years. And, since the age of six, she’s been committed to the idea of working with words for a living.

“I fell in love with books and words as a child,” she says. “As I grew older, I wanted to be a poet and wear big hats and long dresses like Edna St. Vincent Millay.”

Although the author wasn’t wearing dramatic attire when she spoke with BookPage from her home near Philadelphia (where she lives with her husband, author Jerry Spinelli), she did share tidbits from her bibliophilic childhood.

“My best friend Gladys and I—she was eight, I was six—would walk to our town library and spend the day. It had swings, we’d bring a lunch, and take the allotted 10 books home in shopping bags,” she says. “The library was my amusement park, my mall—it’s where we went for fun. I grew up in that little world of books.”

Sixty years and 50 books (plus six children and 17 grandchildren) later, the author has created her own world of literature, including the new picture book Princess Pig, which tells the story of an accidental porcine princess.

One day, a hearty gust of wind yanks a “princess” sash from a parade participant and deposits it in Pig’s pen. She takes the sash as a sign—deciding that she is, in fact, Princess Pig—and sets about living the life of a royal. But as the obligations pile up (she must spend hours in the sun posing for a portrait, and she can’t roll in the mud anymore), Pig realizes her new role is a difficult one that’s alienating her from her friends. Ultimately, she tosses aside her teacup crown and cavorts with her barnyard pals once again, happy in the knowledge that a non-princess Pig is a good thing to be.

The author says, “I try to write about things I’m already interested in, or want to know more about.” Princess Pig was sparked by a combination of imagination plus reality (in the form of a documentary Spinelli watched about the royal family). “They work very hard—princesses have a lot of work to do, sometimes five appearances a day,” she says. “And I wanted to show it’s OK to be a pig, or a princess . . . it’s OK to be whoever you are.”

That message is shored up by Tim Bowers’ artwork, full-page illustrations that demonstrate his intuition and skill: the animals’ faces are expressive—hilarious, adorable and kind. Each page bears detailed, appealing art that meshes with the characters’ vivid personae and the book’s engaging rhythm.

Spinelli says of that rhythm, “Writing a picture book is a lot like writing a poem. Language is very important to me, and a lot of my picture books are really poems.”

Spinelli’s first book, 1981’s The Giggle and Cry Book, was a poetry collection, in fact, and numerous picture books and chapter books (including the Lizzie Logan series) have followed. “Every book has a different voice and calls for a different mode of writing,” she says. “I don’t set out to do one or the other, it’s more, how am I going to do this particular idea? The more you do it, the more you have a feel for what works.”

Good information for aspiring writers, to be sure, and Spinelli hasn’t stopped trying new things, either: her first collaboration with husband Jerry, Today I Will: A Year of Quotes, Notes, and Promises to Myself, is due out in October.
“It was great working separately and then coming together and critiquing, but not great being in the same room working on the same book,” she says with a laugh. “I’m really pleased with how it turned out.”

Attentive readers may be wondering how Spinelli’s childhood friendship with Gladys turned out. That story, too, has a happy ending: the girls lost touch when Spinelli’s family moved to a new town, but several years ago, the women reunited at their beloved library.

“That children’s department is now a storage room,” Spinelli says. “The places where the stacks were, and Mrs. Armstrong’s desk—it’s so tiny! But to me, it was the biggest place in the world.”

Linda M. Castellitto is pretty sure her cat is a princess.

 

Eileen Spinelli is not afraid of commitment. She has belonged to the same Wednesday-morning book group for 20 years. And, since the age of six, she’s been committed to the idea of working with words for a living.

“I fell in love…

Fiction

Jim Lynch

Who says you can’t judge a book by its cover? The startling image of flocking birds that wraps around Jim Lynch’s rambunctious second novel, Border Songs, is a near-perfect analogue for the setting, subject and narrative energy of the story inside.

The image comes from a recent painting by Walton Ford, Lynch says during a call from his home in Olympia, Washington. Lynch lives there with his wife, who teaches English as a second language, and their 16-year-old daughter. The watery environs near his home inspired Lynch’s well-regarded first novel, The Highest Tide, whose pint-sized 13-year-old narrator relates the outsized adventures of a formative summer at the water’s edge. Lynch composed Border Songs, set along the U.S.-Canada border in Washington state, in a “mini private-eye office”—complete with a frosted glass door, but minus Internet or phone service—in one of the oldest office buildings in Olympia.

Lynch says setting and a sense of place are important hallmarks of both his novels. “To write about western Washington and not have the kind of lushness [represented in the painting] seems almost impossible to do,” he adds, then notes that his publisher thinks the book cover will “be one of those what the hell!? kinds of covers that you just have to pick up.”

And why not? Viewed from a certain angle, the cover even mirrors the deft comedic exaggeration that makes Border Songs such a lively read. Nowhere is that quality more evident than in the character of Brandon Vanderkool, the hulking, sweet-souled, rookie U.S. Border Patrol agent who is the protagonist of Border Songs and who just happens to have some very unusual abilities.

“I didn’t start out to make a six-feet-eight dyslexic 23-year-old guy who is into landscape art and who is really into birds the central character of the book,” Lynch says. “I actually started out on a kind of writer’s dare. My protagonist in The Highest Tide is just four-feet-eight, and I’m a short guy myself, so I was thinking, OK, I can write tall. I’m going to make this guy six-feet-eight. The more I thought about it, the more it amused me to have a character who was unusually tall. Then I started giving him abilities that matched the extremeness of his size.”

Brandon, it seems, has always been the weird Harold of the small farming community along the Washington-British Columbia border where he grew up and now patrols amid post-9/11 border tensions. But, in one of the wonderful comic twists of the novel, the same strange affinities with birds and art that alienated him from his classmates during his youth, now make Brandon unwittingly—and uncannily—successful as a Border Patrol agent. With every wrong turn or seeming blunder, he ends up apprehending a drug smuggler or undocumented alien, exciting the interest of superiors and congressional committees, the surprise of his father, a local dairy farmer, and the bemused envy of fellow officers.

Alas, no similar happy twist of fate immediately lifts Brandon’s quest for the heart of Madeleine Rousseau, the girl from 50 or so feet across the border who had been one of Brandon’s rare childhood friends but is now a rookie girl-gone-bad in the British Columbia pot-exporting business.

“I’m either drawn to or fascinated with reckless women,” Lynch says. “All of my characters are trying to squeeze more out of life. But Madeleine is trying to find something well outside the norm. She’s in trouble and she’s gone awry and Brandon senses that, although he’s clueless about what to do about it.”

Around the charged relationship between Brandon and Madeleine, Lynch populates his story with a motley, engaging, vividly drawn assemblage of Border Patrol agents, national politicians, local dairy farmers, parents, children, Canadian pot dealers, illegal aliens and even a few potential terrorists. Lynch spent 15 years working as a reporter, including a stint as a political reporter in Washington, D.C., and he tells his story with remarkably clear prose punctuated by a sort of well-informed wink at the ridiculous attitudes on both sides of the border.

“When I was at the The Oregonian I went up and hung out in the pot cafes in British Columbia and wrote about their whole marijuana culture,” Lynch says, highlighting the wellsprings of the novel. “They would tell me that the whole problem with America is that we’re euphoria-phobic. They have a guy who calls himself the Prince of Pot and who likes to get arrested smoking huge joints out in front of police stations. The self-righteous audaciousness of that struck me as a fun contrast to our drug czar, get-tough-on-marijuana policy,” he says.

“When I was riding around with the Border Patrol I kept noticing all the birds. Border guards spend so much time spitting sunflower seeds, chewing tobacco and moseying around doing nothing that I thought having a birding Border Patrol guard would actually make sense . . . . [Besides,] the border guards weren’t catching a lot of illegals—your basic job-seeking illegals. But they were intercepting huge amounts of BC [British Columbia] bud. They would take me into the rooms where they stored these huge bags of marijuana and they were like teenagers with the big buds in their hands, aping for the camera,” Lynch recalls. “It was just goofy and it struck me that here was this little-known battlefront in the war on terror and the war on drugs with great comic potential.”

Lynch concludes, “We go through these absurd cycles from hyper paranoia about the border to forgetting it’s even there to ramping up and getting tough on Canada as a potential menace. To me there’s a nonsensical dynamic to the way we guard our border with our peaceful neighbors to the north, and a certain absurdity to the way we wage our war on drugs and our war on terror. If that seeps through to the reader as I describe life on the border, so much the better.”

Lynch’s provocative critique of U.S. border policies does indeed seep through Border Songs, but, thankfully, it wafts on the breeze of a warm-hearted guffaw.

Alden Mudge writes from Berkeley, California.

Who says you can’t judge a book by its cover? The startling image of flocking birds that wraps around Jim Lynch’s rambunctious second novel, Border Songs, is a near-perfect analogue for the setting, subject and narrative energy of the story inside.

…

Mystery & SuspenseMystery

Vikas Swarup

Unless you were living under a rock this past Oscar season, you’ve undoubtedly heard the buzz about Slumdog Millionaire. But what you might not know is that Danny Boyle’s beloved film was actually the adaptation of a successful novel, Q&A, from Indian diplomat turned author Vikas Swarup.

Swarup’s new novel, focused on the murder of a high society Indian playboy with a knack for getting out of trouble, is not your typical murder mystery. Instead, Six Suspects intricately weaves the stories of six different people (the six suspects of the murder in question) against a fascinating backdrop of modern India.

Swarup, who comes from a family of lawyers, currently serves as India’s Deputy High Commissioner in South Africa. Adept at juggling his diplomatic career with his writing career, he answered questions from BookPage after completing work on Indian’s recent parliamentiary elections.

Six Suspects narrates the lives of six people—seven, if you count journalist Arun Advani’s columns. What was it like writing from so many different perspectives?
It was quite difficult. The difficulty stemmed not so much from the second book syndrome as from my choice of narrative structure. Writing about the interior lives of six different characters is much more complex than writing about the interior life of one character as in Q&A. I had to experiment with voice, with technique and at the same time ensure that my story remained coherent within the confines of the schematic space signposted by the section headings—Murder, Suspects, Motives, Evidence . . .

In the same vein, you cover such a vast range of characters, occupations and complex legal and social situations. How did you do your research?
I was trying to give the readers a glimpse of modern India through six different eyes. So you had to have a diverse range of characters covering a wide social spectrum. Research meant poring over books dealing with the Onge tribe in the Andaman Islands, learning about the modus operandi of mobile phone thieves, discussions with police officers on firearms, and a crash course in Texan English! The Internet was certainly a big help.

Did any of your characters surprise you as the narration progressed? Or did you plot out exactly who did what and when before you started writing?
I think several did. For instance, when I first started writing the diary of the Bollywood actress I thought of her as a vain, flippant celebrity who couldn’t see below the surface. I had initially conceived of her diary entries as being in the vein of chick-lit. But she surprised me with her erudition and emotional depth. She starts out as a clichéd sex symbol but by the end the reader has started feeling sympathetic towards her. The plot also mutated as the book went along.  

This may be an impossible question for a writer, but do you have a favorite character in Six Suspects?
I think it is the stone-age tribesman Eketi. The choice of Eketi as a character was inspired by a report I had read of how during the 2004 tsunami the primitive tribes of the Andaman had remained safe using their powers of medicine and magic. I was interested in the interplay between two totally diverse cultures; what would happen when a primitive tribesman is confronted by the glittering lights of the modern world. Although I did a lot of research, eventually I had to get under the skin of the character and that proved to be quite difficult. How do you know how a stone-age tribesman behaves, what he thinks?

Despite your career as an Indian diplomat, you’ve been remarkably frank in depicting your home country in your fiction. Do you have any concerns about giving the rest of the world such an honest slice of Indian life?
Well, first of all, what I write is fiction. I do not wear my diplomat’s hat when I write fiction and my government allows me that freedom. As a writer, I have complete liberty to express myself in a literary work as long as it is clear that the views expressed do not represent the views of my government or mine in my official capacity. I also don’t feel defensive about what I write because at core I am extremely optimistic about India and that comes through in my novels, as well.

Tell us about your writing process. When and where do you do your best work?
Because I have a full-time day job, I do not have the luxury of writing whenever I want to. Besides, I can only write when I have a clear horizon ahead of me and no interruptions. So I write early in the mornings and on weekends only. 

Has the success of Slumdog Millionaire had any effect on the way you approach your work as a writer?
When your first novel becomes such a huge success, the pressure on the second novel is much more. But I always ask myself the question, do I have a story to tell? As it turned out, I didn’t have just one story to tell, I had six, hence Six Suspects. The success of the first book has made me somewhat more self-conscious as a writer. But the good thing is, I still see myself primarily as a storyteller.

Six Suspects has already been optioned for film. Do you expect to be any more involved in this adaptation than you were in the making of Slumdog?
Six Suspects is a more ambitious book than Q&A. The characters are very diverse, the resolution is much more complex. So certainly I would take a much closer look at how it is translated onto the screen. In fact, I am myself curious to see how John Hodge (he has just been commissioned as the screenplay writer) adapts it. Whodunits are notoriously difficult to film. You can disguise the murderer in the novel, but how do you disguise it in a film, where everything is in your face?

What do you like to read for pleasure? Any recent favorites?
I have read many authors and many books over the years, from Albert Camus to Irving Wallace. I have been a big fan of the thriller genre, but I have enjoyed contemporary literary works as well, such as Coetzee’s Disgrace, David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and the novels of Haruki Murakami.

What can we expect from you next? Do you have plans for a third novel? If so, can you tell us anything about it?
As long as I feel I have stories to tell, I will write. I have already begun my third novel. For a change, it is set outside India.
 

Unless you were living under a rock this past Oscar season, you’ve undoubtedly heard the buzz about Slumdog Millionaire. But what you might not know is that Danny Boyle’s beloved film was actually the adaptation of a successful novel, Q&A, from Indian…

YA FictionYA

Jennifer E. Smith

Two teenagers take off in a whirlwind journey and a quest for answers in Jennifer E. Smith’s second book for young adults, You Are Here. Along the way, they find out a little about each other and a lot about themselves.

Emma Healy and Peter Finnegan, both on the brink of their 17th birthdays, embark on a road trip—in matching Mustang convertibles—that will change their lives and their feelings for each other forever. Emma, a middle-of-the-road student and self-admitted misfit, has never quite understood how she is related to her academic-obsessed parents and multi-degreed, uber-successful siblings. She has always felt that there was a missing link in her life—until she finds a clue to a dark family secret hidden away in the attic.

On the other hand, Peter, a study geek and history buff, fits in with Emma’s family just fine—but not his own. His widower, police officer father cannot understand why Peter would ever want to leave their small upstate New York town or why he is obsessed with historic battlefields and far-off places instead of just being happy where he is. First separately, then together, Emma and Peter set off on a spontaneous road trip to find out for themselves who they are and where they belong.

Smith’s coming-of-age story, told intermittently through the eyes of both Emma and Peter, is remarkably insightful, heart-wrenchingly sad and laugh-out-loud funny. Through both Emma and Peter, we learn how the loss of someone you never really knew—in Emma’s case, a twin brother, and in Peter’s, a mother—can leave scars that run surprisingly deep. We see how an uninvited three-legged hitchhiker (a mangy but hilarious dog) can unlock hidden talents and emotions in a person. We witness how a friendship born out of patience, understanding and a little bit of teasing can lead to unexpected first love. And we see how the open road and a fresh perspective can help two teenagers find a new path to happiness.
Smith got her start in the publishing world working in a literary agency in New York City shortly after graduating from Colgate University in upstate New York, a location she later used as the setting for You Are Here. She had wanted to be a writer since the fourth grade, and after helping others get their starts in the literary world, Smith took the plunge into writing herself.

Having perused volumes upon volumes of adult literary fiction, Smith was anxious to focus on another genre. “That’s what steered me to young adult books,” the author recalls in an interview. “It’s a different world from adult, and it was nice to sit down and be the writer for once.” It also helped that she was a longtime fan of the genre. “I loved Where the Red Fern Grows and Bridge to Terabithia,” Smith says, “and I wanted to write a book that I would have liked to read when I was a kid, something wholesome and heartfelt.”

Smith’s first novel for young adults, The Comeback Season, was inspired by her love of baseball. A Chicago-area native, Smith was watching a Cubs baseball game on TV when she got the idea for the book. “I wrote the first two paragraphs of the novel right then—and they are the same now as when I wrote them,” she says. In fact, the book took her a mere four months to write. “It was a once in a lifetime experience,” Smith says, “and such a wonderfully easy process.” From there, Smith was convinced that YA was the right market for her. “The more I learned about YA books and the wonderful outpouring from kids and teachers, the more hooked I became.” She especially loves hearing from her readers. “The emails I have received have been so gratifying,” she says. “Kids have an unabashedly honest response to people’s work, and that’s the best part.”

After The Comeback Season was published, Smith went back to school to get her master’s degree in Creative Writing at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. While there, she started working on her second novel, You Are Here. “It was great to take a year to really focus on writing and traveling,” Smith recalls, “and it was nice to have a new perspective.” When Smith returned to New York, she went back into publishing—this time as an editor—and had to finish the book “on the side.” “I love my job,” Smith says, “and it’s been great to see the industry from all perspectives, but it does make writing a little slower.” Still, she hasn’t been that slow: she finished You Are Here in nine months.

The author’s experiences traveling through Europe and studying abroad leant a theme of perspective to the book as well. Her characters seem to be able to “find” themselves once they have stepped out of their normal comfort zones. For Emma, it takes tracing her family’s history back to her birth and visiting her long-lost brother’s grave to find out that she is the glue that has always bound her eclectic family together. For Peter, it takes a road trip to Gettysburg and a view from outside his small town’s limits to realize that where he actually wants to be is home.

Smith’s own journey is taking her further into the YA world, with two more books already underway. In addition, she’s promoting You Are Here with local readings, school visits and guest blogging for various YA sites. All the while, she is keeping her “day job with homework,” as she calls it, and continues to edit manuscripts for the adult literary world by day and write wonderful stories for her young adult audience by night. With her sophomore title already poised to take the YA world on an incredible voyage, Jennifer E. Smith has arrived.

 

Two teenagers take off in a whirlwind journey and a quest for answers in Jennifer E. Smith’s second book for young adults, You Are Here. Along the way, they find out a little about each other and a lot about themselves.

Emma Healy and Peter…

Children's & YAPicture Book

David Wiesner

This month, David Wiesner's Sector 7 softly breezes into bookstores and libraries, taking readers on a tour of the cloud industry. Wiesner, a Caldecott medalist, has been interested in telling stories with pictures since his teen years, when he enjoyed wordless comic books and silent movies. "I think early on it was clear that my interest was telling stories with pictures, not just painting a picture. To me, it was more interesting to actually do a series, because if I came up with a character or place that I liked, I wanted to spend more time either in that place or with that character. So actually, telling stories with pictures was very appealing."

With comic books, "I certainly read the stories and got into what was going on, but what I really found exciting was the way the stories were told pictorially, using the panel format to do all sorts of incredible things: pressing time or expanding it, using an entire page of little panels to take a rather small action and stretch it out, almost like slow motion. One of the turning points for me was when [I came across] a comic book artist who would occasionally put into the story several pages with no words, telling the story with pictures.

"And I thought this was the greatest thing I'd ever seen. There's always slam! bang! pow! stuff going on, word balloons everywhere. But here there was this calm, quiet interlude, with just pictures. What really fascinated me was the way he was conveying information with just pictures, using close-ups, moving away to a long shot, to speak of it in film terms. As I came across more examples of wordless storytelling over the years, it just took hold of me. My senior degree project was a 48-page, wordless picture book where I took a story by fantasy writer Fritz Lieber and told it in wordless format. It was an incredible learning experience."

Part of that experience certainly included editing. Conceptually, editing text and dialogue is easy to grasp, but how does one edit pictures? "Visual editing involves discovering the way to break up the rhythm of the book; the way your eye tracks across the page, for example. Some of my books are very dense with information, with big double-page spreads that have a lot going on. You really have to sit and look very carefully. Then you can get to a page, like in Tuesday, where the frogs are flying up in the air, and there's a panel where they're spinning somersaults and flying into the town, chasing the birds, really moving quickly across the page. So taking into account how your eye is going to read the position plays into it, too. That's really the first place I try to work those things out."

Wiesner's ideas bloom differently, but all are planted in his sketchbook. His second Cricket magazine cover, for example, eventually blossomed into the book known as Tuesday.

"I was working on the March cover, and two themes in this particular issue were St. Patrick's Day and frogs—a lot of green. St. Patrick's Day didn't seem all that interesting, so I thought I'd do something with frogs. All my books start in my sketchbooks, and the frogs were very interesting and fun to draw. They're very squishy and bumpy, very odd-looking things." Reminiscent of 1950s science fiction/flying saucer movies, "[the lilypad] became a sort of magic carpet, flying around. So I did the cover, and I liked the painting. But once again, I wanted to spend more time with what I created. I thought more and more about flying frogs, and started seeing frogs in front of the TV, chasing the dog, floating by the window, etc. And I just organized them, and they created this sequence. It came together incredibly fast. In that case, it grew out of this sort of arbitrary suggestion."

June 29, 1999, however, originated from a drawing that had lingered in his sketchbook. The image was part of some samples Wiesner had drawn for his portfolio to submit to various publishers. "There was a lot of folktale stuff, like wizards, for example. And I had a bunch of stuff in the back that were things I really wanted to do, including a painting of a large pepper floating in the sky in this field, with all these people with wires, trying to pull it down. And art directors and editors would get to these items and say, 'What is this?'" he laughs.

Wiesner would glance at this particular image periodically for the next 11 years. "I wasn't forcing anything. I was kind of waiting for it to reveal to me what it was about. After I finished Tuesday, I was looking at it again, and I wondered why had I envisioned them floating down? Maybe something went up first. Sector 7 also started out as a drawing that I needed to work my way through."

 

 

This month, David Wiesner's Sector 7 softly breezes into bookstores and libraries, taking readers on a tour of the cloud industry. Wiesner, a Caldecott medalist, has been interested in telling stories with pictures since his teen years, when he enjoyed wordless comic books and silent…

FictionAudio

Richard Ford

The seven deadly ones get all the press, but it’s the multitude of other, seemingly petty sins that Richard Ford writes about in his new short story collection. "All of those small acts we commit on a daily basis at ground level are how we fail," he says. "We fail by lacking patience, sincerity, passion, truthfulness, lacking all kinds of things — that’s what A Multitude of Sins is." 

Ford, whose 1995 novel Independence Day won both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award, uses his new collection to pinpoint pivotal moments of failure in people’s lives. Their sins aren’t spectacular ones, just the sad accretion of betrayal and loss that’s part of daily life.

"I don’t think these people are doomed, desperate or on the edge more than anyone else," says Ford of characters like the husband and wife in "Charity," whose marriage of 20 years is in limbo after the husband has an affair. "They’re socked into life pretty good. I don’t think if you were to stand outside the lives of the people in these stories, in ‘Creche’ and ‘Charity,’ you would think they were anybody special. By looking at these lives, you’re liable to see something as great as kings and heroes. In that fabric of otherwise under-noticeable lives is the stuff of real moral existence. It’s meant to ennoble and make more poignant the lives you may not have noticed."

In the struggle of these ordinary characters, Ford creates a mirror, a way to view our own humanity. He’s made infidelity a theme in his stories, and as he does with the title A Multitude of Sins, takes a term "we think we understand and have a working definition of, and lifts the lid on it."

Infidelity in Ford’s lexicon means a betrayal of our true selves. His characters fumble, deceiving each other and deluding themselves. Many also commit the more common definition of infidelity — adultery. It’s an intriguing theme from Ford, who married Kristina Hensley, his college sweetheart, in 1967 and has stayed good and married to her. That doesn’t make him eager to be literature’s patron saint of wedded bliss. "I think that nobody’s marriage is alike," says Ford, who believes even in so-called solid marriages like his own, "you see all kinds of peculiarities, idiosyncrasies."

In Ford’s case, he has a restless nature and doesn’t like to stay put for long. Since publishing his first novel A Piece of My Heart in 1976, he’s crisscrossed the country and lived abroad, as well — a man with no sense of home and no patience with the subject. "I don’t think about it. It doesn’t matter. I don’t care. I’m a Mississippian. Was born in Mississippi. I don’t want to live there. I did live there. I may live there again. I finally have given up. I’m an American."

Ford, 58, frequently tires of his home on New Orleans’ Bourbon Street and lights out for his homes in Maine and Mississippi. His wife, a New Orleans city planner, doesn’t have the same luxury. "We have not been living together very much," admits Ford. "But the overriding thing about Kristina and me is we really love each other and we know that and have seen it over and over again at every pass. What makes a solid marriage is not necessary kind of conduct or stewardship or guardianship. That seems to me to be missing the point. You have to love somebody."

His housing situation is soon to change. "We just bought a much more commodious house in the Garden District," says Ford. "I was never good at living in the French Quarter. It makes a great story, great letterhead, but it was kind of a drag. Like living in a theme park."

Aware of his own quirks, Ford never plays moral arbiter as a writer. In A Multitude of Sins, he serves as witness, sometimes speaking through the narrator by writing in first person, sometimes portraying scenes with a cinematic crispness by writing in third person.

"Third person is hard for me," he confesses. "I struggle with that. Sometimes I write in third person just to prove I can." Ford works to determine how much the omniscient narrator tells, how intimate the voice should be. "The bar I set for myself is a very high bar. It’s the bar of Alice Munro. I’m never as successful at it as I want to be, whereas in first person I feel I’m as successful as I could be."

He selects point of view "by the way in which the first lines of the story occur to me. I don’t think it’s always right, but I’ve never changed the point of view once I have it under way."

As with the stories in his 1987 collection Rock Springs, the stories in A Multitude of Sins originally appeared in The New Yorker and Granta. Each story stands on its own, a searing indictment of how ethically lost and emotionally isolated we’ve become. In his story "Quality Time," Ford writes, "[S]omeone has to tell us what’s important because we no longer know." Taken together in this collection, though, the nine stories read as though all of a piece.

"They were meant to," says Ford. "I realized when I was three stories into it. ‘Privacy,’ ‘Creche’ and ‘Quality Time’ prefigured the rest of the book. It was a sort of a relief. Sometimes you write books of stories that come in from all quadrants, a rattle bag. But I’m a novelist principally and had this prefiguring idea. I could choose what I was thinking about, choose with a novelist’s eyes, to make one story fit after another."

In order to ascertain that he’d created the effect he wanted with repetition of words and themes, Ford read each story aloud as he did with the 700-plus manuscript pages of Independence Day. "I’m dyslexic. I can’t see those things," he says. "When you read it out loud, you catch everything."

He expects readers to enter into his work with the same seriousness and dedication. "The idea of authorship is that you authorize the reader’s responses as much as you can. You don’t want there to be a great discrepancy between what you write and what you know the reader will read. If there are great discrepancies, you’re not running the story as much as you need to be. I feel it’s a tincture of failure," says Ford.

"I know the reader will have his own history, preoccupations, priorities, obsessions, thoughts, I know that. And that just means everybody’s different. But at the point of contact with my story, I want everybody to be mine."

 

Ellen Kanner is a writer in Miami.

The seven deadly ones get all the press, but it's the multitude of other, seemingly petty sins that Richard Ford writes about in his new short story collection. "All of those small acts we commit on a daily basis at ground level are how we…

FictionWomen's Fiction

Sue Monk Kidd

There's a sweet new voice in the world of Southern fiction, and it would be wise to listen. Known primarily for her books about spirituality (The Dance of the Dissident Daughter), Sue Monk Kidd now offers us her first novel, The Secret Life of Bees. But in her first work of fiction, Kidd does not stray far from her interest in the interior life. More than the coming-of-age story of Kidd's endearing heroine, Lily Owens, The Secret Life of Bees is the story of a soul's journey, its evolution and its slow awakening to life's great mystery. 

"I think of it as something deeper and more profound happening to [Lily] at the level of soul, and I wanted her to have a real transformation and a real awakening . . . to this other realm," Kidd says during a recent call to her home in Charleston, South Carolina.

But the path toward enlightenment is not always an easy one. As a young child, Lily's life was changed forever by one tragic event — the death of her mother. When we meet her as an adolescent, she is trying to come to terms with this loss, and with her relationship with her cruel father, T. Ray. Life on their South Carolina peach farm might be too bleak to bear if not for the feisty Rosaleen, Lily's "stand-in mother" who works for the family. Kidd writes beautifully of their relationship, its subtle workings and its fierce love.

"The yearning for home and mother, which is what drives Lily, is deeply embedded in all of us," says Kidd. "The symbolic layer of the novel for me was this longing that is in every human soul for the mother. The mother within, the archetypal mother, the divine mother, whatever you want to call that, it is in us, and we recognize it when we see it in another story, and it resonates in us. And home — the deepest calling we have is to come home to ourselves. And so those things were operating in my mind when I was trying to write Lily's story. Mostly, I have to say, I wasn't thinking about all that; it was sort of in the background. I wasn't trying to write symbolically, and I wasn't trying to write about these archetypes and symbols, I was just trying to tell a really good story." And at that she succeeds. The Secret Life is Southern storytelling at its finest, but the layers of this story run deep.

Ironically, Lily's journey home begins when she leaves the peach farm. The opportunity comes when Rosaleen takes a stand against some racists in town and is beaten and jailed; Lily then knows that it's time for them to fly. Led by Lily's search for clues about her mother's past, and guided by a picture of a Black Madonna her mother left behind, they make their way to Tiburon, South Carolina. It is there that Lily and Rosaleen meet three sisters who welcome them into their world of bee-keeping and their own brand of spirituality centered around a Black Madonna. And it is there, among these bee-keeping sisters, that Lily embarks on a mystical journey into the world of bees and the sacred feminine.

The symbol of the bee and of the Black Madonna are perfectly wedded to one another, yet Kidd says that she didn't know any of the symbolism of bees before writing The Secret Life or about the amazing connections to the Virgin Mary. Somehow the two just coalesced. "I think we have to trust that choreographer inside of the writer who does offer up these gems and images at times. And we don't know how rich and layered they really are." When she began her research, she thought, "I can't believe it! Here we go." Upon discovering that Mary was often referred to as the queen bee and thought of as the bee hive, Kidd says, "I was so floored." She adds, "Bees and honeymaking lend themselves to ideas of change and transformation. And they also sting, so you've got to have that side of it."

Kidd's research included spending some time with beekeepers. Her hours in the honeyhouse and at the hives were invaluable. "Some of those scenes where Lily is experiencing that rush of feeling and emotion when the bees come swirling out of their hives, I could never have gotten that from a book. The fear and delight of all that and the sounds of it. . . . The way your feet stick to the floor in a honeyhouse . . . The senses are alive in all of that experience." Kidd's vivid prose makes The Secret Life a sensual experience for the reader, too.

Kidd was also inspired by a visit to a Trappist monastery in South Carolina where she came upon an unusual statue of Mary, unusual in that it was a ship's masthead that had made its way to the abbey from the shores of a distant island. "The day that I discovered her, I was totally captivated by . . . the powerful imagery of this masthead Mary that was surfacing from the deep, washing up from the deep, onto the shores of consciousness so to speak, and here is the feminine, returning. And I just could not get over that."

It seems the time was right for Kidd to make the jump from memoir to fiction, and indeed this novel feels inspired. Kidd says the work was a challenge, but one she'd always hoped to meet. "In fact, when I first came to the idea that I would pursue a career as a writer I wanted to write fiction. But things didn't work that way for me. . . . Maya Angelou said [to be a writer of fiction] you have to have something to say and you have to have the means or the ability to say it, and then you have to have the courage to say it at all. And I don't think I had enough of all three of those . . . when I was in my late 20s and early 30s."

The Secret Life makes clear that Kidd does possess all the elements that make the alchemy of storytelling possible. She adds to that mix humor and an understanding of human relationships, and the end result is something quite extraordinary. "Sometimes you just get a gift from your own unconscious or from somewhere," the author muses. The Secret Life of Bees is certainly a gift to Kidd's readers, one that both entertains and satisfies the soul.

 

Katherine H. Wyrick lives in Little Rock, Arkansas.

There's a sweet new voice in the world of Southern fiction, and it would be wise to listen. Known primarily for her books about spirituality (The Dance of the Dissident Daughter), Sue Monk Kidd now offers us her first novel, The Secret Life of Bees.…

Memoir

Buzz Aldrin

There’s nothing like seeing Buzz Aldrin’s name on one’s caller ID. His office is calling from California for part two of our interview to discuss his second memoir, Magnificent Desolation: The Long Journey Home from the Moon. He sounds more relaxed this time around: there are no phones ringing in the background, no email alerts sounding on his computer and he’s not shouting out fax instructions to a staff member.

At 79, the former Apollo 11 astronaut and the second man to walk on the moon is incredibly active, traveling the world promoting space exploration and his space lottery idea and also just enjoying himself. He’s been to the North Pole (on an expedition with ABC’s Hugh Downs for “20/20”) and is finalizing a South Pole excursion. A longtime avid diver—he’s the guy who developed many of NASA’s underwater training procedures for the Apollo program—he shot B-roll shark footage for the 1981 Bond flick For Your Eyes Only, visited the Titanic wreckage with a British documentary team and still dives regularly.

Aldrin’s schedule remains almost as packed as the world tour he and crewmates Neil Armstrong and Mike Collins took—or, rather, were subjected to, in his opinion—after their July 1969 moon flight. Along with his annual visit to the Paris Air Show, he’ll also make a number of appearances in observation of Apollo 11’s 40th anniversary.

“I’m standing by for NASA endorsement of different events,” he says, his gravelly voice assuming a cadence indicative of his many years of military training. He says he’ll squeeze in some sort of book tour when he can. But what he really wants is a spot on Oprah’s show. “I would appreciate that invitation. . . . This is a book that’s about a human,” he pauses, then laughs, “drama.”

Magnificent Desolation is an account of Aldrin’s difficult years—decades, really—following the moon landing. He discusses alcoholism (no, he wasn’t drunk when he punched that Apollo hoax theorist), infidelity, divorce, financial troubles, a frequently strained relationship with his father, depression and a stalled career, among other things.  He’s right, this is definitely Oprah territory. As hard as it has been for Aldrin (and many of his fellow Apollo astronauts) to talk about their experiences in space—more on that later—you’d think he would have found it nearly impossible to open up about personal matters, or that it was perhaps difficult to revisit some of the most trying periods of his life.

“No, I don’t think so,” Aldrin says. “The stories, the photographs, the activities have been related in progressive interviews over 30 years now. It’s just a question of deciding: what is the output going to be? Are we looking for a dramatic movie to reach large numbers of people, or are we going to try to put more detail, more things down in writing because there probably won’t be another real chance to do that.”

He spent less than a year working with co-writer Ken Abraham and also bringing in other people for interviews. “It was quite satisfying to renew some of those acquaintances,” he says. There were astronauts, family members and Aldrin’s children. “[to get their] perspective now on their adolescent observations, and teen-aged and subsequent witnessing of the progressions in my life,” Aldrin says somewhat ruefully.

Magnificent Desolation starts on a high note, though: July 16, 1969, the morning of the Apollo 11 launch. It makes for a great opener. “It always has,” Aldrin laughs. He takes readers through that morning and does a marvelous job of putting the technology of the day in perspective for those used to 21st-century devices: “Many modern mobile phones have more computing power than we did. But those computers enabled us to measure our velocity changes to a hundredth of a foot per second, determine rendezvous and course corrections, and guide our descent . . . to the moon. You couldn’t do that with a slide rule.”

Aldrin spends the first three chapters in space, describing what he saw and how he felt about it. He describes the astronauts’ relief at having landed successfully, the deafening silence once the Lunar Module’s engines shut down, planting the American flag (“I still think it’s the best-looking flag up there out of all six”), and just wanting to sleep on the return flight to Earth. He writes about the mission’s iconic images, including the ones he shot of his footprint: “Framed in the photo was the evidence of man on the moon—a single footprint. . . . That’s kind of lonely looking, I thought. So I’d better put my boot down, and then move my boot away from the print, but only slightly so it’s still in the frame. . . .”

That’s a lot more than he’s willing to say over the phone. The question, the one every interviewer has to ask, is met by a pause just this side of uncomfortable. “Well, I know it would be nice to pinpoint, but there was a continuity associated with kind of moving beyond each achievement successfully and the culmination is being in the Pacific Ocean,” he concludes with a laugh.

OK, but is there one thing in particular, one tiny detail about being on the moon that stands out even after all this time? “We were sightseeing, looking back and seeing the gradually diminishing size of the back side of the moon, and I think most everyone who’s seen it would say the crater named after the Russian pioneer Tsiolkovsky is probably the most unique feature that stands out. You gotta take our word for it,” he says, his voice becoming slightly mischievous, “because only 24 people have seen it, plus the cameras.”

Though he gets why people feel compelled to tell him where they were on the night of July, 20, 1969, he doesn’t want to spend the rest of his life reliving those seven hours on the moon. Instead, he’s interested in promoting continued space exploration and developing new rocket technology (he holds a couple of patents for rocket design).

“I’m known as an astronaut, and I am still thrilled with that designation,” he writes in Magnificent Desolation. “But I don’t want to live in the past; as long as I am here on Earth, I want to be contributing to the present, and I want to stride confidently into the future.”
 

There’s nothing like seeing Buzz Aldrin’s name on one’s caller ID. His office is calling from California for part two of our interview to discuss his second memoir, Magnificent Desolation: The Long Journey Home from the Moon. He sounds more relaxed this time around: there…

Animals

Temple Grandin

The smart mischievous chicken, the sweet sensitive cow and the problem-solving pig are the stuff of cartoons. But these almost human qualities are based in reality, according to scientist and animal welfare pioneer Dr. Temple Grandin, and that’s hard to swallow when the animals become breakfast or dinner.

"All animals and people have the same core emotion systems in the brain," she writes. All sentient beings—from wildlife and zoo residents to farm animals and family pets—deserve greater understanding, humane treatment and respect, according to Grandin, who has targeted massive industrial farming companies and meat plants as well as the average pet owner with her award-winning animal welfare work.

"I feel strongly we have to give animals a decent life," she says by phone from Fort Collins, where she is a professor of animal science at Colorado State University.

Grandin’s work with animals has been strongly influenced by her own autism, a condition that has helped her understand how animals perceive the world. She has explored the connection in two best-selling books, Thinking in Pictures and Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior.

Her extraordinary new book, Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals makes a connection between the humane treatment of farm animals and the physically and emotionally healthy life that household pets deserve. 

Most animal behavior—pleasant or obnoxious—is driven by "the blue ribbon emotions," according to Grandin, which include seeking (searching, investigating and making sense of the environment); rage (frustration sparked by mental and/or physical restraint); fear; lust; care (maternal love and caring); and play.

She identifies the primary emotions motivating animals in various locations: the wild, the "enriched environments" of zoos, industrial farms, ranches and homes. Then she explains how to recognize the physical and behavioral signs of both stress and satisfaction to bring out the best in any species.

"Usually—but not always—the more freedom you give an animal to act naturally, the better, because normal behaviors evolved to satisfy the core emotions," she writes.

Grandin’s interest in animal welfare dates back to her childhood, when she can recall happy, emotionally healthy dogs wandering her childhood neighborhood ("We never had leash aggression," Grandin says), which contrasts with her current observations of lonely dogs barking and whining in isolated backyards.

But the "normal" behaviors for a dog—roaming the countryside for miles per day—usually aren’t possible for the modern pet owner, so Grandin identifies good substitute behaviors like off-leash romps, plenty of games with humans and a rotating stash of toys which stimulate the play and seeking drives.

"Dominance aggression" or leash aggression has become extremely common in modern dogs. But Grandin suggests that aggression—which isn’t an animal emotion—has its basis in fear and anxiety, which are painful emotions that can be addressed through frustration tolerance and obedience training.

Her own childhood struggles with autism and her perception in pictures rather than words helped Grandin comprehend how animals see the world. Observing how cattle became calm in the "squeeze" chutes used to perform veterinary procedures on her aunt’s ranch, she discovered the same calming sensation for her own hyper-awareness and anxiety. After earning degrees in animal science at Arizona State and the University of Illinois she then designed a similar, humane chute now used by more than half of the beef processing plants in America.

In Animals Make Us Human, her anecdotes about working with the meat industry, zoo keepers, ranchers, farmers and other animal owners make for fascinating reading. She helps cowboys shoo "riperian loafers" grazing on protected land by getting them to work with the cattle’s nature instead of against it. She explores why cats are trained effectively with a clicker. ("A cat . . . hasn’t evolved to read people, and he isn’t motivated to scrutinize his owner for signs. You know a cat is going to hear a click.") She helps a horse owner figure out why his mare went "berserk" when a carriage harness was put on after discovering that a previous owner had made his harnesses out of rubber, snapping the horse’s skin like a big rubber band. And she stares at the flip side of abuse, the farm workers too tenderhearted to put runts or sick animals down. "When employees repeatedly go through the pain of holding onto an animal and watching it suffer and then finally euthanizing it or watching it die, eventually they’re going to become desensitized to animal suffering. That’s how habituation works."

Grandin has dedicated her entire career to meat-industry reform and animal welfare, designing plant audits for huge corporate buyers like McDonald’s, and showing often-reluctant CEOs that animals can be processed quickly and humanely with a few often inexpensive modifications, as well as better training and monitoring of staff.

"I would have liked that they just stopped being mean to the animals," Grandin says. "But if you want change to happen, you have to do it on business terms."

She encourages her students to enter the animal welfare field, and encourages ordinary animal lovers to find out where their food comes from, then consider writing a hand-crafted note to big corporations rather than a form letter or e-mail ("Those count," Grandin says). And she hopes that her insights into horses, dogs and cats in the book will perhaps turn a "mere" pet owner into a gentle agitator, bringing "real change on the ground."

"You have to be consistently insistent," Grandin says of her tireless and unsentimental work on behalf of animals. "Activists soften the steel, then I bend it into pretty grill work."

 

 

Deanna Larson writes from Nashville.

Author photo by Joel Benjamin.

The smart mischievous chicken, the sweet sensitive cow and the problem-solving pig are the stuff of cartoons. But these almost human qualities are based in reality, according to scientist and animal welfare pioneer Dr. Temple Grandin, and that's hard to swallow when the animals become…

Fiction

Tiffany Baker

On a recent call to her Marin County home, just north of San Francisco, Tiffany Baker seems unruffled, despite the fact that her babysitter hasn’t shown up to corral her three young children, who at present can be heard shrieking through the halls. An occasional squeal punctuates our ensuing conversation, but Baker maintains her composure and focus—and her sense of humor. Focus is something that the author obviously has in spades, having written her first novel while tending to one baby and pregnant with another. "I’ve always written, ever since I was little," she says.

In addition to three children, ages six, five and two, Baker has also given birth to a debut novel that’s already generating a big buzz. With The Little Giant of Aberdeen County, Baker introduces readers to Truly Plaice, an unconventional heroine, a giantess whose monstrous proportions make her both an outcast and a curiosity in her small, upstate New York town. "I know that it’s a very odd book," Baker concedes. But, we believe, one that will have considerable appeal.

Set against the bleak backdrop of a dying town, Truly’s story begins at birth, with an epic scene reminiscent of something out of Isabel Allende. Thereafter, the novel unfolds at a quieter pace. After the death of her mother, who died in childbirth presumably because of Truly’s enormous size, Truly plods through a hardscrabble existence with her tormented father and pretty, popular sister, Serena Jane. Her father also dies prematurely, and Truly, who continues to grow at an alarming rate due an untreated pituitary problem, is sent to live with the Dyersons, a luckless farming family trying and failing to scratch out a living from barren land and a series of decrepit race horses. Serena Jane, however, goes on to live a life of privilege and relative happiness—until, that is, she crosses paths with the cruel Bob Bob Morgan, the youngest in a line of Robert Morgans, Aberdeen’s family doctors for generations. This encounter changes the course of Serena Jane’s life and ends her plans to escape her hometown and become a Hollywood starlet. 

Asked about the creation of a character as peculiar as Truly, Baker says, "I’m very much a voice writer. I just got Truly’s voice in my head, for better or for worse, because it didn’t leave for years after!" She goes on to say that additional inspiration arrived in another form. "I got the image of this woman shrinking," she explains, which is what begins to happen to Truly toward the novel’s end.

Baker was also intrigued by the idea of a larger-than-life character that defies definition. "She’s just too big for her life, but no one can see her. She is so big and so out of the ordinary, but it makes her invisible. I became fascinated by that contrast," says Baker. She believes there are many people in society we willingly choose not to see, like the crazy person on the bus. "It’s so fun to give a person a voice who doesn’t have one," she says. The townspeople do, however, begin to take notice when Truly undergoes both an outward and inward transformation. And when Truly begins to grow out of her assigned role in society (or, in an ironic twist, "shrink" out of it), it makes some of those people very uncomfortable. As her name not so subtly infers, Truly Plaice does at last find her true place.

Though it would be accurate to subtitle the book, "The Incredible Shrinking Woman," Little Giant is less freak show than fable. Baker does turn her attention to the daily travails of her characters, but the story, which strikes a universal tone and has a folkloric feel, is not bound by city limits. Baker cites her Ukrainian background as one of the reasons folklore has always fascinated her. And she credits her boarding school experience back East for her interest in New England as a setting. It was also at her Rhode Island prep school that Baker fell in love with the writing of Nathaniel Hawthorne, which clearly informs her work. Baker, who has a doctorate in Victorian literature, says, "I’ve described [Little Giant] as kind of New England Gothic folklore." She muses, "I love that kind of fairytale, folktale feeling because maybe I never really grew up."

Though Truly takes up the most space, Baker also populates her novel with a cast of minor characters who add color and their own distinctive voices to the narrative. As the story progresses, Truly leaves the Dyerson farm and her adopted sister Amelia, herself an outcast, to take care of Serena Jane’s husband and son after Serena Jane abandons them. It is in the Morgan family home where Truly discovers family secrets that will change her life forever. Thus emerges the parallel story of Tabitha Dyerson, one of the novel’s most interesting threads. Tabitha, a rumored witch and healer, left behind a mysterious "shadow book," which has eluded generations of Dyerson men. It takes Truly to unravel this mystery, and it is in doing so that she finds she has the power not only to heal others, but also herself.

In the interest of not giving away too much, let’s just say that the most delightful aspect of the novel is the story of Tabitha’s quilt, an object that itself constitutes a character.

It comes as no surprise that Baker cites Allende, John Irving and Anne Tyler as influences. And, like Truly with her herbal remedies, Baker has concocted a pleasing brew of the three: the offbeat Irving with his penchant for eccentric characters, the magical quality of Allende and Tyler’s plainspoken insightfulness into relationships of every stripe.

Baker is currently at work on her second novel, in which she returns to New England, this time to a salt farm. She won’t divulge too much, but does say that it is about three women, two of them sisters, who are all involved with the same man. If Little Giant is any indication, we can expect Baker’s next book to bear the mark of her natural storytelling and astute observations on human nature.

Baker brings a wisdom and compassion to this timeless portrait of small-town life, a place where the boundŸary between reality and fairy tale is but a blur and happy endings are possible. "I love a happy ending," says Baker unapologetically. "That’s the whole point in reading, because you don’t always get that in life." In Little Giant, Baker rewards the reader with one, and it’s all the sweeter because of the long, hard road it takes Truly to get there.

 

 

Katherine Wyrick is a writer in Little Rock.

Author photo by Lauren Drever.

On a recent call to her Marin County home, just north of San Francisco, Tiffany Baker seems unruffled, despite the fact that her babysitter hasn't shown up to corral her three young children, who at present can be heard shrieking through the halls. An occasional…

Memoir

Azar Nafisi

In her beloved and powerful memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran, author Azar Nafisi wrote about using literature as a source of strength while she lived under the oppressive government of Iran. Now she returns with a new memoir, Things I’ve Been Silent About, in which she opens up even more about her life, from her complex relationship with her mother to how she survived long-ago sexual abuse.

Honest, introspective and at times painfully direct, Things I’ve Been Silent About is a compelling follow-up memoir, one that exposes the cost of family secrets. Nafisi recently talked with BookPage about her decision to open up her life to millions of readers.

You are incredibly honest in your memoirs, which is all the more striking since discussing personal experiences is considered taboo in Iran. How has your family reacted to the very personal details you reveal about life in the Nafisi family and in Iran?
My family has been very supportive. This does not mean that they do not have their anxieties and reservations, but they, specially my immediate family, have been considerate of my work and me to such an extent that I often went to them to seek encouragement and consolation. My brother has been amazing. I know how difficult this has been for him, but he provided me with information, with photos and documents, without interfering in the story in any way. 

As the title suggests, you write honestly about a lot of painful experiences in Things I’ve Been Silent About, including the sexual molestation you suffered as a child. What made you decide to share this and how difficult was it to write about?
At first I avoided writing about this and other painful events in my life; this was almost instinctive, perhaps from a desire to protect myself. But while an author is and should be in control of her book, every book, like a child, has a life of its own; it will also bring in its own rules and norms. The events I chose to talk about were the ones that were most pertinent to the main themes of my book. I have avoided mentioning individuals and incidents that were not integral to my story and this one was such an integral part of the story. One of the main themes of this book focuses on victims and authority figures, on ways through which we do or do not overcome our victimhood and the choices we make in relation to it. This event was in many ways crucial to the development of these themes, not just in personal terms—it resonated on so many different levels, cultural, social as well as universal.

You write, "If at home I was subdued into compliance, at school I quickly developed a reputation as a difficult child." How much of your childhood self do you see in yourself now?
That self for better or for worse is still alive and kicking—in some ways I remain a "problem child!" Looking back, more than anything I was reacting to authority figures, and although now those figures have changed, my reaction to authority and authority figures has in some ways remained much the same. I am instinctively suspicious of them, especially when it comes to political authorities and ideologies. On some level I believe with John Locke that "All authority is error." I don’t mean we do not need a system that helps create and maintain order or one that holds us all accountable, but I am wary of people and systems that try to take away your power of questioning. I believe now my reactions are not as impulsive as they were in my childhood, they are more measured and I hope I have learned to base my life not on reaction to others, be they authority figures or not, but on my own actions.

You’ve written, "I left Iran in 1997, but Iran did not leave me." Do you think you’ll ever return there?
Well, every time I write or talk about Iran, I feel that I have returned. When I was physically in Iran there were so many restrictions that I, like some others, tried to act as if we lived somewhere else. But to return to your more direct question: I do expect to return for visits if for nothing else. I consider that my natural right.

Newsday said Reading Lolita in Tehran "reminds us of why we read in the first place." Why do you read?
I read for the same reason that I write: I cannot help myself. It is like falling in love, there must be a number of reasons why one falls in love, but when it comes to explaining them, one can feel tongue-tied. I think the basis for both reading and writing is a sense of curiosity, the desire to know, to go places where you have never visited before. There is a sense of incomparable freedom and liberation in our ability to respond to this urge.

In her beloved and powerful memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran, author Azar Nafisi wrote about using literature as a source of strength while she lived under the oppressive government of Iran. Now she returns with a new memoir, Things I've Been Silent About, in which…

ParentingFamily & Relationships

Alison Gopnik

Flipping through the channels one recent morning, I landed on a cable infomercial showing a 14-month-old strapped in his high chair, sippy cup by his side. His mother stood in front of him, running through a set of flash cards each printed with a single word.

“Monkey!” yelled the child gleefully. “Clap!”

A voiceover on the ad urged parents to grab the small window of opportunity and give their children the edge they’ll need for lifelong success. As seen on TV, it seems, even infants and toddlers need a competitive edge to succeed in life.
Enter Alison Gopnik, an influential child psychologist and philosopher whose research at the University of California Berkeley is changing the way we think about the lives of children.

In her fascinating and thought-provoking new book, The Philosophical Baby, Gopnik argues that instead of relying on the same old how-to-get-your-child-to-sleep parenting books and gimmicky get-smart-quick products, parents should simply embrace their children’s youngest years as a necessary time for exploration and imagination. She posits that young humans are “useless on purpose,” unable to care for themselves in even the most basic ways, so that they can focus on what Gopnik calls research and development. The most intelligent and flexible species, she says, are usually the ones with the longest periods of childhood.

“I want parents to appreciate the wonder and complexity of what’s going on in their children’s lives,” Gopnik said in a recent phone interview from her home in Berkeley. “This is not a pseudo science—do this and your baby will be smarter. I don’t want them to come away [from my book] with any kind of formula for making their child better!”
Still, Gopnik understands the attraction of books and toys promising smarter, more successful children. It’s linked, she said, to a fragmented society where fewer and fewer people have experienced caring for other children before having their own.

“It’s a fact that for most of human history, almost everyone becomes a parent and more significantly at some point before becoming a parent, they took care of other children,” says Gopnik. “Taking care of children was just part of what it meant to be human. It’s only fairly recently that you have people who have babies who’ve never taken care of babies before—even held a baby.”

The oldest of six children, Gopnik certainly grew up taking care of babies. Even as a young girl, she says, she was fascinated both by children and by philosophy. The daughter of two college professors, she was reading Plato at 10 and is considered a leader in her field of study. Her brother, Adam, is a well-known author and staff writer for The New Yorker. Another brother, Blake, is the Washington Post art critic. Yet for all that, she is strikingly down-to-earth, warm and bubbling with enthusiasm when talking about her work. The mother of three grown sons, she sees children not as research subjects but as an essential part of the universal conversation about who we are.

“We raise children, and live with them every day,” she said. “It always seemed to me, even growing up, that we should talk about babies with the same seriousness and importance as any other topic. I’m always surprised at parties that the conversation around babies is how to get them to sleep, and that’s it. Then it’s, oh, no, let’s talk about real estate or something grown up.”

In The Philosophical Baby, Gopnik argues that young children have been unfairly omitted from the broader conversation about human nature—consider this from the chapter titled “Babies and the Meaning of Life:

“What makes life meaningful, beautiful and morally significant? Is there something that we care about more than we care about ourselves? What endures beyond death?

“For most parents, in day-to-day, simple, ordinary life, there is an obvious answer to these questions—even if it isn’t the only answer. Our children give point and purpose to our lives. They are beautiful (with a small dispensation for chicken pox, scraped knees and runny noses), and the words and images they create are beautiful too. They are at the root of our deepest moral dilemmas and greatest moral triumphs. We care more about our children than we do about ourselves. Our children live on after we are gone, and this gives us a kind of immortality.”

And yet, she goes on, children are rarely considered or even mentioned in thousands of years of thinking about human nature and immortality. Shouldn’t we look to the creation of the next generation as part of what gives life meaning?

For all the heavy subject matter, The Philosophical Baby is never ponderous. In fact, Gopnik explores the subject of how children think with a fresh, enthusiastic and wry voice. She draws on memories from her own childhood, weaving in lively and even poignant details from research sessions she’s conducted over her years in the field and other anecdotes.

In a chapter exploring the purpose of imaginary friends, Gopnik recounts her three-year-old niece Olivia’s imaginary friend, Charlie Ravioli, who seemingly helped her understand the busy Manhattan culture in which she was growing up. Charlie Ravioli, you see, was not a very accessible friend. Olivia often left him pretend voice mail messages imploring him to call her.

Fun and fascinating, The Philosophical Baby is a must-read for anyone who wants to better understand child development and what it means to be human.

“It matters the way all science matters,” Gopnik says. “It matters for the same reason finding out about black holes matters, finding out about DNA matters. We have to acknowledge just how important a part children are of our lives.”

Amy Scribner is the mother of two young children who would probably prefer to chew or color on flash cards.

Flipping through the channels one recent morning, I landed on a cable infomercial showing a 14-month-old strapped in his high chair, sippy cup by his side. His mother stood in front of him, running through a set of flash cards each printed with a single…

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