All Interviews

Children's & YAMiddle Grade

Clare Vanderpool

What was the first thing that went through your head when you found out you had won the Newbery Medal?
It wasn’t so much a thought that went through my head. It was more a wave that went through my body. Shock, gratitude and a great urge to jump up and down.

Who was the one person you couldn’t wait to tell about your award?
My husband was in the kitchen with me when I got the call so he was the first person I told. But then I most wanted to tell my mom and dad and sister. They were all very excited.

 
 
Do you have a favorite past Newbery winner?
There are so many good ones. I think I love the ones I read as a kid—A Wrinkle in Time, Island of the Blue Dolphins. But I also loved A Long Way from Chicago and A Year Down Yonder.
 
What’s the best part of writing books aimed at a younger audience?
It’s really fun that I have kids in the target audience. One of my daughters is in fourth grade and her teacher is reading the book out loud to the class. That is a thrill for me as a writer and as a mother. Also, I am fairly playful in my writing and I think kids enjoy that.
 
If you had to be stranded on a desert island with one fictional character, who would you want it to be?
I love questions like this. Somebody asked recently if I could have lunch with one author living or dead, who would it be, and I said Mark Twain. So I suppose Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn would the obvious choice for the desert island.  That would be fun! (I know that’s two people and you said only one but I figure they’re kind of a package deal.)
 
Have you read or listened to past Newbery acceptance speeches? Are you excited (or worried!) about your own speech?
I have not read or heard any past Newbery acceptance speeches. It will be an incredible experience to actually give the Newbery acceptance speech in New Orleans this summer. The funny thing is, my daughter just asked me last week (the day before the Newbery Award was announced) where I’d like to go on vacation. I had no idea where the summer ALA meeting was being held and of course had no idea I would be invited to attend, but my answer to her was New Orleans!
 
What’s next?
The next big thrill for me will be going to Frontenac, Kansas, to celebrate the book with them. I think most people who have read the book know that Manifest is based on the real southeast Kansas town of Frontenac and I look forward to sharing this excitement with them.

Author photo by Annmarie Algya.

What was the first thing that went through your head when you found out you had won the Newbery Medal?
It wasn't so much a thought that went through my head. It was more a wave that went through my body. Shock, gratitude and…

Fiction

Kevin Brockmeier

Kevin Brockmeier is easy to spot. He enters the café wearing a long overcoat, wire-rimmed glasses round as compasses and the subtlest look of unease. It’s harder, however, to pin him down.

Brockmeier’s reedy voice, which sounds strikingly like David Sedaris’ (without the sardonic edge), almost gets lost in the din of this bustling Little Rock bakery. After easing into a corner by the kitchen, hazelnut latte in hand, Brockmeier eyes the digital recording device on the table. (He prefers being interviewed via email.) But soon enough the conversation takes on a life of its own, ranging from the pedestrian to the profound.

In his brilliant, curious new novel, The Illumination, Brockmeier poses a weighty question: “What if our pain was the most beautiful thing about us?” He explores this query in all its complexity through six novella-length chapters, linked by a private journal of love notes written by a husband to his wife. But first, the phenomenon occurs.

What people call “The Illumination” spontaneously begins at 8:17 on a Friday night, causing everyone’s wounds to shine. Everywhere, people in psychic or physical distress start to phosphoresce, to glow. In the aftermath of a car accident, the aforementioned journal of love notes passes into the care of a hospital patient and from there through the hands of five others, touching each of them in different ways. The six recipients—a data analyst and divorcée, a photojournalist, a young boy, an evangelist, a novelist and a homeless man—inhabit a world that feels at once bizarre and familiar, a world in which human pain manifests as light.

The journal entries interspersed throughout the book are by turns tender and playful, revealing the intimacies of a happy marriage. “I love watching TV and shelling sunflower seeds with you,” one note reads. “I love how easily you cry when you’re happy. . . . I love the soft blue veins on your wrist.” Brockmeier’s hope is that the notes come together to create a composite picture of one couple’s life together, and they do. “When I was working on the novel, that was how I began each day as a way of re-immersing myself in the world I was trying to create,” he recalls.

Asked about the genesis of the novel, the author points to the missionary’s monologue in the fourth chapter of the book, a section he references frequently during our conversation. “When Ryan [the missionary] is talking about human suffering, the question of it and the value of it, he considers that maybe it’s our suffering that makes us beautiful to God, and if so, what does that imply . . . and also if so, how dare he,” Brockmeier says. “I was thinking about those things, about what value [suffering] could possibly have, and I had this image of an injury shedding light. What if that was the way God saw the world—that your pain sets you aglow—and the image seemed meaningful to me, and it slowly gave rise to a novel.”

In addition to his novels The Brief History of the Dead and The Truth About Celia, and the story collections Things That Fall from the Sky andThe View from the Seventh Layer, Brockmeier has also written two children’s books, City of Names and Grooves: A Kind of Mystery. It’s not surprising that his imaginative blend of literary fiction and fantasy also appeals to young readers.

Growing up in Little Rock, Brockmeier attended Christian schools, which partly accounts for his familiarity with the Bible and his interest in theology, specifically the works of G.K. Chesterton and Simone Weil (an epigraph from her writings introduces one of the chapters in The Illumination).

His upbringing, of course, informs his writing, but his interests are wide and varied. To call him an avid reader would be a gross understatement; he’s voracious, a student of all things. “I’m an explorer. I try to find writing that excites me,” he says. Right now what excites him is an obscure slender novel, The Private Life of Trees, by the Chilean writer Alejandro Zambra. From a soft leather briefcase, the meticulous Brockmeier produces a series of lists. (He admits to being a prolific, slightly obsessive list maker by nature.) “It’s how my mind works,” he explains. He offers up his 50 Favorite Books, followed by 50 Favorite Stories, Movies . . . Albums . . . Children’s Books. And still there are others, all of which give insight into this somewhat elusive author.

After discussing his favorites for a time, talk gradually returns to Brockmeier’s latest novel, which deserves its own place on a “Top 50” list somewhere. Asked whether the purpose of this phenomenon, the Illumination, is to awaken compassion in all beings, Brockmeier pauses for a moment before responding. “Ultimately, just because you’re granted a clearer vision of the suffering that’s around you, doesn’t necessarily make the world a better place,” he says.

The cacophony of the bakery’s kitchen swells as the weight of this bleak conclusion settles over the table. But what if, like heat lightning, the small flickers of awareness that occur in each individual character ultimately raise the consciousness of humanity as a whole? A silence ensues before Brockmeier answers, with great deliberation. “It doesn’t seem to change the systems of the world—it changes individual souls,” he says. “And I don’t know whether that’s a pessimistic or a cynical way of imagining the way this phenomenon would unfold or whether it’s a realistic one.” The inherent question hovers unanswered in the air between us. “There’s so much pain in the world and so much beauty in the world and they’re so intertwined. How do you tease them apart and can you tease them apart?”

The novel illuminates this paradox without resolving it. The book does suggest, however, that the light offers a new way of seeing and relating to others through shared pain.

“There’s something very compelling about that,” Brockmeier says. “While I was writing the book, I felt as though I was reorienting my own way of looking at the world. It’s not as if I was walking around seeing light emerging from people, but I felt as if I was training my mind to be ready to see the world that way. And occasionally I was dreaming that I saw the world that way.

“I think the best books change the way you see the world while you’re reading them,” he adds.

The Illumination is one of those books. In it, Brockmeier reveals the interconnectedness of his characters’ lives and moments of crystalline compassion, and chronicles their suffering in prose sometimes so startlingly beautiful you have to look at it indirectly, like the sun. 

Kevin Brockmeier is easy to spot. He enters the café wearing a long overcoat, wire-rimmed glasses round as compasses and the subtlest look of unease. It’s harder, however, to pin him down.

Brockmeier’s reedy voice, which sounds strikingly like David Sedaris’ (without the sardonic edge), almost…

Fiction

Karen Russell

When Karen Russell was “lost in the swamp” of composing Swamplandia!—her outlandish and haunting first novel about the Bigtree family of Florida alligator country —a host of solicitous friends and relatives offered her well-meaning advice. 

“At one point,” the 29-year-old Russell recalls during a laughter-filled call to her “tiny, dirty apartment” in Manhattan, her dad asked her, “Why don’t you write a love story? Set on a boat? During wartime? People like those things!”

“You have to have a solid bedrock to grow your crazy out of. Florida is such a weird, weird place.”

Then there were the skeptical-but-supportive “oooh-er-umms” of friends who made the mistake of asking what her novel-in-progress was about. “Try telling people you’re writing about a scary bird monster,” Russell says, laughing uproariously. “I’m like, well, one girl falls in love with a ghost. Her younger sister teams up with this scary bird monster-type man to rescue her from the Underworld. And their brother is working on the mainland in a Florida theme park.”

And finally there were the research trips into the Florida Everglades, not far from where she grew up, with her father, brother and grandfather. “My grandfather, who [recently] passed away, was very concerned,” Russell says. “He knew I was an inside girl and he would say, why are you writing about that swamp? People don’t want to read about that place; it’s full of bugs! He just knew I was going to get everything wrong. So he went out with me on this tram tour and he kept correcting the tour guide. She’d be like, ‘You see those brambles over there, that’s a gator’s nest.’ And he’d say, ‘That’s not a damn gator’s nest!’ He would reject all her facts. So I basically learned nothing on that research trip, except that my grandfather had strong opinions.”

Luckily, despite the strong opinions of her grandfather and the helpful suggestions from others, Russell stayed true to her swamp. As a result, Swamplandia! achieves the same exhilarating, remarkably inventive amalgam of the real and the fantastic that won Russell universal praise for her short story collection, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves (2006) and led to her being chosen as one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists and then, in 2010, being named one of the New Yorker’s 20 best writers under 40 years old.

One of those much-heralded early stories, “Ava Wrestles the Alligator,” Russell says, provided the seed for what becameSwamplandia! “When I was done with the other stories in that collection, I had no desire to go back to them. But with the Ava story, I really felt haunted. I kept thinking about the sad things that had happened in her family.”

Thus, Swamplandia! is told mostly from the point of view of Ava Bigtree, the 12-year-old daughter of Chief and Hilola Bigtree, the fake-Indian proprietor-performers in “the Number One Gator-Themed Park and Swamp Café” on the Ten Thousand Islands off the Gulf Coast of Florida. When Ava’s mother, the theme park’s main attraction, suddenly dies, things fall apart. Her father goes off to raise money to save the park. Her brother Kiwi, convinced he is some kind of genius, leaves to find fame and fortune on the Florida mainland. Her older sister Ossie seeks—and apparently finds—a ghostly sort of love through the Ouija board and sets off with her lover for the Underworld. And Ava naively decides she will hook up with her strange bird-man and go through hell and high water to bring her sister back. 

“They all sort of get lost,” Russell says. “It’s like a cue-ball break: Each member of the family gets lost in their own little pocket of grief. Everybody has their own doomed scheme to save the family and the park. And they’re all equally ridiculous in their own ways.”

But despite its wildly imaginative riffs, Russell says much of the book “feels pretty personal and exposing in a way. I mean, it’s not a memoir or directly autobiographical, but some of the emotional stuff feels pretty raw to me. I was just totally besotted with fairy-tale worlds when I was a kid. And we did have a swampy mangrove patch in our backyard. So at an age when I’m sure I was supposed to be using lip balm, my best friend Alexis and I were still wandering around in the muck near my house. I mean, I was not a tomboy because that implies athletic prowess. But I really loved being outdoors, and I loved reading fantasy books, all that sort of coming-of-agey, emotional stuff. So Ava’s emotional world is close to what I remember feeling when I was that age.”

Russell found further inspiration in her research into the Florida history that serves as a backdrop for her story. “You have to have a solid bedrock to grow your crazy out of,” she says. “Florida is such a weird, weird place. When I was researching this book I realized how much of our state’s history, or what I thought of as our state’s history, is totally fabricated. Fantasy is its big industry. . . . I wanted some of that history in Swamplandia! because the Bigtrees’ whole game is this really American project of self-invention. It seemed right for the texture of the book to let people know that the state itself is a mix of the real and imaginary.”

And then there are Russell’s marvelous descriptions of Florida’s prodigious, profligate landscape. “My mom would insist that we go on these doomed family outings where we would go biking in the Everglades even though we are all short, potato-shaped people. And I found that, geographically, Florida is just the most beautiful place in this country,” says Russell. “But it’s rubbing shoulders with all these strip malls and fast-food chains and super-development. My mom grew up in Miami Springs and my dad grew up in Sarasota. They both have this real nostalgia for it. When I was a kid it felt like there was this world I had just missed, a time when the place was just totally foliated and a lot more wild. So I think some of the book is born out of a nostalgia I’m probably not entitled to for the old Florida or for this wilderness that we’ve paved over a decade or two before I was born.”

Swamplandia! is thrillingly permeated with those competing American emotions—hope and doom. As for Karen Russell herself? “I’ve been very, extraordinarily lucky,” she says of her success. “Lucky in the way that, to make the math come out right, I’ll probably be eaten by a shark before I’m 30. I think that will just about balance the books.”

When Karen Russell was “lost in the swamp” of composing Swamplandia!—her outlandish and haunting first novel about the Bigtree family of Florida alligator country —a host of solicitous friends and relatives offered her well-meaning advice. 

“At one point,” the 29-year-old Russell recalls during a laughter-filled call…

Children's & YAMiddle Grade

Wendy Wan-Long Shang

In Wendy Wan-Long Shang’s debut, The Great Wall of Lucy Wu, sixth-grader Lucy has a few problems. Just when she’s supposed to get her own bedroom after perfect sister Regina goes to college, Lucy’s great-aunt from China moves in. Then, Sloane Connors threatens to take away Lucy’s chance to be team captain of the sixth-grade basketball team. And don’t even get her started on Saturday morning Chinese school.

Shang’s funny coming-of-age novel tells the story of a girl torn between the culture of her family and her idea of a “normal” American life. In a Q&A with BookPage, Shang tells us about her own childhood resistance to Chinese culture, an upcoming project and why Lucy is so good at shooting hoops.

Can you tell us a little about what inspired you to write the novel?
A few years ago, a distant relative in China contacted my mom for family photographs for some genealogy research. After she sent him the photos, he wrote back, thanking her and saying that he had thought he would never see those photos again. His statement really struck me at the core—the idea of losing photographs in this digital age is pretty astonishing, and given China's modern history, I thought he must have lost them in a truly awful way. Particularly during the Cultural Revolution, you could be persecuted for your family's perceived misdeeds, so people often burned family photographs that they thought could implicate them in some way.

I knew I didn't want to write directly about the Cultural Revolution—I think that narrative belongs to the people who experienced it. But I did want to find a way to connect a modern character to her family's past.

Can you tell us a bit about your family's heritage and background? Did you ever feel the resistance to your family’s culture that Lucy experiences?
As children, my parents fled the communists in China and moved to Taiwan. They then came to the United States as young adults. Most of our close family lives in the United States and Canada, as well as Taiwan, though we have some relatives still living in China. 

I grew up in northern Virginia, and at the time, it wasn't a terribly diverse place. (Unlike now—a woman in a hijab made my sushi the other day.) I did feel a tremendous resistance to my culture, probably because it was such a source of tension for me at school. Like Lucy, I did not want to go to Chinese school. I did eat some Chinese food, though I was a pretty picky eater, generally speaking.

Lucy and her siblings are very different—and sometimes clash. Do you have siblings? Which of the Wu kids do you most identify with?
I have one older brother—we are separated by 7 years. I have to say I identify with Lucy the most, particularly because when I was growing up, I felt different from my family. The rest of my family is very science and math-oriented, and I was more geared toward art and language. Kenny [Lucy’s brother] was written for every brilliant but absent-minded boy I know. And Regina—well, we all know a Regina, don't we?

What was your favorite subject in school when you were Lucy's age?
When I was Lucy's age, I loved reading. A great day for me was being dropped off at the library. I also had a wonderful teacher, Mrs. Thompson, and she let us work at our own pace through the class reader. There was a group of us who “competed” against each other to see who was farthest along.

I think like many passionate, lifelong readers, I can't imagine life without reading any more than giving up breathing or eating. I was a bit shy and sheltered as a child, and books were my way of exploring the world—not just different places but different emotions and ways of approaching life. I especially liked characters who did (slightly) naughty things that I wanted to do but didn't dare. The main character from The Alfred G. Graebner Memorial High School Handbook of Rules and Regulations by Ellen Conford was particularly great in that regard.

Who was your childhood hero?
My older brother was my hero throughout my childhood. He was so much older than I was, and he pushed himself to excel at everything. He was his class valedictorian, lettered in track and created these amazing adventures for himself. My parents would often ask him to get me to do things that I wouldn't do for them.

The Great Wall of Lucy Wu reminded me of one of my favorite books from elementary school, In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson. What books did you love to read when you were growing up? If kids finish your novel and want to read more about Chinese characters and families, are there any books you would recommend?

My favorite kinds of books were realistic fiction, often with a humorous edge. I loved Judy Blume, and I particularly appreciated her Tracy Wu character in Blubber. I can't say I was consciously missing Chinese characters at that point, but when I read about Tracy, there was a moment of relief. A there I am! moment. I also loved Harriet the Spy, the Little House books, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and books by Ellen Conford.

If kids are looking for more books with Chinese characters and families, there are great books to choose from. My middle child and I just finished Grace Lin's Where the Mountain Meets the Moon—it may have been the first book he read that didn’t have the word “underpants” and he loved it. While this book is a fantasy, I feel that there is still a strong Chinese sensibility in it when it comes to family and how parents and children are bonded to each other. I think readers would also enjoy Millicent Min, Girl  Genius and Stanford Wong Flunks Big-Time by Lisa Yee, as well as the Alvin Ho books by Lenore Look. If they would like to read more about children who grew up during the Cultural Revolution, Red Scarf Girl by Ji-li Jiang is excellent.

Are you a basketball fan? Why did you choose for Lucy to be obsessed with (and very good at) basketball?
Honestly, I was not a basketball fan when I started the book. I chose for Lucy to be a basketball fan in part because as a Chinese-American woman writing about a Chinese-American girl, I wanted to be sure that Lucy was her own person. Consequently, I deliberately gave her some distinct characteristics I did not possess, namely, basketball prowess and a different height. However, in the course of researching this book, I watched women's basketball and read books, particularly by Tennessee women's basketball coach Pat Summitt, and I have to say, if you want to watch a game that's about teamwork and smart plays, women's basketball is where it's at.

Can you tell us about your next project?
I am currently researching a baseball book (funny you should mention In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson!)—there's an interesting point in time where Little League represented a lot of the hopes and dreams of Chinese-Americans, and reflected the changing culture in America as well. It's kind of funny for me that this book also has a sports motif, since I played exactly one season of organized sports as a kid. But my kids play a lot of sports, and for them, sports are a source of excitement, a chance to learn about sportsmanship, and of course, an opportunity to practice teamwork.

Author photo by Maria Pschigoda.

In Wendy Wan-Long Shang’s debut, The Great Wall of Lucy Wu, sixth-grader Lucy has a few problems. Just when she’s supposed to get her own bedroom after perfect sister Regina goes to college, Lucy’s great-aunt from China moves in. Then, Sloane Connors threatens to take…

LiteratureArts & Culture

Stanley Fish

Stanley Fish just might be America’s most famous professor. His columns for the New York Times routinely receive hundreds of comments, and he has published 12 books, including How to Write a Sentence. This slim volume—clever as it is informative—documents Fish’s love affair with language and guides readers in their own pursuit of clear writing. BookPage caught up with the professor for his take on writing mistakes, favorite authors and how sentences can save us.

You write that you appreciate fine sentences as others appreciate fine wines. Do you have a favorite?
My favorite sentence is the one by Swift that I analyze in the book. I admire it for its efficiency, its apparent simplicity and its extraordinarily quiet brutality. “Last week I saw a woman flayed, and you will hardly believe how much it altered her person for the worse.” (Did he really say that?)

Who is the intended audience of How to Write a Sentence?
I had multiple audiences in mind. I’m speaking in part to the universe of composition teachers, many of whom have been seduced by what I call “the lure of content.” I hope to persuade some of them to pay serious and extended attention to forms. I also write for those who find themselves taken with a sentence they read or hear, but don’t quite have the vocabulary to describe and analyze the source of their pleasure. And I am writing for the even larger audience made up of those who fear the act of composing, and feel that writing something coherent and efficient is a task immeasurably beyond them.

I want to tell these readers that they can do it, perhaps not as well as a Jonathan Swift or an Oscar Wilde or a Virginia Woolf, but in a way that brings the satisfaction that attends any act of mastery.

When did you first discover that language has the power to “organize the world” and that sentences can “save us”?
I’ve always thrilled to the power of language, but it was only when I studied classical, medieval and renaissance rhetoric in graduate school that I discovered a world of verbal effects and the ways of codifying them. Almost everything I have done both in my academic work and in my public journalism has emerged from my study of rhetoric.

When I say that sentences can save us I mean that in a world where projects often go awry and situations are almost never neatly and finally resolved, the existence of sentences that move confidently to their destination and provide, for a moment, a definitive summing-up is something of a miracle, and one we can have recourse to at any time.

What is the most common mistake your students make in writing sentences?
All of the mistakes that students make stem from a failure to realize that a sentence is a structure of logical relationships; that is, a structure every component of which relates in a rigorous way to every other component.

You give examples of how to write sentences like Henry James, Tana French and other authors. Is every author imitable? Can you learn to write like Faulkner?
It depends on what you mean by “like Faulkner.” If you mean can you learn to write sentences that communicate both the power and the anguish of Faulkner’s, the answer is not very likely. But you can learn how to write sentences as long and as involuted as Faulkner’s, while learning how to maintain and extend a basic structure of thought for many clauses and phrases. Learning to do that won’t make you Faulkner, but it will make you a better writer.

You refer to “virtuosi in the art” of crafting sentences. In your opinion, who is at the top of that esteemed group?
Ford Madox Ford, especially in The Good Soldier, every sentence of which is a marvel.

I spent many hours in high school diagramming sentences for a course titled Modern Grammar. You write that Gertrude Stein found this activity “exciting”—but my 14-year-old self found it quite taxing. Why should students make the effort to diagram sentences?
When Stein says that the experience of diagramming sentences is exciting, what she means is that the experience of everything falling into place in a complex structure is exciting because it gives you a glimpse into the possibility of achieving a kind of perfection, even if it is perfection on a small scale.

Do all devoted readers have the capability of being good writers, too?
All devoted readers have the capability of becoming better writers because they are devoted readers; whether they become good in some strong sense of that word is another matter, but better is good enough.

Author photo by Jay Rosenblatt.

Stanley Fish just might be America’s most famous professor. His columns for the New York Times routinely receive hundreds of comments, and he has published 12 books, including How to Write a Sentence. This slim volume—clever as it is informative—documents Fish’s love affair with…

Children's & YAPicture Book

Erin E. Stead

What was the first thing that went through your head when you found out you had won the Caldecott Medal?
For the first moment, while the committee was still in mid sentence, absolutely positively nothing. I was still shocked that I was receiving the call and I was utterly speechless. The first actual thought to form was that I must have heard them wrong. In my most secret, wildest dreams I thought maybe I could pull off an Honor in my career. But not the medal, and not this year. I just must have heard them wrong.

Who was the one person you couldnt wait to tell about your award?
Philip! He knew I was getting a very important phone call when the phone rang (I did not). I think he thought he should let me have the moment for myself. Also, he had to take our dog out! So, after I received the call and stumbled off the phone, I then called my editor to ask him to repeat everything to me slowly. I took one deep breath and found my feet, then threw on my coat and snow boots and ran to the park to tell Phil.

Do you have a favorite past Caldecott winner?
I love books and have a suspicion that my answer would change depending on when I was asked and what I was looking at during that time. But oh, how I love Evaline Ness, David Small, Marc Simont and Alice and Martin Provensen. If I am including Honors, then I could go on and on. I am honored this year to be listed with Bryan Collier and David Ezra Stein, both of whom I am a tremendous fan. Leo Lionni, Kadir Nelson and Peter Sis are some others. I could make this a very long list.

What's the best part of illustrating books aimed at a younger audience?
There are so, so many good things about illustrating books. I love the idea of being checked out from the library or told at the local store's story time. If I'm really lucky and someone likes the book enough to buy it that feels very special. But I think the best books (the books that Philip and I try very hard to deserve to share shelf space with) aren't necessarily aimed at a younger audience. I think they're just aimed at people. I think it's just as hard to be a kid as it is to be an adult. If you can tug at a person a little (whether they're small or big) and make them feel sincerely happy, or sad, or silly, then that is a real book. The best part for me about being an illustrator is that it keeps me honest. If I can make a book as honest as I can and my book makes someone (small or big) feel something honest, than maybe I have made a real book.
 
What artists inspire you?
Like the Caldecott question, I could go on and on. William Kentridge tends to stop me dead in my tracks. Tara Donovan, Giacometti, Robert Motherwell, Ray Johnson to name a few. James Whistler and Paul Klee. This could be a very long list.

Have you read or listened to past Caldecott acceptance speeches? Are you excited (or worried!) about your own speech?
I have read and listened to acceptance speeches for the Newbery and the Caldecott in the past, but never truly thought I would have to make one myself. It was the second thing Neal, my dear editor, said to me after he had told me I won. I think he knew I would be pretty terrified about this. I am shy in front of three people, let alone a large group. I am worried but I'm glad I will have some time to get my head around it.

What's next?
As long as Phil and I can make this our job, this is what we'll be doing. He has a book coming out this spring entitled Jonathan and the Big Blue Boat. I have a book coming out next winter written by my friend Julie Fogliano. It will be called And Then It's Spring. Phil has written me another story (!) which I am working on right now. It's about a bear and will be out Fall 2012.

Also in BookPage: Read a review of A Sick Day for Amos McGee.

What was the first thing that went through your head when you found out you had won the Caldecott Medal?
For the first moment, while the committee was still in mid sentence, absolutely positively nothing. I was still shocked that I was receiving the…

Memoir

Ree Drummond

Here’s an old-fashioned love story that will make you fan yourself, swoon and maybe even break into a light sweat: how a city girl fell in love with a country boy and changed the course of her life, all because of passion and her weak-kneed reaction to an unexpected relationship.

In the mid-’90s, Ree Drummond was in the process of breaking up with a guy in California when she came home to Oklahoma to regroup. She would apply to law schools in Chicago, find an apartment and take it easy under her parents’ roof before starting the rest of her life. It was a “self-imposed pit stop.”

“I think everyone has a story—I've just found a fun way to tell my story and convey my day-to-day life.”

That was until she saw a Marlboro Man-type character from across the room at a smoky bar, a moment deliciously depicted in her romantic new memoir, The Pioneer Woman: Black Heels to Tractor Wheels—A Love Story.

“He was tall, strong and mysterious, sipping bottled beer and wearing jeans and, I noticed, cowboy boots. And his hair. The stallion’s hair was very short and silvery gray—much too gray for how young his face said he was, but just gray enough to send me through the roof with all sorts of fantasies of Cary Grant in North by Northwest.”

Fast forward 14 years. Drummond married Marlboro Man, became a full-fledged ranch wife in Pawhuska, Oklahoma, and had four children. She launched ThePioneerWoman.com in 2006 to share stories with out-of-town friends and family, and nearly five years later the website has inspired a #1 New York Times best-selling cookbook, earned a Bloggie Award for Best Weblog of the Year—twice—and drawn countless fans who look to Drummond for easy-to-follow, cowboy-approved recipes, insights on life in the country and humor. (Ever suffered from armpit stains in the most inconvenient of times? You’ve got a sympathetic sister in PW, as she’s affectionately known on her site.)

During a period of writer’s block in 2007, Drummond decided to entertain her website readers with the story of her courtship with Marlboro Man. That story blossomed into 40-plus online chapters and finally became The Pioneer Woman. The book includes the chapters available on ThePioneerWoman.com, along with an all-new section about the couple’s first year of marriage—what Drummond calls “a dose of reality” that chronicles the period when she was dealing with the divorce of her parents, a rough pregnancy and business troubles on the ranch.

I recently visited Drummond at her family’s ranch in Pawhuska and got a firsthand look at the landscape so present in the book. The feeling of driving down the long, dusty gravel road to Drummond’s property was a bit surreal, since the night before I’d read a scene in which the Pioneer Woman runs her car into a ditch on an early date with Marlboro Man. Luckily, I made it to the ranch in one piece.

Drummond and I got right down to business talking about her “fizzy love story,” as she describes it. It’s officially categorized as a memoir, although PW thinks “memoir has a little bit more of a cerebral, serious meaning—presidents write memoirs.”

Whatever you call it, The Pioneer Woman is perfect reading for Valentine’s Day, whether you’re celebrating a lasting love or still looking for The One. Yes, it is mushy and occasionally sentimental, but I’d venture to say even the most cynical of readers will be charmed by Drummond’s hilarious story of being won over by a cowboy. In just a matter of weeks, she went from having a career and going out on the town in Los Angeles to working cattle and smooching under the stars in rural Oklahoma; from vegetarian to steak lover; from a woman unsatisfied with her romantic relationships to a woman hopelessly in love. It’s a dizzying transition and an adventure, and as PW writes in the introduction, “I hope it reminds you of the reasons you fell in love in the first place. And if you haven’t yet found love, I hope it shows you that love often can come to find you instead . . . probably when you least expect it.”

When I met with Drummond at the ranch’s beautifully restored lodge, it was easy to see how an urbanite could become captivated by such a remote locale. From the sweeping property below the house, to the beauty of the horses in the surrounding pastures and the calm of a still landscape, Drummond’s view made me feel a greater sense of peace and freedom than I’d felt in months of city living.

When I asked if she ever thinks about what life would have been like if she hadn’t moved to the country, Drummond answers without pause: “Yeah, I shudder. I am thoroughly convinced that I am where I was meant to wind up. In the country we really lead an isolated life . . . we’re just together, we’re out here, we’re on the land and in the quiet. It’s not that everyone needs that to maintain some level of peace and contentment, but I needed it. It centered me.” During our conversation, Drummond often comes back to the idea that her choice is not the choice for everybody, but sitting on the couch in the cozy lodge and surrounded by wide-open windows that overlook the ranch, her choice seems to make a lot of sense. That much nature is good for the soul.

In my time on the ranch, PW comes across pretty much exactly as she presents herself on her website—warm and funny with a hint of self-deprecation. She gives me cinnamon rolls for the road (I sampled them before I left Osage County) and frets about the puffiness of her face when she sits for a quick video interview.

After talking with Drummond for an hour, what stands out the most is her insistence that her tale is perfectly normal. “I know this sounds a little funny,” she says, “but I contend that I am not an extraordinary person; there’s nothing extraordinary about me or my story. I think everyone has a story—I’ve just found a fun way to tell my story and convey my day-to-day life.”

In spite of all the heart pounding described in her book, Drummond maintains that she does not live in a romance novel. “I don’t believe that romance conquers all and love conquers all. But the passion—I don’t know—it propels you forward through the tough times.”

There is a tall order of passion in The Pioneer Woman—although as my grandmother would say, the specific bedroom details are “left to the imagination.” (The story is billed as a bodice-ripper, but Drummond quipped to me that “it’s like the first little seam is ripped—that’s about it.”)

“That’s not to say that a 20-year-old marriage or a 40-year-old marriage has to have daily bursts of roses and chocolates and diamonds,” she says, “but I remember through the rough times when we were first married—my parents split, all of the bumps in the road—I really was sustained by this guy. My heart would race when I was around him.” (Surprisingly, Marlboro Man has not read the complete saga of which he is the hero. He read a few installments online, only commenting if his wife got an agricultural fact wrong. “He was like my fact-checker when it came to cattle and horses and that sort of thing,” Drummond says.)

From wardrobe malfunction to prairie fire, from fireworks-worthy kisses to a disaster of a honeymoon, The Pioneer Woman is a fun and sexy romp with a most unexpected setting: a working cattle ranch. This romantic journey is a delight, even though we know from the beginning what the ending will bring (reader, she married him). As you experience the woozy sensation of early love through Drummond’s writing, you’ll wonder why she even thought about packing those bags and heading to Chicago. These days, so does she.

“I was completely in love with him,” the Pioneer Woman recalls. “In retrospect, there was no way that I was going to leave in the throes of what I was feeling.”

 

Here’s an old-fashioned love story that will make you fan yourself, swoon and maybe even break into a light sweat: how a city girl fell in love with a country boy and changed the course of her life, all because of passion and her weak-kneed…

Mystery & SuspenseSuspense

Mo Hayder

Where do you write?
Always in the same place—bed. And always in my pyjamas.

Name one book you think everyone should read.   
The Encyclopedia Brittanica. If you stop being curious about the world what more do you have to live for? 

 

What's your favorite movie based on a book?
I liked Roman Polanski’s Tess. My mother was a great Thomas Hardy fan, but I probably tried reading him when I was too young and found him hard going. Seeing Tess on the screen helped me access the story in a way I hadn’t been mature enough to do in the text.

If you weren't a writer, how would you earn a living? 
I’d stack shelves in the supermarket. I don’t have any aspirations other than to write.

Of all the characters you've ever written, which is your favorite?
Mama Strawberry in The Devil of Nanking and The Walking Man in the Walking Man series.

What was the proudest moment of your career so far? 
Standing up to my Japanese publishers who didn’t want to publish The Devil of Nanking unless I lowered the statistics I was quoting on how many civilians had died in the rape of Nanking. They dropped me and I’ve never been published in Japan since.

What are you working on now? 
I have just finished a standalone novel—Hanging Hill, and now I’m working on the sixth in the Jack Caffery series about a maximum security hospital in the UK.

Author photo by Arnaud Février.

 

Where do you write?
Always in the same place—bed. And always in my pyjamas.

Name one book you think everyone should read.   
The Encyclopedia Brittanica. If you stop being curious about the world what more do you have to live for? 

 

What's your favorite movie…

Fiction

Bradford Morrow

Describe your book in one sentence.
Cassandra Brooks, the first woman diviner in a long lineage of patriarchs who practiced the craft, comes upon a hanged girl in a lonely forest in upstate New York while dowsing water for a developer, and in doing so inadvertently opens up a Pandora’s box of past secrets that threaten her very existence.

Name one book you think everyone should read.
The Diviner’s Tale? No, well, William Gaddis’ The Recognitions meant everything to me when I first read it. There are hundreds, though, really, as you know.

What book are you embarrassed NOT to have read?
Still haven’t finished, to my abject shame, Don Quixote.

What was the proudest moment of your career so far?
When my first book was accepted for publication, that was the proudest moment. Until my second book was accepted, and so forth. To write a novel and have the great fortune for others to believe in it enough to publish it, bring it into the world for other readers to experience it—what could be better? And when a reader connects with the book, I’m prouder and happier yet.

If you weren't a writer, how would you earn a living?
Either as a musician, my lifelong infatuation, or as a bookseller, an occupation that would surround me with what I most love in this world. Patti Smith was right on the mark in her National Book Award comment, “Please, no matter how we advance technologically, please don’t abandon the book. There is nothing in our material world more beautiful than the book.” So, a bookshop with music constantly playing, that would be pure heaven.

What's your favorite movie based on a book?
Werner Herzog’s version of Dracula is one of the most original films based on a book I’ve ever encountered. His direction is astonishing for its originality, its striking out from the core text in fresh and haunting directions, but also for its fidelity to Bram Stoker’s original. Plus, damn, does it get any better than Klaus Kinski when the dawn light strikes him, and he collapses, folding like a dying bat into his vampire death?

If you had to be stranded on a desert island with one fictional character, who would you want it to be?
Captain Lemuel Gulliver, because he seems to have an endless store of yarns that would keep me in high spirits, and an uncanny ability to escape the various islands, floating or otherwise, he gets himself stuck on in the first place.

Describe your book in one sentence.
Cassandra Brooks, the first woman diviner in a long lineage of patriarchs who practiced the craft, comes upon a hanged girl in a lonely forest in upstate New York while dowsing water for a developer, and in doing so…

Memoir

Gabrielle Hamilton

Prune, an unpretentious, 30-seat restaurant in New York City’s East Village, drew attention upon its 1999 opening. And so did its chef-owner, Gabrielle Hamilton, who was quickly approached by people suggesting she write a book.

“I remember at the time thinking, oh man, this is so cheap. Everybody gets a book? You open a restaurant and you get a book?” recalls Hamilton, whose essays about the intersection of food and life have appeared in the New York Times, Food + Wine and other publications. The flattery would have convinced others, but Hamilton wasn’t so easily persuaded. “I love books. I revere books. To me, they are precious, magic creatures that shouldn’t be like turds in the toilet.” And so she said no to every offer of a book contract or agent representation, choosing instead to focus on her restaurant business.

But as Hamilton’s skills developed, both with a pen and with a stove, she thought she could make a greater contribution. The result is Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef, a riveting memoir that explores her sometimes tumultuous family life and years spent in catering kitchens before opening Prune. The book has drawn ecstatic praise from fellow chefs, including Anthony Bourdain and Mario Batali.

Hamilton’s story begins with idyllic childhood family dinners with her French mother, artist father and four siblings at their rural Pennsylvania home. But when Hamilton’s parents divorce, the children’s lives are flipped on end. During one summer, weeks pass when then-13-year-old Hamilton and her brother Simon are literally left alone. That’s when Hamilton steps into a professional kitchen for the first time, trying to make money to support her prematurely adult life. She wanders into a kitchen in her tourist town and is put to work peeling potatoes. “And that, just like that, is how a whole life can start,” Hamilton writes.

 

"I revere books. To me, they are precious, magic creatures that shouldn’t be like turds in the toilet.”

The ensuing journey takes her down a path seasoned with trials, errors and colorful relationships. Hamilton moves to New York, is in and out of college (it takes her three tries to graduate) and kitchens, often scraping by financially while learning about hard living from her fellow kitchen staff. After years of work in restaurants, catering kitchens and even a summer camp, Hamilton decides to pursue her long-held desire to be a writer. And so, with 30 on the horizon, she leaves her final freelance cooking gig and her girlfriend to head for the Midwest and the University of Michigan’s MFA writing program. It’s not long before she finds herself back in a catering kitchen, and upon her return to New York, Hamilton is seduced by the idea of her own restaurant—and later by an Italian man who pulls her into a green-card marriage, all while charming her with family summers in Puglia, Italy, familial joviality and Italian cooking. The result is a beautifully told tale of a colorful and sometimes spicy life. 

The book’s conversation unfolds at an easy pace, like getting to know a new friend, tale by life-defining tale, and Hamilton’s writing becomes almost electric when she sees a restaurant space that could become her own. Her style mimics both the winding life path she’s traveled and her casual, conversational attitude. “Basically, it’s an invitation. So here, I’m going to start the conversation,” she explains, “and hopefully people will reciprocate.”

The time Hamilton spent crafting the memoir mimicked her story’s more exhilarating moments. As she wrote, she juggled two children under the age of three and a bustling restaurant. Sleep wasn’t a priority, and in the process Hamilton gave up on striving for balance.

“If I keep pursuing it, I feel like I’ve failed constantly. So now I’m resigned to the idea that it is not balance. It’s a binge and purge,” Hamilton explains from Prune’s dining room. “I just have to change my mind about whether that sucks or not.”

Sometimes that meant seeing her children only when they were asleep. On other occasions, she left her restaurant staff to run the kitchen while she spent time with her sons. And when it came time to transform the first draft of Blood, Bones & Butter into the finished product, the restaurant’s office became Hamilton’s refuge.

But she wonders, what’s the alternative? “I have this restaurant that was very popular, I have this book deal, I have these incredible children. What was I going to do, say no to all of that? It sucks that it all happened at the same time, but that’s a high-class set of problems right there,” she says, laughing. “I could die now and feel content.” 

 

Prune, an unpretentious, 30-seat restaurant in New York City’s East Village, drew attention upon its 1999 opening. And so did its chef-owner, Gabrielle Hamilton, who was quickly approached by people suggesting she write a book.

“I remember at the time thinking, oh man, this is so…

Children's & YAPicture Book

Shane W. Evans

Shane W. Evans’ Underground, a spare and dramatic depiction of the Underground Railroad, is highlighted as part of February’s Black History Month picture book roundup. Reviewer Robin Smith praises the "stunning simplicity" of the illustrations, writing: "[Evans] respects the young audience and makes us want to join in with the book’s closing words, ‘Freedom. I am free. He is free. She is free. We are free.’ " 

Evans took the time to answer a few questions for BookPage on inspiration, Black History Month and what he’s working on next.

What was your favorite book as a child?
I would have to say that I was a fan of The Snowy Day and Where the Wild Things Are.

What’s the best part of creating books for a younger audience?
There are SO MANY . . . knowing that you are touching the life of young readers is a great privilege and a blessing. I look at all of the great stories there are to share and it is a BIG inspiration to me. I can often see in the eyes of children the JOY that they have when they learn that they too can tell stories through pictures and words. I always encourage them to share their creative ideas.

What artists inspire you?
The world is a BIG inspiration. I have traveled to MANY countries and seen many cultural expressions through those travels. One of my most favorite places to explore is the continent of Africa. It is so rich with stories that inspire so many feelings that I have shared through my work.


 

What was the proudest moment of your career so far?
I was invited to the Kennedy Center and asked to share the book Olu’s Dream with an audience of hundreds. In addition I wrote a song to go along with the book and to hear the audience sing along . . . that was a GREAT TREAT!

What sort of research did you do when working on Underground?
I wanted to go on the journey of “underground” myself, so I wanted to use my existing knowledge on the topic so that I could explore more of the FEELING of the experience through the art. I can only imagine what it would feel like from ALL of the stories that I have heard and read. This book is about the feeling of simple actions and feelings like fear, running, crawling, making friends, etc.; this is the essence and the spirit of the underground.

At the end of the book I researched facts to give a starting direction for readers to go deeper and learn more about the people and times. I also focused on the idea of the “underground” and the spirit of this story still living with us today and the importance of us helping our neighbors to freedom.

Do you have a favorite book to read in honor of Black History Month?
That is a GREAT question . . . there are so MANY. The one that comes to mind actually is The Middle Passage by Tom Feelings . . . this is more about FEELING and when I pick this book up I have to go into a sad and scary part of my imagination . . . this helps me truly appreciate all of the work that has been put into building this history of ALL people.

What’s next?
Continuing to create! That is a must . . . I have a great book coming out with a friend and TV/film star Mr. Taye Diggs called Chocolate Me! We are both very excited about the project. In addition I completed a book that I view as my “follow up” to Underground called We March which highlights the march on Washington, D.C., in 1963. Also two exciting projects working with Olu. The first is Olu’s Dream . . . The Musical . . . !!! which will be a stage production of the book Olu’s Dream. Oluizumz.com is a website that will showcase the MANY faces of Olu and offers a fun way to learn. This month we launch 28 “Faces of Black History” to commemorate the incredible offerings of wonderful people creating wonderful stories.

 

 

Shane W. Evans' Underground, a spare and dramatic depiction of the Underground Railroad, is highlighted as part of February's Black History Month picture book roundup. Reviewer Robin Smith praises the "stunning simplicity" of the illustrations, writing: "[Evans] respects the young audience and makes us want to…

Susan Elizabeth Phillips

Novelist Susan Elizabeth Phillips has been delivering hilarious stories of happy endings for more than 25 years. Her latest book, Call Me Irresistible, was our top pick for romance in February 2001 and follows a love triangle involving the grown children of three of her most memorable couples.

Describe your book in one sentence
Mr. Perfect meets Ms. Screw-Up and she does something that makes him really mad and he does a lot of things that make her really mad but she’s stuck in his town and now everybody’s mad at her and the only thing she can feel good about is that she would never ever fall in love with Mr. Perfect and he would never ever fall in love with her but then there’s some kissing and that only leads to more trouble and what’s the world coming to, anyway?!

Where do you write?
Not in my beautiful office, that’s for sure. Instead, I curl up with my laptop all over the house, from a beat-up La-Z-Boy to the screen porch.

If you weren't a writer, how would you earn a living?
Probably in my original career as a high school teacher. Or a rock star. I think I’d be good at that.

You revisit a lot of characters in this book. Which one were you happiest to be writing about again?
If I could only pick one—which is a totally unfair thing to ask me to do!—I’d probably say Ted’s mother, Francesca. As the mother of grown sons, I completely identify with her need to mess in their lives when they don’t want her to.

Name one book you think everyone should read.
I’m going to fall back on that old standby, To Kill a Mockingbird. It’s our great American poem.

What book are you embarrassed NOT to have read?
Not a single one. Any book I wanted to read, I’ve already read. Reading is pure joy for me, and I’ve never been influenced by “should haves.” Let’s face it. Most of those books are depressing as hell.

What are you working on now?
At the beginning of Call Me Irresistible, the hero’s bride flees her wedding and we never see her again. Now that’s hardly fair, is it? I’m halfway done with her book and am very much enjoying learning her story.

You can read an excerpt from the book on Phillips' website.

 
 

 

Novelist Susan Elizabeth Phillips has been delivering hilarious stories of happy endings for more than 25 years. Her latest book, Call Me Irresistible, was our top pick for romance in February 2001 and follows a love triangle involving the grown children of…

FictionDebut Fiction

Deborah Harkness

Featuring an enchanted manuscript and a forbidden relationship between a witch and a vampire, Deborah Harkness’ debut novel, A Discovery of Witches, is sure to cast a spell over readers worldwide.

A Discovery of Witches has been described as everything from “paranormal romance” to “a magical romp through academia.” How do you think of it?

I don’t think it’s easy to categorize this novel. In some ways, I think it’s a book mystery; it’s a book about books. I love books like Possession, Shadow of the Wind and The Club Dumas, so in my mind, A Discovery of Witches is really about this search for a book that might answer all of our questions—Ashmole 782. Everything else that happens is in some ways just orbiting around this very important book.

Between working as a professor of history and blogging about wine—how did you manage to find the time to write such a huge novel?

[laughing] When I think back on it, I can’t quite put all the pieces together! I was teaching full time, and I kept trying to blog, so honestly I just tried to write in the first couple of hours each day. You know, the time before the phone starts ringing and West Coast email starts leaking in. Somewhere in the back of my mind as I would go through the rest of the day I would think about it and sometimes I’d get a second wind in the evening, but really it was written just a few hours in the morning every day. For me it was a good day if I got two or three pages done. Sometimes if I was on vacation I would write 12 pages in a day, but I just pushed through it one page at a time and it got done! It took 20 months from the first idea to the delivery of the manuscript into the copyeditor’s hands.

You’ve stated that your jumping-off point for the novel was the question of what vampires would do for a living if they really existed. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

What was really behind the question was the notion that it really must be quite difficult to be someone who lives while everyone they love around them dies and while the world that they know changes over and over and over again. For me, my job gives me an enormous amount of joy—I love being a historian, I love teaching, I love the research—but to me, what I’d never seen was a vampire who had that kind of purpose to anchor themselves in. How would you think of something you could do not just for this one life, but conceivably for hundreds or thousands of years?

Did you feel that since vampires are in fact historians of world history that would be a bit of a cheat?

Yes, definitely. I knew that vampires would not want to be historians; it would be too close to home and would offer them no respite from what their whole lives were, which is remembering.

When I started to think about who vampires would spend their time with, I realized that human beings wouldn’t be very interesting to them, so that’s how I stumbled upon the idea of witches and daemons. I realized very quickly that it would be witches who would the historians and the anthropologists. They were the record keepers because of the traditions they have maintained and upheld.

In many ways your own research is very similar to Diana’s—have you also been interested in the supernatural?

I’ve been fascinated with it in terms of how, for so long, the supernatural was just part of the natural. Now we have a very strong divide where we think, there’s the world, and then there’s this supernatural stuff, but that has not been true for most of history. . . . I was really interested in the idea that for such a long time people would think “well, that happened because a witch made it happen,” because there really wasn’t a better explanation.

I always tell my students to try to imagine what people from the 16th century would think if they saw us walk over to a wall and flip a switch and a light on the other side of the room turned on. I couldn’t draw you an electric diagram of how that works, so on some level we take science on faith and that’s our explanation today. In some sense, science is the new magic, especially for those of us who aren’t actively involved in science.

Speaking of science, one of the things that is so refreshing about this novel is the way you create a genetic explanation for the paranormal.

For me, the world of this book really needed to be a world that would make sense. I tried to figure out a way for this world to exist in our world. I realized that modern genetic research would be a problem—for these different species, who we used to differentiate because they could make certain things happen or based on what they ate, suddenly the prospect of having a car accident and having your blood tested and having it revealed that it was different in some significant way, this struck me as being both enormously frightening as well as offering up the prospect of real understanding.

I did a ton of reading about genetics and different theories about chromosomal change and [read] the great studies of spontaneous chromosomal mutations due to pathogen bombardments. It seemed to me that there were all kinds of wonderful possible explanations in the scientific world, so that’s the explanation I went with.

As an aside, I think that alchemy is actually really helpful in terms of trying to marry the fantastical with the real world because alchemy is a scientific discipline where there is a belief that substances change fundamentally from one thing to another. Alchemy has a rich set of images and beliefs about how a seed can turn into a plant, or lead can turn into gold, or the mortal can change into the immortal. So I began to think well, how is neuroscience like magic, or neutron bombardment like alchemy? Those were really fun days when pieces like that began to fall into place.

Diana is such a compelling character. She’s so strong and independent, it was surprising to discover that she wasn’t the starting point for the novel.

Well, Diana was actually the first character name that I wrote down. So, while the questions about the book may have started with vampires—after all, the world was pretty obsessed with vampires in the Fall of 2008!—it all very quickly became about this world, and some of the very first things I wrote down about the book were about witches and daemons. Pretty much as soon as I figured out that witches were the historians, then I began focusing more on them and that element of the story.

Diana’s name came to me very quickly through a combination of thinking about vampires as hunters, since Diana is the goddess of the hunt, but also thinking about some of the first families that were victims of the witch hunts in Salem in 1692 here in America.

It was important to me that Diana be really smart and really independent, but also somebody who was ultimately appealing. I think that a lot of women that I’ve talked to really empathize with some of her struggles about being independent. I think it’s good for fiction to deal with those issues, not necessarily as one of the central things, but as something that gets worked out in the course of the plot.

It sounds like there are quite a few striking parallels between Diana and yourself.

Certainly the fact that she is a historian and working at the Bodleian was something I knew, though I must say what historians actually do in a day is not always how it seems in books. A lot of it just came from tracking situations and thinking what someone with her background and characteristics would do. From that perspective, she often does things that I would never do, because she is not me. In some ways it was almost wish fulfillment of what I’d like more heroines in literature to be, that appealing mix of vulnerable and intelligent that I think most women are in real life.

The sexual tension you develop between Diana and Matthew is incredibly intense. Sex scenes and convincing love stories may be the hardest things to write, so do you have a particular philosophy regarding these elements in writing?

I think the best sex scenes are the ones that leave a lot to the imagination. We’re very unique individuals, so when people are very good they can suggest in a word or a phrase what’s really going on.

I also think sex should be about joy; it shouldn’t be about pain or angst. It should be one of the most joyful things that happens! I wanted their romance to involve some tension, but also lots of laughter and lots of mutual respect and give and take, so that’s what I tried to put in those scenes.

I know there have been some people who have wanted to know where the real sex is, but it’s only been 40 days! These are people with PhDs, and they haven’t picked each other up at a bar for a one-night stand. I wanted it to be realistic about what these two characters would do in these incredibly fraught situations, so I just wouldn’t have bought it as a reader if they had been spending these long days in bed. They need to wait for the right moment, which will happen.

Given the current fervor for vampires, were you worried people would be burnt out?

When I started writing the story, I really started writing it for me. . . . I had spent six or eight weeks on it and had nine chapters completed before I even told anyone else that I was working on something. I didn’t really know exactly what I was doing, so the larger issue of how my writing would fit into the world wasn’t even something I was thinking about. I told the story that I wanted to tell and that I couldn’t keep from telling. Whether it had vampires or witches, whether it would be published or anyone would read it, that wasn’t the issue to me. What did motivate me is that there are so many books out there that draw on history, secret books and alchemy, so I wanted to see if I could put all those pieces together again in a way that seemed more plausible or possible to me as a historian.

Why do you think we just can’t quit vampires? What about them is so appealing?

Because I don’t have children of my own, I was largely oblivious to the more recent young-adult fervor over supernatural and paranormal romances. I mean, you can’t go through an airport or turn on the television without knowing about Twilight, but I hadn’t read those books.

However, I grew up with Anne Rice, so vampires are not a new thing! I am really fascinated with the cycles that these topics go through, because they are useful symbols for us to think about life through.

I think we have a very complicated relationship to creatures and people who aren’t like us. On the one hand, we are enormously attracted to them, we are fascinated by them and want to know more. There is also some fear and drawing back from people who aren’t like us. I think the vampire is an extreme example of that attraction and withdrawal mechanism. Witches serve similar but not identical purposes.

Throughout history there has been some kind of human sense of some people not being like us and struggling with how to explain that. Some of the most enduring ways [of explaining the unknown] in literature have been about people with paranormal abilities. Interestingly, in most western countries, vampires in their current form are rather late to the party!

Who are some of your favorite fictional vampires (or witches)?

I always go back to Anne Rice. Those are really the witch and vampire books that made the biggest impression on me as a young adult growing up. The Mayfair witches that she wrote about in The Witching Hour and the characters she created in The Vampire Chronicles really made a big impression [on me]. I was always a big fan of Louis in Interview with the Vampire, more so than Lestat.

I also have to say that I have an enormous fondness for the Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s vampires. I was an Angel girl for a very long time, but by the end I was with Spike all the way. I also really loved Drusilla, who was wonderful. I loved the humor in Joss Whedon’s vampires. They took themselves so seriously while they were in the moment but then realized their actions were huge clichés.

So far, the response to the book and the pre-publication buzz has been overwhelmingly positive. Did you ever expect your book would garner this kind of response?

No! I am a history professor so this was very unexpected! The first responses from foreign publishers were so wonderful because they knew very early on that they wanted to translate it and make it available to readers. I think that was my first sign that people would embrace the book, but you never know whether people are going to adopt your characters and bring them into their homes and have them become part of their imaginative lives.

I’ve really loved having readers write me and tell me that they love some of the more minor characters other than Matthew and Diana, because they all seem so real to me. In the end, I think getting that kind of response is really what it’s about for an author. I’m just so happy the book has been getting this kind of response as I hope it helps it find itself into the hands of other readers who will enjoy it. When you write non-fiction, you don’t have that same kind of emotional impact on your readers!

A Discovery of Witches will be published in more than 30 translated editions. Is there a particular version you’re especially excited to see?

Oh gosh! I think that I will have a very special place in my heart for the French edition because it will be in Matthew’s language. It’s also one of the languages I’m slightly more adept at . . . I’m not sure how I’ll fare with the Czech version!

Really, it’s just so astonishing it’s going to go into so many languages that on some level every single one is just such a kick. I’ve had the pleasure of being in contact with some of the translators and they’re all just so smart and the care that they’re taking with this book to get it right is amazing.

When you’re not busy writing, teaching and researching, what do you like to read? Are there any particular authors or works that inspire you as a writer?

Honestly, the thing I read most is nonfiction because of my work. I really read an eclectic blend of things when I’m not reading nonfiction. I love poetry. I certainly have a real soft spot for Diana Gabaldon and her Outlander series. I think I’m drawn to big, thick chunky books regardless of the genre. I like being caught up in a story and getting lost in it for more than just a day or two. From there it can be straight fiction, romance, fantasy or mystery. I love Elizabeth George! For me it’s about loving the characters and being able to go visit friends again. When I go on trips I usually take a book that I already have read because I know I will love it so re-reading is a big treat for me.

With popular books it always seems like the next step is Hollywood. Do you have any plans or aspirations to turn your books into movies? Have you had any thoughts on who you’d like to play Diana or Matthew?

I think it would be an enormous treat to see what a really smart filmmaker would do with this book. Film is an adaptation of the book, not word-for-word, but so that it conveys the right meaning and tone. That said, if it doesn’t happen, I’m absolutely fine with having every reader make that movie in their own head, since that’s what we all do anyway.

I can say with all honesty that I can think of absolutely no one I have seen who can play Matthew! If a filmmaker can come up with that, more power to them, but I can’t say I can picture that individual.

The novel ends on a bit of a cliffhanger. Did you know from the outset that you’d be writing more than one book?

When I thought about the story, I always thought of it in three distinct movements and this was always the first movement. It was sold as a stand-alone book so it needed to stand on its own merits and there needed to be some kind of closure at the end, but for me the story has always been three. I actually wrote the first chapter of the first book and the last chapter of the last book, so these bookend chapters were the first two things I wrote.

Are all the books written then?

No. I know a lot more about how they get from point A to point B than I used to, and I am actively working on the second one right now, which presents new challenges and is proving to be a great learning experience. So that’s my focus right now, the next stage of the adventure.

Matthew and Diana’s relationship will continue to evolve and truly the best is yet to come. I think we often do not pay enough attention to sustaining relationships, so I think people often go into the world with some strange ideas and it’s no wonder so many people are disappointed all the time! The really challenge and the real beauty of a relationship is building something that can really last, so that’s what we’ll be seeing a little bit more of.

Stephenie Harrison writes from Nashville, where she studies science at Vanderbilt University and blogs about books at Steph & Tony Investigate!

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BookPage got the scoop on what a history professor is doing writing fiction, the current craze for vampires and where her heroes are headed next.

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