Alice Cary

FictionLiterary Fiction

Celeste Ng

Interview by Alice Cary

At first glance, Celeste Ng may look unassuming, but make no mistake, this bright-eyed writer is a veritable fireball. She starts her books with a bang.

Ng’s narratives reveal families plagued by delicately interwoven secrets and misunderstandings that ultimately yield tragedy. Her debut bestseller, Everything I Never Told You (2014), begins with devastating news for a Chinese-American family. Her latest novel, the mesmerizing Little Fires Everywhere, starts with an equally provocative lead: “Everyone in Shaker Heights was talking about it that summer: how Isabelle, the last of the Richardson children, had finally gone around the bend and burned the house down.”

“That was fun,” Ng says with a grin, referring to her new novel’s incendiary beginning. “In literary fiction, you don’t often get to have explosions. If you think about action movies, Michael Bay gets to blow everything up. And then there are the quiet indie films, and that’s what literary fiction is. So it was fun to get to do that.”

As we talk on a hot summer morning, Ng sits in the corner of a dark cafe near Harvard University, her alma mater. She lives near Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her husband and soon-to-be 7-year-old son. The initial idea for Little Fires Everywhere was sparked by a church fire in Cambridge in 2009. “That gave me the idea of a literary fire that might burn everything to the ground,” Ng recalls. She speaks crisply and quickly, her mind overflowing with ideas and enthusiasm.

While Everything I Never Told You takes place in 1970s small-town Ohio, Ng sets her latest novel in Shaker Heights, Ohio, a wealthy, planned community that prides itself on educational achievement and diversity. Ng spent most of her childhood there, experiencing “that kind of blissful childhood that people think of, where you ride your bike and there are lots of parks and everybody has a front lawn.”

It’s hardly a haven for family arsonists, however.

“I had the idea of a dysfunctional family,” Ng explains. “I started thinking that there’s this one black sheep who is at odds with everything that the family and the community are aligning themselves with. What’s going to happen? How far is that tension going to go?”

Ng’s saga takes place in 1997-98, when Ng herself was a senior in high school, making her the same age as her studious, Yale-bound character, Lexie, the oldest of the four Richardson children. Lexie’s siblings include handsome athlete Trip (a junior); quiet, reflective Moody (a sophomore); and wild Izzy, the fire starter.

Both of Ng’s novels focus on the roles of mothers and daughters and the relationships between the two, but her new book includes a twist. “A lot of times I feel that mothers are supposed to be peacemakers who put out all of the fires,” Ng says, “but in this book, they’re inciting all of the fires.”

At center ring of these mother wars are Mrs. Richardson—a frustrated career woman, local reporter and busybody—and Mia Warren, an artist and single mother who lives hand to mouth and moves into a rental property belonging to the Richardsons. Mia and her teenage daughter, Pearl, soon befriend and infiltrate the Richardson family, with everyone helping to stoke the oncoming firestorm. Ng sees no heroes or villains in the story, just women acting “out of fear of losing their children, especially their daughters.”

The result is a deftly woven plot that examines a multitude of issues, including class, wealth, artistic vision, abortion, race, prejudice and cultural privilege. While all of this could be handled in a heavy-handed way, rest assured that in Ng’s talented hands, the issues arise organically.

“In literary fiction, you don’t often get to have explosions. If you think about action movies, Michael Bay gets to blow everything up. And then there are the quiet indie films, and that’s what literary fiction is. So it was fun to get to do that.”

Ng’s parents, both scientists, emigrated in their early 20s from Hong Kong to the United States, where they married, pursued graduate studies and raised two daughters. The family moved from Pittsburgh to Shaker Heights just before Ng turned 10, when her father began working at NASA’s Lewis Research Center and her mom began teaching chemistry and conducting research at Cleveland State University. The move proved to be transformative for Ng.

“It was the first time that I had been in a place that wasn’t basically completely white, where I was the only nonwhite person,” Ng says. “Before, in my elementary school, there was one black girl, one girl who was Jewish and one Asian girl, who was me.”

A woman ahead of her time, Ng’s mother tried to broaden her daughter’s cultural perspectives through books. “If there was a book that came out in the ’80s or ’90s that has to do with anything in East Asia, I probably had it,” Ng says, laughing.

While race was at the forefront of her first novel, it’s also an important subplot in Little Fires Everywhere, concerning a legal battle between a young Chinese immigrant mom who abandons her baby and a white couple who tries to adopt her child.

Ng, who describes her husband as a “tall white guy,” says she didn’t plan to write about this topic. “But because I’m in a mixed-race marriage and have a biracial child, these issues are just things that are on my mind,” she says. “In Little Fires Everywhere, I wanted to write about it from a different angle. I wanted to show the ways that race is not just an issue for nonwhite people; it’s an issue for everybody.”

As for her next novel, Ng is contemplating two “wildly divergent ideas” and has yet to settle on one. “The best analogy I have is that if you’re walking around a big walled city, you need to keep going around it until you can find a gate. I’m kind of walking around and trying to find where the gate is.”

No doubt she’ll find it, and readers will follow her in.

 

This article was originally published in the September 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Author photo credit Kevin Day Photography.

“Mothers are supposed to be peacemakers, but in this book, they’re inciting all of the fires.”
Children's & YAMiddle Grade

Katherine Paterson

Interview by Alice Cary

With My Brigadista Year, beloved children’s author Katherine Paterson shares the little-known story of Cuba’s brigadistas: teachers who helped promote Fidel Castro’s campaign for nationwide literacy. One volunteer brigadista is 13-year-old Lora, and through her story, readers discover a complicated history of Cuba.

You thought you had retired, but then this project evolved. How did this story begin to tug at your heartstrings? And you’ve noted that this book was a “pure delight” to write, as opposed to the agony that occasionally occurs. What made this project so delightful?
It was a delight because I had forgotten how much I love the process. Suddenly I had a story that few people in this country had heard, and I wanted to share it.

“If only the people of the world would unite in causes that heal and elevate our mutual humanity and shared planet, rather than fight to destroy each other and perhaps our beautiful world.”

You’ve traveled twice to Cuba. What drew you there, and how was it? What things surprised you most? Any plans to visit again?
Both times I went to Cuba, it was at the invitation of Emilia Gallego, who runs a literacy conference every two years for folks from Latin America. She asked me to speak despite my lack of Spanish because some of my books have been translated into Spanish and have been enjoyed in Latin America.

Yes, I certainly want to go to Cuba again. I have another invitation from Emilia for next spring when she is sponsoring a conference commemorating José Martí’s 165th birthday. I’m hoping to go either then or sometime before I get too much older.

I imagine many readers will be surprised to learn how in 1961 Fidel Castro achieved his goal of making Cuba an “illiteracy-free” nation in a year (the first country in the Western Hemisphere to do so) and that Cuba continues to have one of the highest literacy rates in the world. How did your impressions of Castro and Cuban history change as you researched and wrote this book?
I knew very little about Cuban history before I visited there the first time and knew nothing about the literacy campaign. For me, as probably for most Americans, Castro was a cruel dictator who caused great suffering in Cuba and drove many Cubans to flee. I had heard about their fine universal health care system, but had trouble reconciling that with the regime I thought I knew something about. I did know that Castro had driven out Batista and the American mafia, which was a good thing, but how good was it for one dictator to simply be replaced by another?

Was it difficult—or a delicate dance—to touch on some of the history involved in this story, including U.S. involvement in Cuba, as well as the repressive regimes of both Castro and Batista? I love what Lora says in the epilogue: “My country is not perfect, but, then, is yours?”
Yes, of course. The story is written in first person by a person who still lives and works in Cuba. I was conscious of the fact that my fictional character, like my friends who live there, would tread softly when talking about the political situation in her country when writing her story for Americans. She wouldn’t want to land herself in jail, now would she?

The narrative is compelling and flows so well. How did you begin to imagine the character of Lora, and was it hard to make her first-person narration sound so authentic?
I was inspired by actual stories, but I do also believe in the power of the imagination.

Your friend Dr. Emilia Gallego, a Cuban educator and writer, was herself a brigadista and one of the many young women whose lives were transformed by the campaign. How much of her experiences and impressions did you incorporate into your novel?
I found out just before my second visit that my brave, accomplished friend Emilia had been one of the teenage literacy volunteers or brigadistas that I went on to write about. She is a very proud Cuban, but, like many, never named Castro, simply stroked her chin to indicate the bearded one. The stories in my book were inspired mostly by the interviews with former brigadistas in the documentary Maestra and the accompanying book, A Year Without Sundays, because they were translated into English. But I treasure Emilia’s response to the draft of the book that I sent to her and that our friend Isabel Serrano helped her read. (Emilia is brilliant, but not in English.) Among other things, she said that if she didn’t know me and my books, she would not believe that someone who had never had the experience could have written the book. That gave me the courage to move ahead with the project.

This was indeed a war on illiteracy, and there were some tragedies. Some brigadistas were killed, and some reports say that others were forced to go. If you had been a 13-year-old Cuban girl like Lora, would have wanted to leave home and join this literacy brigade? And if you had been a Cuban parent, would you have allowed your son or daughter to go?
I’m not that brave a person. So I probably wouldn’t have volunteered. But having had four children braver than I was at 13 and knowing what a determined bunch they are, I would have swallowed hard, prayed a lot and known I couldn’t stop them.

Near the end of the story, Lora says, “We were like an army of sharpened pencils marching into the center of the capital among our flags and banners.” Can you envision such an army of global literacy volunteers?
The photographs of that march are thrilling! If only the people of the world would unite in causes that heal and elevate our mutual humanity and shared planet, rather than fight to destroy each other and perhaps our beautiful world.

You have said that books helped you through tough times as a child, and they still help you during transitions. Have any been especially helpful lately, and before and after the death of your husband, John, in 2013?
I have found that it is hard to watch television these past four years, because the news is so bad and so insistent. I’d rather read the newspapers that deliver news more gently and thoughtfully. So I am reading a lot. I think the book that was most helpful was Final Gifts, written by two hospice volunteers. Last year I was jury chair for the NBA in Young People’s Literature and was so heartened by the number of wonderful books I read—and saddened that we had to narrow our choices down to 10, five and one. My husband was jailed in Alabama in the summer of 1965, so March: Book Three, as well as the first two volumes of Congressman Lewis’ powerful autobiography, were especially meaningful for me.

Your son David has turned several of your books into movies, and there are plans for more movies, as well as TV shows. How are things going? Wouldn’t My Brigadista Year make a wonderful movie!
My sons (John is now helping produce) certainly think My Brigadista Year would make a great movie, but in the world of independent filmmaking, the gears turn very slowly. It took us 17 years to get Bridge to Terabithia into theaters, seven years to get The Great Gilly Hopkins into a few theaters and onto on-demand sites. Let’s hope the next movie can get made and into theaters in, say, four years.

When Lora describes her grandmother as “an old woman with young ideas,” I couldn’t help but think of you. You’re 84 and seemingly as busy as ever. How does it feel to be a Library of Congress “Living Legend”? Do you and the others ever hang out?
Boy, wouldn’t I have liked to hang out with Pete Seeger? But fellow legend Judy Blume took my son, my granddaughter and me to lunch in Key West last April. It had been years since Judy and I last saw each other, but she is just as lovely and gracious as ever. I fear, however, that lovely oceanside restaurant is no more.

Are any new books begging to be written? Please!
Don’t worry: If one comes knocking, I will throw open the door.

Beloved children’s author Katherine Paterson shares the little-known story of Cuba’s brigadistas: teachers who helped promote Fidel Castro’s campaign for nationwide literacy.
NonfictionBiography

Caroline Fraser

Interview by Alice Cary

Caroline Fraser’s endlessly fascinating biography, Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, honors the 150th anniversary year of Wilder’s birth.

Fraser, who has written for publications including The New Yorker and The Atlantic, has been immersed in Wilder’s world for years, having edited the Library of America edition of the Little House books. On the desk of her home in Santa Fe, she keeps a program from the 1937 Detroit Book Fair, where Ingalls gave what Fraser calls “her most important statement about why she wrote the books.” Wilder said in her speech, “I understood that in my own life I represented a whole period of American history,” specifically, the settling of the American frontier.

(Carrie, Mary and Laura Ingalls)

Fraser’s goal with Prairie Fires was to meld the “great story” of Wilder’s life with American history. “While there are good biographies of Wilder available,” she explains, “I felt that the history really merited a closer look.”

Like generations of young readers, Fraser was fascinated by the Little House books as a child, especially because her maternal grandmother’s family emigrated from Sweden to Duluth, Minnesota. But what ultimately drew her into years of research was an interview she heard with William Holtz about his 1995 biography of Wilder’s daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, whom he claims essentially ghostwrote her mother’s books.

“I just thought really,” she remembers. “That was such a surprise.”

Lane was a well-traveled reporter and celebrity biographer who had publishing connections that were vital to her mother’s success. “If she had not,” Fraser says, “I don’t know that [the books] would have ever seen the light of day.” However, Fraser’s research reveals a more balanced collaboration between mother and daughter, one that she says “brought out the best part of both of them.”

Wilder began writing about her childhood as early as her late teens, although those manuscripts haven’t survived. Over the years she wrote for newspapers and farming magazines, also penning a gritty manuscript titled Pioneer Girl, which remained unpublished until 2014, well after Wilder’s death in 1957.

Little House in the Big Woods was published in 1932, when Wilder was 65. After years of financial instability, her books about her poverty-stricken childhood finally brought her wealth. In the introduction to Prairie Fires, Fraser calls the feat “a profound act of American myth-making and self-transformation,” as she “reimagined her frontier childhood as epic and uplifting.”

The Little House series “has all of Laura’s stoicism and her grit and determination,” Fraser says. “I think Rose made it more accessible for children at times―to kind of gentle down some of the harsher realities of what her mother was writing. She polished some of that and brought out the high points, the cheerfulness, the love in the family.”

Still, questions linger. At the Detroit Book Fair, Wilder firmly stated, “All I have told is true but it is not the whole truth.” Not quite, as it turns out.

“Laura and Rose would take factual material and transform it into fiction,” Fraser asserts, “and then claim it was factual, and have no problem with that. Rose cut her teeth in yellow journalism. Insofar as she had any training, it was in the yellow press. It was the real fake news.”

Wilder aptly described her books as “a long story, filled with sunshine and shadow.” The privations she and her family suffered, however, were much harsher than what was described in the books. The family’s only son died at 9 months, and Wilder’s sister Mary went blind. Years later, Wilder’s husband, Almanzo, suffered a stroke early in their marriage, making farm work difficult, and their only son died as an infant. A short time later, their house burned down. Wilder, her husband and daughter finally left South Dakota in 1894 to settle in the Ozarks, on a farm they called Rocky Ridge.

After their departure, Wilder didn’t see her beloved father again until years later, when he was on his deathbed. After that, she didn’t see her mother or sisters for years and wasn’t able to attend her mother’s funeral. Fraser says Wilder’s “exile” from her family was critical to her writing, adding, “I think all those years added up to a very intense yearning and nostalgia for her family, which resulted in her wanting to recapture and revisit her childhood in these books.”

In recounting her pioneer childhood, Wilder and her daughter blurred the lines between fact and fiction.

Fraser notes that readers cherish the Little House books for their “incredible sense of the closeness of the family.” The paradox, she says, is that Wilder and her daughter never had that. Lane suffered from depression and described her childhood as a “nightmare.”

“It says something about the extraordinary nature of literature that a relationship as fraught as that between Laura and Rose was able to produce this amazing testament to the American family,” Fraser says.

In recent years, many have criticized the series for its racist attitudes toward Native Americans. For example, in Little House on the Prairie, Wilder begs her father to let her adopt a Native American baby whom she sees passing by. Fraser notes that while the young girl’s statement may seem “innocent on the surface,” it embodies “a perfect image in American literature of what white settlement was all about, and the acquisitive nature of the people who came to the West and wanted to take everything that belonged to somebody else.”

Nonetheless, in 1894 Wilder wrote in her diary, “If I had been the Indians I would have scalped more white folks before I ever would have left [the wilderness].”

“It’s a very bold statement,” Fraser says. “I really think it’s one of the most extraordinary statements that she ever made and a really astonishing one for a woman of her era to make. Many other people were just terrified or overwhelmed by the kinds of experiences she had. She remembered the terror, she remembered being overwhelmed, but it did not affect how she felt about the land, and that, to me, is extraordinary.”

Despite the controversies about the Little House books, Fraser believes they will have an enduring legacy. “I certainly hope that people continue to read them, because I do think that they are really important, not only as children’s literature, but as American history,” she says. “They deserve a place among the classics of American literature.”

 

This article was originally published in the December 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

(Author photo by Hal Espen.)

Caroline Fraser’s endlessly fascinating biography, Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, honors the 150th anniversary year of Wilder’s birth.

FictionLiterary Fiction

Chloe Benjamin

Interview by Alice Cary

It’s fitting that Chloe Benjamin was born on All Soul’s Day, a religious festival remembering those who have died. Her latest novel, The Immortalists, explores the eternal mysteries of death and the boundaries of science, religion and magic.

“The Immortalists felt like the book that I was always meant to write,” Benjamin says during a phone call from her home in Madison, Wisconsin. “If I died now, at least I would have written this. I don’t think I’ll ever have a book like this again.”

That’s a somewhat startling statement coming from a young writer, but at just age 29, Benjamin is well on her way to being an established author. Her first novel, the award-winning The Anatomy of Dreams, explored another intangible—the surprising power of lucid dreaming.

Benjamin says of her two novels, “The Anatomy of Dreams is a more internal look at the conscious and the subconscious, and an almost claustrophobic exploration of the central relationship. With The Immortalists, I wanted to cover more ground socially, culturally and historically, as well as interpersonally. It felt important to challenge myself to write a book with greater scope and diversity.”

“It was really one of the hardest writing experiences I’ve had.”

The premise of The Immortalists is immediately gripping: In 1969, the four siblings of the Gold family (Varya, age 13; Daniel, 11; Klara, 9; Simon, 7) live in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, where their father owns a tailor shop. When Daniel gets wind of a mysterious fortuneteller, the children track her down and have an encounter that will forever change their lives. The soothsayer predicts the exact date of each of their deaths.

The four sections of the book address each sibling’s life in order of their predicted demise. Simon was told he would die young, while Varya seems destined to live until a ripe old age. Or is she? One of the book’s central questions is whether the fortuneteller is clairvoyant, or whether her prophecies simply become self-fulfilling.

“I wanted to leave this open to interpretation, to see what the reader thinks,” Benjamin says. “I’ve always really been drawn to books with multiple perspectives or books that show how different people can interpret the same event in such varied ways.”

The book’s beginning brings to mind the four siblings who step through the wardrobe in The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. What’s more, at one point in The Immortalists, Klara’s daughter cries out, “It’s like Narnia!” when it begins to snow.

Benjamin laughs at the reference, explaining, “That was actually something I said when I arrived at college on the East Coast. Everyone made very prompt fun of me, because I was coming from California.”

As for parallels to the C.S. Lewis classic, Benjamin says they were unintentional, although she admits, “I think those books were in the petri dish that created this one.”

The Gold children all take strikingly different paths: Daniel, the oldest Gold boy, becomes a military doctor, while Varya ends up a scientist. Simon and Klara run away to San Francisco, where Simon dances, both ballet and in a gay bar. Klara becomes a Las Vegas magician, following in the footsteps of her namesake grandmother. She even takes to performing her grandmother’s act, the Jaws of Life, in which she hangs from a rope by her teeth, calling herself “The Immortalist.”

Benjamin, who initially knew nothing about magic, modeled the Jaws of Life trick after a real act she stumbled upon during her research. A Hungarian immigrant who called herself Tiny Kline once performed this extraordinary feat over Times Square and later played a flying Tinker Bell in Disneyland. “I think she just held on with her teeth,” Benjamin says. “It was so dangerous and unbelievable.”

It’s not surprising that showmanship is at the forefront of so much of the novel. Benjamin’s mother is a stage actor, and as a child Benjamin was involved in theater and active in ballet until college.

“I miss those things a lot,” she admits, “but I don’t feel brave enough to perform at this point in my life. I’m more comfortable writing something where I can make it as perfect as I can and then put it out there for consumption. But that level of risk and uncertainty and vulnerability—and also a kind of flash and dazzle—was a part of my childhood.”

Benjamin did substantial research for each section of the book, adding: “I don’t make it easy on myself. There’s an adage to write what you know; I’m more interested in writing about what I want to know.”

The research for Varya’s section proved most vexing. At first Benjamin had Varya study a species known as the immortal jellyfish, which seemed to be a perfect thematic fit­­—although the subject had its own challenges.

“I had to read so much molecular biology,” Benjamin recalls, “and that is not the way my brain works. So I’d be practically crying, sitting with this stack of academic journals that I couldn’t possibly understand. I worked on that section for years.” Ultimately, she ended up starting it over. “It was really one of the hardest writing experiences I’ve had.”

The completed novel spans decades, explores a variety of philosophical questions and addresses everything from gay life in 1970s San Francisco to the ethics of scientific research on animals.

As for her next novel, Benjamin is already at work. “I get an idea maybe once every five years,” she says, “and it’s like, OK, well I guess that’s what I’m writing. So as much as it’s driving me crazy, I have faith.”

 

This article was originally published in the January 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

It’s fitting that Chloe Benjamin was born on All Soul’s Day, a religious festival remembering those who have died. Her latest novel, The Immortalists, explores the eternal mysteries of death and the boundaries of science, religion and magic.

Fiction

Kristin Hannah

Interview by Alice Cary

Kristin Hannah has known for 20 years that she wanted to write a book set in Alaska­—and that she wanted to use a haunting and powerful title inspired by a favorite poem: The Great Alone.

In the meantime, she wrote more than 20 other novels, including her 2015 runaway bestseller, The Nightingale, a novel about two sisters in German-occupied France during World War II. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the blockbuster success of The Nightingale made it a hard act to follow. “It did kind of mess with my mind,” Hannah admits, speaking on the phone from her home near Seattle. “You feel an immense pressure to follow it up.”

Determined to write something completely different, she says, “I decided—clearly after too much wine—to write a domestic thriller.”

The book was set in current-day Alaska. Hannah wrote for about a year and a half, only to come to a terrible conclusion: Her manuscript wasn’t working.

“I had already thrown everything I could think of at it, and I had failed,” Hannah says. It was a heartbreaking realization, but as much as she loves thrillers, “I realized that I wasn’t ultimately interested in what happened. I’m much more interested in why things happen and who people are. Not only was the book not good enough to follow The Nightingale, it wasn’t good enough to be a book with my name on it.”

Fortunately, there were a few shreds of hope to be salvaged: the Alaskan setting, which Hannah says “is just as special in its own way as World War II France,” and a cast of characters she liked. So she created a new story for the Allbright family, who in 1974 move off the grid to the fictional town of Kaneq, located near Homer, Alaska. They are propelled by their survivalist father, Ernt, a Vietnam vet with post-traumatic stress disorder who has inherited a cabin from an old army buddy. The isolation becomes a pressure cooker for his demons, with tragic results for his wife, Cora, and their 14-year-old daughter, Leni, the book’s narrator.

Once Hannah wrote an opening scene from Leni’s viewpoint, she immediately knew that “this is a girl worth following.” After 18 more months of writing, she had crafted a new—and very different—novel.

“It’s a much more intense read than I’ve done before,” Hannah concludes. “It’s very much about this girl coming of age in an incredibly dangerous environment, both inside her home and outside of it. I think I was able to bring to the reader a vision of Alaska that is different than what they’ve read before.”

The setting provides a mesmerizing look at the difficulties that face a homesteading family. Upon their arrival in Alaska, the Allbrights are warned by Large Marge, one of the book’s many marvelous characters, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.”

The Allbrights make a multitude of mistakes, which translate into page-turning, riveting, wee-hours of-the-night reading. Leni, a whip-smart, book-loving girl, becomes a rugged Alaskan outdoorswoman, forced to make agonizing decisions about the domestic violence that overtakes her family.

It’s clear that Alaska is embedded deep in the author’s heart, a special connection that began with her own family’s odyssey. When she was 8 years old, Hannah’s father loaded the family into a VW bus and traveled through 16 states, landing in the Pacific Northwest.

“He said we were looking for home,” Hannah recalls, “and we’ll know it when we see it. It was about 100 degrees in that bus, and all I remember is my mom and dad saying, ‘Will you stop reading your book and look at the scenery?’ ”

Hannah offers readers “a vision of Alaska that is different than what they’ve read before.”

From this journey blossomed Hannah’s interest in Alaska, and she started spending summers there, once working in a fish processing plant, an especially grueling summer job. “You don’t sleep for hours and hours on end,” she says. “It was gross.”

The book’s title, which Hannah held onto for so long, also comes from her father. It pays homage to poet Robert W. Service’s nickname for Alaska, from a poem called “The Shooting of Dan McGrew”: “Were you ever out in the Great Alone, when the moon was awful clear, / And the icy mountains hemmed you in with a silence you most could hear . . .” During childhood camping trips, Hannah’s father used to recite Service’s poems to her and her siblings, who learned them by heart and later passed them on to their children.

Hannah’s mother inspired her as well and, in fact, launched her career. When she became terminally ill during Hannah’s last year of law school, Hannah’s mother invited her daughter to collaborate on a novel. She also predicted that her daughter would become a novelist, a notion that struck Hannah as absurd at the time.

“It’s taken me a long time to find my stride as a writer,” Hannah says. “The biggest part of that is finding my voice, and what I have to say. And it’s pretty clear that it’s about ordinary women banding together or on their own, fighting in extraordinary circumstances in an extraordinary time, and finding a way to both survive and thrive.”

As Hannah wrote The Nightingale, she pondered whether she would have risked her life to save a stranger in the circumstances that her characters faced. With The Great Alone, she contemplated a different essential question.

“I kept asking myself, ‘Could I survive here?’ ” she says. “And I can say with absolute certainty that I probably could not be an Alaskan pioneer. For me, interestingly enough, it’s not the weather and it’s not the dark. I think it’s the hard work and no reading time.”

 

This article was originally published in the February 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Author photo by Kevin Lynch.

Kristin Hannah has known for 20 years that she wanted to write a book set in Alaska­—and that she wanted to use a haunting and powerful title inspired by a favorite poem: The Great Alone.

NonfictionTravelMemoir

Shoba Narayan

Interview by Alice Cary

In Shoba Narayan’s delightful memoir, The Milk Lady of Bangalore, she recalls moving from America to India and the many joys she found there—the most unexpected being cows. In India, where cows are considered holy, bovines roam the street, and Narayan forges a friendship with the woman who sells fresh milk across from her home. In this Q&A, Narayan tells us about her bovine infatuation, surprising uses for cow dung and her career back-up plan.

Sarala, your milk lady, believes that “more than any creature, cows are connected to humans.” Another person told you that “cows are the most evolved animal, after humans.” What are your thoughts on these statements?
I started as a skeptic. I would roll my eyes at these statements and then try to figure out what the agenda was. I think those of us city-dwellers who have lost our connection to nature—the birds, bees and, ahem, bovines that surround us—are depriving ourselves of a vital link that is part of our evolution and ecology. Such statements reveal the connection that people like Sarala have maintained with all species great and small. Their lives are the richer for it. I am now trying to emulate and engineer such connections. It is easier to do in India.

You write that if anyone had suggested that youd be writing about cows, you would have yelled “Get out!” in an Elaine-Jerry Seinfeld kind or way. Now you're in love with them. Did you pick cows as a subject, or did they pick you?
Cows picked me. I used to see them all over the place in India. I didn’t realize then that they would arrive at my doorstep. The story too, unspooled over 10 years. Like the slow and sensuous gait of a cow, this was a tale that took its own time to come to life.

Unlike your previous book, the recipe-filled Monsoon Diary, this book contains only one recipe: for panchagavya, a mixture of cow dung, cow urine, yogurt, bananas and other ingredients. You describe an incredible number of uses for cow dung and cow urine, including urine as an elixir, which you tasted. Do you recommend it?
Look, I know that you guys are now rolling your eyes like I once did. Do I believe in esoteric alternative remedies that most people would mock? Yes. Do I imbibe cow urine tablets on a daily basis? No. Do I realize that this situation is ripe for satire? Yes. Do I add panchagavya to the manure for my garden? Most definitely. And I grow wonderful heirloom tomatoes, purple eggplant, beans, pumpkin, basil and tons of herbs. So there you have it.

You grew up in India, where cows are holy. Then you immigrated to America for college and journalism school, and eventually returned to India with your husband and two daughters. How has your view of cows changed throughout these transitions?
Well, it is hard to find a live cow walking the streets in the U.S. So my interest in cows remained dormant while I lived stateside. It was hibernating perhaps. When I returned to India, my interest renewed with fresh zeal because I saw cows as animals I had grown up with but also as symbols of Indian culture and the Indian ethos where fantasy and reality seem to blend in kaleidoscopic color.

What does your family think about your cow adventures? Are they as fond as cows as you are?
My husband tolerates it. My kids openly laugh at me while (I hope) secretly being proud of my peculiarities. My parents and in-laws who belong to the earlier generation of Indians heartily approve. My aunts and uncles use me as an example when they talk to their own children who are now in America. “Look at Shoba. See how connected she has become to her Indian roots,” they will say. My cousins all resent me for becoming an Indian role model in a way that they simply cannot emulate. I mean, how can you sit in Buffalo, New York, and compete for family approval with a cousin who has gone and bought a cow?

“The reason I want to buy milk from a cow,” you explain, “is because I am trying to recapture the simple times of my childhood, particularly after the intricate dance that I have undertaken for the last twenty years as an immigrant in America.” Can you explain how it feels for you to taste a glass of fresh, raw milk, and how it helps you reconnect with your native country?
I hate to burst this bubble, but I don’t drink raw milk. Years in America have made me a tad cautious. So all milk in my house, even my cow’s milk, is subject to strict standards of, shall we say, sanitation. We double-boil it and use it to set yogurt. For my everyday milk for coffee, I am, as I say in the book, still using pasteurized milk.

That said, I touch every passing cow. I am not queasy about dung. I don’t mind squatting on the sidewalk to milk a cow. These are the ways in which I reconnect with my culture.

Has Sarala read your book or articles that you’ve written about her?
Well, she doesn’t read English. But she knows about all my articles and my book because my newspaper sent a photographer to shoot her and her family for some columns I wrote about her in India. So every time one was published, I would walk across the street, where she milks her cows, and show her the piece. She would glance at her photo and nod her approval but it was not a big deal to her.

Sarala seems to have acted as a personal tour guide when you moved back to India, showing you so much about your new home, its people and ways. You write touchingly about your relationship and also mention how financial inequities at times made you feel uncomfortable around her as well as others. Are you still living in India, and do you plan to stay?
Yes, and yes. Still living in India. Plan to stay. For now. We have developed deep connections here to our large and extended family. My daughter goes to college in Pittsburgh, so we come back every year to visit. We go to New York, D.C., Florida and Pittsburgh—all places we have friends and family. I imagine that we might eventually spend time in California because my daughter studies engineering and, who knows, she may end up in Silicon Valley. We loved our 20 years in America and we could see moving back, but that won’t likely be for at least another few years.

You came to own a cow during the process of writing this book, which you donated to Sarala. Can you give us an update on Anantha, the cow that you and your husband named after his sister?
She is still around. Cows are often roaming untethered in Bangalore, so I meet Anantha on the streets sometimes and I speak with Sarala about her. I worry about her getting hit on the road. But life in India is all about relationships and most people quickly develop a keen sense of the balance between attachment and detachment. So I try to stay close with my cow but not too close.

You write that your life goal is to be a stand-up comic. How’s that going?
Not very well, I am afraid. I am taking classes with Second City, Chicago, but online classes can only help you so much. Now that would bring me back to America in a heartbeat: To study comedy for a year would be a dream. And it is easier to do in the States. I did a comedy Masterclass with Steven Martin online. All my classmates kept writing about their gigs in their posts. I don’t have a single gig in India.

You never planned to write cows until one “literally walked up to me.” What’s next? Have you bumped into anything new?
Hahahaha. Nice one. You know, that is such a nice line that I don’t want to add anything to it. Let me wait for the next story to bump into me. I can’t imagine what it will be.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The Milk Lady of Bangalore.

In this Q&A, The Milk Lady of Bangalore author Shoba Narayan tells us about her bovine infatuation, surprising uses for cow dung and her career back-up plan.  
NonfictionMemoir

Tara Westover

Interview by Alice Cary

Describing her childhood as the youngest of seven children growing up without schooling in the shadow of Buck Peak, Idaho, Tara Westover says, “It all seemed very normal to me.”

Speaking by phone from her home in Cambridge, England, Westover, 31, describes her life’s improbable trajectory that led to her startling memoir, Educated. It was so unusual, in fact, that a bidding war erupted over the sale of her book, which is now being published in more than 20 countries and has inspired comparisons to Jeannette Walls’ The Glass Castle and Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club.

When her survivalist father recounted the story of the 11-day siege of Randy Weaver in the 1992 Ruby Ridge standoff, its vivid details became young Westover’s strongest memory. It was as though the Feds had invaded her own house with deadly gunfire. Striving to become fully independent and off the grid, the Westovers stockpiled food, gasoline, guns and a bullet-making machine in preparation for the End of Days.

“I was kind of looking forward to it in a lot of ways,” she recalls. “We were totally prepared. It was going to be a reversal of fortunes. My family had always been poor and looked down upon. Suddenly we were going to be royalty because we were going to have food and gasoline―all the things that people needed.”

The younger children in Westover’s family didn’t have birth certificates or exact birthdates. She wasn’t allowed to go to school, and there was little homeschooling. “By the time I was 10, the only subject I had studied systematically was Morse code, because Dad insisted that I learn it,” she writes. Doctors and hospitals were forbidden as well; the family relied on her mother’s herbs and essential oils, even after car accidents, concussions and severe burns. An older brother taught Westover to read, using Little Bear Goes to the Moon as her primer. A few books lay around the house, but lessons and tests were nonexistent.

She grew up studying the Book of Mormon, the Bible and essays by 19th-century Mormon prophets. Westover emphasizes that her story is not about Mormonism. She believes that mental illness, possibly bipolar disorder, led to her father’s extremism.

“There is a caricature of Mormonism that people have,” she explains. “I don’t want to contribute to that. These aren’t Mormon attributes. Mormons send their kids to school.”

Nor does Westover want her father to come across as a caricature. “Sure, his views are interesting,” she notes. “What’s also interesting is the fact that he sincerely believes them and that he is trying to look after his kids.”

Educated is the remarkable story of Westover’s education. She taught herself math so she could take the ACT, and at age 17 she first set foot in a classroom after enrolling in Brigham Young University. Fellow students laughed at her for having never heard of the Holocaust. Despite failing her first exam and fearing she would flunk out, she graduated in 2008 and later earned a Ph.D. in history at Trinity College, Cambridge.

Despite the gaping holes in their early education, three of the seven Westover children ended up earning Ph.D.s. “We seriously overcompensated.”

In many ways, Westover says, she had a positive childhood. “I grew up on a beautiful mountain that was like an amazing cathedral. The scrap yard at times was kind of like an exotic playground. And those are real parts of my childhood.”

“It was going to be a reversal of fortunes. My family had always been poor and looked down upon. Suddenly we were going to be royalty.”

However, a giant cloud overshadowed everything. Her father’s actions often endangered his children, and her childhood was complicated by years of physical and emotional abuse by an older brother. Her brother and parents deny this assertion, which has resulted in her estrangement from them and certain siblings.

Westover says leaving home and becoming educated “made me see my brother’s violence for what it was. . . . Suddenly, I could not accept it. And so once I started writing, I realized it’s really not possible for me to tell the story of my education in any kind of meaningful way without telling the family story.”

At first, the ongoing estrangement posed a problem in searching for an ending to her story. Westover admits, “In the end, I decided that maybe not having a neat ending would be what this book was about.” Perhaps, she adds, “people would see bits of their messy lives in my messy life.”

Her unique history presents hurdles when it comes to how she relates to her family in the present. “Most of the time I am no longer angry with them,” she says, “and the reason is that I am no longer afraid of them. I am no longer under their power.”

Anger did, however, color her outlook for years. “I became someone who had no beautiful memories,” she recalls. Writing helped her reconcile the contradictory truths of her past. “I could keep all of them because they’re mine, and no one can take from me the good, but also no one can obscure for me the bad.”

To prepare to write a book-length narrative, Westover read widely. And then, someone mentioned something called the short story. “I’d never heard of that before.” After listening to favorite episodes of the New Yorker Fiction Podcast 40 to 50 times, she modeled each chapter like a short story. The strategy makes her memoir particularly readable and compelling. “For me it was the greatest curriculum,” she says.

Westover concludes, “You only get the life that you get. I’m glad that I was pushed in that way because now I know what I’m able to do. . . . But I wouldn’t go back and go through that again. Not for anything.”

 

This article was originally published in the March 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Author photo by Paul Stuart.

Describing her childhood as the youngest of seven children growing up without schooling in the shadow of Buck Peak, Idaho, Tara Westover says, “It all seemed very normal to me.”

NonfictionTrue Crime

Kirk Wallace Johnson

Interview by Alice Cary

Kirk Wallace Johnson was fly-fishing in the frothy waters of a New Mexico river when his guide told him a whopper of a tale he could hardly believe. Be forewarned, once you start the book that was born from this moment, you’ll be just as hooked as Johnson was.

“This whole story kind of grabbed me by the throat,” Johnson recalls. “I still sometimes can’t believe that it really happened and that I was lucky enough to be able to write about it.” Speaking by phone from his home in Los Angeles, the likable, earnest author is discussing his highly improbable true crime story, The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century. The thief is flutist Edwin Rist, a talented young American with two great loves: music and the Victorian art of salmon fly-tying—creating elaborate artificial flies for use in fly-fishing.

One night in 2009, after performing at London’s Royal Academy of Music, the 20-year-old broke into one of the world’s largest ornithological collections, the Natural History Museum in Tring, England. For a fly tier like Rist, who lusted after exotic feathers, this museum was Fort Knox. He broke a window, climbed in and stuffed a suitcase full of 299 priceless and rare preserved bird specimens used for study and display. Some had been collected 150 years before by a contemporary of Charles Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace.

Unbelievably, the theft wasn’t discovered for more than a month, and Rist wasn’t arrested until 507 days after his crime. What’s more, Rist never went to jail, receiving only a suspended sentence. Numerous specimens were never recovered; they were likely either sold on the black market or are still hidden somewhere.

“Part of what drove me into this madcap search was a sense that justice has been denied here, that [Rist] had gotten away with it,” Johnson admits. He spent years researching, interviewing and traveling to different countries, even creating what he calls a “ridiculously obsessive timeline” of Rist’s life. Johnson yearned for “some kind of dramatic moment where some suitcase would be opened up and I would find all of them—as improbable or naive as that is.”

The author certainly knows about justice, having founded a nonprofit in 2007 known as the List Project to Resettle Iraqi Allies and written To Be a Friend Is Fatal: The Fight to Save the Iraqis America Left Behind. “I still have these waves of guilt that I should only be doing refugee work,” Johnson says. “What an indulgence to go chase the feather thief around the world.”

Johnson discovered that Rist was something of a Victorian fly-tying savant, having fallen in love with the art at age 11, and by 2005 he and his younger brother were being hailed as “the future of fly-tying” by the editor of Fly Tyer magazine. Rist won numerous fly-tying competitions but wasn’t himself a fisherman. While many other fly tiers do not use expensive or exotic feathers, Rist’s particular type of fly-tying is an intricate art form that focuses on “a cult-like attention to detail” and the worship of expensive, often rare feathers.

“He would always just stay one step ahead of everyone else. Until he didn’t.”

“The vast majority of these guys not only don’t fish with them, they don’t even know how to fish with them,” Johnson explains. “It is just an aesthetic pursuit and obsession. One of the many absurdities in this whole story is that the salmon don’t know the difference. There’s no earthly reason why a salmon in Scotland should be attracted to a king bird-of-paradise feather from New Guinea. It doesn’t make any sense—they’re never going to meet.”

Even to this day, Johnson is still “a little shocked” that Rist went through with it. After visiting the Tring museum during normal hours, Rist first created a computer document titled “Plan for Museum Invasion.” At the time of the theft, he was hoping to buy a $20,000 golden flute. His history with the fly-tying community gave him the means to connect with potential buyers for the valuable exotic feathers. “The number of mental fail-safes that just malfunctioned here, where he would have talked himself out of this, is kind of staggering,” Johnson says.

As to why Rist succumbed to temptation, Johnson can only speculate: “I get the feeling that for most of his life Edwin has been the smartest person in the room. I think that he reasoned, How would anybody catch [me]? He would always just stay one step ahead of everyone else. Until he didn’t.”

Rist only received a veritable slap on the wrist with his suspended sentence, largely because the British court system believes he has Asperger’s syndrome. His reputation did suffer, yet he continues to work as a professional musician in Germany under a different name.

Surprisingly, Rist agreed to be interviewed for the book. In Düsseldorf, where Rist was living, he and Johnson talked for nearly eight hours, while Johnson’s wife manned several tape recorders.

“My wife, who is a lawyer by training, still asks this question: ‘Why on earth did he talk to you?’ ” Johnson says. “Because there really was no good to come of it. And there were moments in the interview when I could sense her lawyerly side kind of leaning forward to say, ‘Edwin, don’t answer.’ ”

But answer Rist did, steadfastly maintaining, “I am not a thief,” and claiming not to know the whereabouts of the still-missing bird skins.

The mystery of the missing specimens continues to haunt Johnson, who says, “Every now and then I’ll be at a red light, and I’ll be like, ah, does he still have 50 of these skins in his apartment?”

He adds, “My hope, to be honest, is that the book will summon others to the hunt.”

 

This article was originally published in the May 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Photo credit Josee Cantin Johnson

Kirk Wallace Johnson was fly-fishing in the frothy waters of a New Mexico river when his guide told him a whopper of a tale he could hardly believe. Be forewarned, once you start the book that was born from this moment, you’ll be just as hooked as Johnson was.

YA FictionYA

Jay Coles

Interview by Alice Cary

Headlines about the shooting deaths of unarmed civilians at the hands of police are seemingly never-ending, and Jay Coles is engaging with this subject matter in his powerful, necessary and hype-worthy YA debut, Tyler Johnson Was Here. We asked Coles a few questions about his personal experiences with police brutality, connecting with his teen readers, his specially curated playlist and more.

Does it feel a bit unreal to have your first book published at such a young age? How did you find out about the great news, and how did you celebrate?
Yes! I’m incredibly lucky and incredibly humbled that I got my book (and name) out there at such a young age, which isn’t the norm in publishing. But when I signed with my agent, which was a huge deal for me in itself, I was certain people/publishers wouldn’t want my work. I code-switched in the text and it didn’t seem like those were stories publishers were asking for. Also, the subject matter of my manuscript felt very risky, even after The Hate U Give sold. But in just a short period of being on submission, my agent Lauren Abramo sold my book to Little, Brown Books for Young Readers. She called me up one morning as I was getting ready to head out to teach a seventh grade English class and broke the news. As soon as I hung up the phone, I cheered with my roommate and then cried a little before going to teach. When I got home, however, I ate an entire box of Oatmeal Creme Pies.

You’ve said Tyler Johnson Was Here was inspired by events from your own life and the Black Lives Matter movement. Can you elaborate a bit?
Yes, it’s always a pretty vulnerable thing, honestly, and I always forget about this aspect because of the trauma and grief. My cousin lost his life to police violence when I was really young, maybe 8 or 9. At the time, I had no idea what “police brutality” meant, yet there was still so much anger and pain experienced by me and my family. When I was in high school, I remember seeing a lot of innocent black and brown boys and girls lose their lives to police violence on the news and social media. It felt like this tunnel of darkness that I couldn’t escape. It kept following me. I knew I had to do something to fight against that darkness, and it was to raise my voice, to speak up, to let out all the anger and frustration I had been bottling up over the years. So, I started writing Tyler Johnson Was Here.

You based your book on a poem you wrote for a high school creative writing class. What was the assignment, and how did it evolve into this novel in its final form? Does your teacher know about Tyler Johnson Was Here?
It wasn’t technically a poem first. Initially, the idea was a letter to my dad, then became a poem, but then it became a short story, and then lastly, it became a book. We had a simple assignment to write a poem about whatever we wanted. At the time, I had found a bunch of letters that I wrote to my dad. One of the letters was about my cousin and the pain I had been holding on to and then seeing/hearing about so many black people dying to police violence. (This letter also appears in the book). I took pieces of the letter, turned it into a poem, and then later a short story just for fun. Then, it became a book after encouragement from others. And no, this particular teacher who assigned me to write the poem has no idea I’m even published haha. However . . . Hey, Mr. Chad Andrews, if you’re out there and reading this: thank you. Look at how far I’ve come because of your encouragement!

How do you make a novel feel both memorable and authentic to young adult readers? Have your ideas about how to achieve these things changed as you’ve gone from being a reader to an author?
The first thing you need to know to be a successful author is know your audience. That can be cliche, but I mean that. You have to know them through and through. For instance, I write for teens. Because I was very recently a “teen,” it was easy for me to nail down the teen voice. For other authors, research through talking with teens to nail down their voice is essential. Also, it’s great knowing popular words, phrases, music, subject matter, etc. This is basic, but trust me, it makes all the difference for helping stories be relatable and not [become] dated so quickly. I don’t think a lot of YA authors I read growing up understood the importance of this.

Music is such a big part of your life, and you’re also a composer and conductor. How do you balance all of your creative interests?
It’s mostly simple. The blessing of doing music and writing full time is that I have total control over my own hours. I’m able to work on whatever I need to get done in a particular day with the help of my very detailed composer/author calendar. Some days, I compose music and work on my next book. Other times, I just do one of them. Days when I have an author event or a conducting gig, I make time at night to write. Like over time. Such fun!

You create playlists for your books as you write. How does this music fuel your writing? How does music shape the lives of both you and your characters?
Music is so, so important to my life and therefore bleeds over into my books. When I have an idea for a book, I create a playlist of songs that relate to the themes or subject matter of the book to help fuel my writing. The songs end up becoming very important to certain scenes and may even show up in the text. I like to think that music is a way into someone’s life. You can learn a lot from the music people listen to and love. Same thing with my characters.

Care to share your Tyler Johnson Was Here playlist?
1. “Feel” by Kendrick Lamar
2. “Hip Hop Ride” by Da Youngstas
3. “Until the End of Time” by Tupac
4. “Hail Mary” by Tupac
5. “Change” by J. Cole
6. “Power Struggle” by J. Cole
7. “If I Ain’t Got You” by Alicia Keys
8. “He Is the Same” by Jon Bellion
9. “All We Got” by Chance The Rapper
10. “Martyrs” by Mick Jenkins
11. “Can You Hold Me” by NF
12. “Mine” by Beyoncé
13. “Hypnotize” by Notorious B.I.G
14. “Guts Over Fear” by Eminem and Sia

Marvin Johnson tells his principal, Mr. Dodson, that the TV show ‘A Different World’  “shows blackness in a way not many other shows do. It taught me that I could be successful, even when people think otherwise.” What other TV shows, movies and books do you love for this reason?
Shows: “The Fresh Prince,” “Black-ish,” “Grown-ish,” “Everybody Hates Chris”
Movies: Black Panther
Books: Tiny Pretty Things, Piecing Me Together, The Hate U Give, Dear Martin

Do you have plans for your next book yet?
I do. It has sold. I think that’s all I can say about it right now. I guess also this fact: I’m obsessed with it. More details soon!

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Tyler Johnson Was Here.

Photo credit Victoria Ruth Photography

Headlines about the shooting deaths of unarmed civilians at the hands of police are seemingly never-ending, and Jay Coles is engaging with this subject matter in his powerful, necessary and hype-worthy YA debut, Tyler Johnson Was Here. We asked Coles a few questions about his personal experiences with police brutality, connecting with his teen readers, his specially curated playlist and more.

FictionPopular Fiction

Jon Cohen

Interview by Alice Cary

Life, death, love, loneliness and grief are the building blocks of Jon Cohen’s wondrous new novel, along with nonstop action, humor and a broad cast of characters whose actions converge like a perfectly crafted jigsaw puzzle.

Undergirding everything in Harry’s Trees is the belief that “the ordinary world is extraordinary, all the time, for everyone.” That guiding principle becomes a recipe for magic that remains firmly rooted in reality, notes Cohen, speaking by phone from his home outside Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Harry Crane is a U.S. Forest Service analyst who literally can’t see the forest for the trees. This paper-pushing bureaucrat spends his days “in a building utterly bereft of wood,” longing for the smell of pinesap. Although his wife, Beth, urges him to quit and work in a local arboretum, Harry settles for buying a lottery ticket each week and yearning for a stroke of good luck.

Instead, misfortune strikes. After urging her husband to forget his lottery ticket “just this once,” Beth is killed in a freak accident while waiting for Harry. In the aftermath, as Harry tries to find his way past grief and guilt, his world collides with that of a nurse, Amanda Jeffers, and her 10-year-old daughter, Oriana, who are reeling from the sudden death of their husband and father, Dean. After they meet in a forest deemed enchanted by the fairy tale-loving Oriana, Harry begins living in an elaborate tree house built by Dean before he died.

“The call of a tree and the childhood beckoning of a treehouse—that’s interesting to me,” Cohen says. “Everybody’s got a special tree, whether currently as an adult, or a tree from childhood.” He goes on to describe a mulberry tree at the end of his boyhood street that was overgrown with honeysuckle and made for a great nest.

“I’ve had all sorts of trees,” he adds. “Still do.”

Cohen sets his novel in the Endless Mountains of Pennsylvania, where Cohen and his wife once owned a small farmhouse and barn. The property and nearby landmarks provided inspiration, especially for a picturesque library where a beloved librarian, Olive, lends Oriana a strange handmade book called The Grum’s Ledger. This fairy tale about an ogre-like creature becomes pivotal to an amazing cascade of events. Throw in the fact that Oriana wears a red coat and Harry has an evil brother named Wolf, and you’ve got yourself a grown-up fairy tale.

Almost. “There’s not a single thing in there that can’t happen,” Cohen observes. “The world is imbued with a little magic. But I made darn sure that there were real-world explanations for what seem like magical events.”

Grief is the force that unites Harry, Amanda and Oriana, and as Cohen explains, “Again and again, reality-based people are ready for magic. I truly believe that when you are in love or when you grieve, you cross a line and see the world in an altered way.”

It’s no accident that both a librarian and a nurse are major players in Harry’s Trees. Those two details help explain Cohen’s unique career trajectory. He was raised by a children’s librarian mother and an English professor father who was a renowned Herman Melville scholar.

“It was a world immersed in books,” he recalls. “You would think I would go right to writing.”

“I truly believe that when you are in love or when you grieve, you cross a line and see the world in an altered way.”

Ironically, he didn’t write in high school or college. “Not a single story,” Cohen says. He earned an English degree at Connecticut College, but after working as a hospital orderly during a college gap year, he made an unexpected move and obtained a second degree in nursing.

“That ignited everything,” Cohen says. “My 10 years as a registered nurse—working on a cancer ward and then ICU/CCU—that turned me into a storyteller.

“My job was to help people in crisis,” he elaborates. “So many personalities, so many ways to cope, so many intimate and amazing details. So much life. [It was] narrative, action, a ticking clock, something at stake—all right there in a hospital room. And that’s the way I write—something is always happening, constant momentum.”

This surgically precise narrative style is what makes Cohen’s writing so readable. And his plot is exactly like an operating room—controlled chaos that leads to a carefully planned outcome.

In his time off from the hospital, Cohen finally began writing stories. He eventually wrote two novels (Max Lakeman and the Beautiful Stranger and The Man in the Window), received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and left medicine. Nonetheless, he feels that nursing became his muse, and each of his novels features a nurse.

But this nurse-turned-writer had yet another career change up his sleeve. After his novels were optioned for movies, he taught himself screenwriting with help from a book titled Making a Good Script Great by Linda Seger. He caught the attention of director Jan de Bont (Twister, Speed), which led to Cohen writing the screenplay for the 2002 blockbuster Minority Report.

“I was happy to have the experience and very lucky,” Cohen says. “It’s nice to have my name on the poster.” Although he describes his screenwriting adventures as “a lark and an oddity,” Cohen always approached the experience pragmatically: “It helped pay some of the bills, but I treated it very rationally and saved the money. I didn’t buy a Jaguar.”

With Harry’s Trees, Cohen has returned to his writing roots. He’s a novelist once more, writing “the one and true voice that I do over and over again—the small, decent guy overwhelmed by events.”

 

This article was originally published in the June 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Author photo by Andy Shelter.

Life, death, love, loneliness and grief are the building blocks of Jon Cohen’s wondrous new novel, along with nonstop action, humor and a broad cast of characters whose actions converge like a perfectly crafted jigsaw puzzle.

NonfictionMemoir

Nell Painter

Interview by Alice Cary

In her memoir Old in Art School, Nell Painter surprises everyone by returning to college in her 60s to earn degrees in one of her passions: painting.

How did you make your decision to leave a chaired professorship at Princeton to go to art school?
My decision to retire from Princeton a little early came in several steps, beginning with my mother’s turn to book writing when she retired back in the 1980s. I was always close to my mother, close to both my parents, actually, feeling my family as a bulwark against a basically hostile—well, if not hostile, at least not trustworthy—society. It took her 10 years to write and publish her first book and 10 years for the second. She was just that disciplined over the long haul, with discipline and persistence her gifts to me. My mother showed me you could change vocations, even though the payoff might not come immediately. The point was to do what you wanted to do. Looking at her, I figured, hell, I could do that, too. It just so happened that what I left was a chaired professorship at Princeton.

My friends were amazed, even dazzled by the possibility of walking away. Looking back, I realize I didn’t see things this way at the time: It might have seemed to some of them that an Ivy League chaired professorship was life’s apogee, as though imagination stretched that far and no farther. But I didn’t identify myself that closely with my job. I heard their curiosity, as they wondered what it would be like to start something entirely new. They asked me to send back a report. Which I am now doing—in utter candor.

Your father taught you to draw, and your mother taught you the art of reinvention by starting over at age 65 and becoming an author. Your mother died during your art school years, leaving your father deeply saddened before his death. You write, "My early years as a painter . . . felt as much about family and loss as about art making." How has the loss of your parents affected your art?
The short answer is I don’t know how my parents’ deaths affected my art, as I didn’t make art about their dying. In fact, I reproached myself for not being able to draw my mother as she lay dying, even though her dying made a riveting visual spectacle. I simply could not take what felt like a step away from her to turn her into art. Art-making did not come automatically to me then.

But as I ponder your question, I think the answer, maybe even the answers, lie first in my chapter “A Bad Decision” and in my inability to dedicate myself single-mindedly, whole-heartedly, full-timedly to making art. My decision to go to graduate school before completing four years of undergraduate art study was not the right thing to do. I should have stayed at Mason Gross for another year. But I felt time pressing down on me urgently as something in short supply. Only as I was writing my memoir did I relate that feeling of time’s limitation to my mother’s impending death and my attachment to her. My time felt like her time.

Throughout the whole of my five years of art school, my parents stayed on my mind. They were hardly ever off my mind or out of my worries. There were daily phone calls and frequent transcontinental trips. Sometimes I could combine art with parental care, as in “Bedside Collages.” But art-time always felt distracted, though graduate school normally offers undistracted time to work flat out and full time, to experiment in depth and find the way to make art your very own way. I felt that sometimes and cherished the sensation. But often as not, my attention was divided. I still miss the opportunity to make art intensely over a relatively long period of time. What a gift that would be!

As for my parents, rather than the import of their loss, I appreciate the gifts they gave me during their lives. They assured me I was a wonderful person who could do whatever I wanted, the basis for the ego strength to take chances. They were hardly wealthy people, but, something of supreme importance, they made sure I never had to make decisions based on fear of running out of money. People don’t talk about that very much, but financial stability is crucially important when you’re making decisions about what you can or can’t do, especially regarding something as expensive and unlikely to pay off as art school. If you’re African-American, freedom from money worries is even less to be taken for granted.

Bette Davis once said that old age is no place for sissies. And neither is art school, it seems, especially when your age made you feel like “a creature from another planet.” Of course, things weren’t helped when your teacher at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) declared that you would never be an artist. Did you ever feel you had made a mistake leaving such a successful career to go to art school?
Oh, boy, did I ever question my sanity for leaving the life I knew how to live for one I felt lost in! The hard part about art for me—one of the hard parts—was my sense of not knowing what was good and not good. Not knowing why my art was not good. One great thing about scholarship is the existence of established criteria of judgment. People don’t always respect those criteria, and there’s plenty of room for old-boy networks and the workings of privilege. Still, the rules of the game are pretty apparent. Not so with art.

I still sometimes feel like the worst painter in the world, but I don’t care anymore. There are awful painters who have their followings; there are more excellent painters in the world than can receive their due.

I love your response to that teacher: “Henry, that’s bullshit.” Although at first you enjoyed a sense of contentment and euphoria at RISD, you ultimately concluded, “this was not my place, and these were not my people.” Looking back, would you do things differently?
As for “not my place, not my people,” the fundamental problems were my age and myself, neither of which I could change. The thing I would do differently would be staying another year at Mason Gross. But that would have just made me a year older, and I’d still be myself: black, academic, female. A fundamental matter was black-in-America. Yes, yes, yes, I know nonblack people often find it difficult to feel at home or find their own people. Missing home may be a basic American or basic human condition. But on top of basic American, you have to add being black in America. Even if you don’t run into discrimination, there are the everyday interactions with nonblack Americans that are exhausting, that remind you that you seem not to belong. This is not anything I can change. And that’s not to add in the matter of working across generations.

Your professors were astounded by the progress you made during the summer between your first and second year of grad school. Did you surprise yourself as well?
During that summer, my growth pleased me enormously. I suppose I took for granted that the work I was enjoying would be good work. But I can’t say I was surprised. My progress didn’t surprise me, but I was amazed by my teachers’ surprise at the beginning of the second fall semester. I have never gotten over how little some people can expect of me.

You note that “the Art World is racist as hell and unashamed of it.” Are things improving?
Everybody always wants to think things are “improving,” so I’ll say they are: Yes. Things are improving. The work of women artists, old women artists, black artists, black women artists, old black women artists is being seen as never before. But basically, as my more experienced art mentors told me, the Art World is racist as hell and unashamed of it. The Art World is part of the U.S., which, if you read the papers you know, is still racist as hell. The improvement is that some Americans are starting to see that and to take steps to address longstanding discriminatory practices. There’s still a long way to go before I will say there’s been fundamental improvement.

When it came time to write your thesis, your first draft was full of anger about injustices in the art world. You, an award-winning historian and author, ended up going to the RISD writing center for help purging that anger. How did that go? Was the person helping you intimidated?
As you can see from my answer to the previous question, my “anger” hasn’t been purged. But I had the sense to see my shortcoming as the author of an MFA thesis and to get the instruction I needed. I don’t think Teacher Jen in the writing center was intimidated. She had seen my problem before and told me of other instances in which MFA students had had to find means of tamping down indignation and to focus on the visual aspects of their work within the context of art.

You’ve written numerous books, but none so personal as Old in Art School. How tough was that?
Writing personally was hard as hell and took several years. I had to dig out experiences and sensations that lay under my consciousness’s surface, and I had to see other people around me, fellow students especially, but also teachers, in situations where I was intensely self-centered. As I wrote through my sufferings, I came to see that maybe they weren’t as awful as I had made them out to be. I still say that earning a Ph.D. in history at Harvard was a piece of cake compared to earning an MFA at RISD. But now I’m wondering if the comparison is shaped by the decades separating the two experiences. Maybe in 33 years, RISD will seem like a piece of cake compared to—what, assisted living?

Near the end of your book you write, “Like artists the world over, my bayoneted, hand-to-hand struggle between insecurity and self-confidence never ends.” Did you have to endure such a constant battle with insecurity as a historian? Are you keeping your artistic struggle in check?
I never had to wage such an anti-insecurity battle as a historian because I loved research and writing, and I knew what I needed to do to succeed. I did it. I hit all the marks (publication, promotion, tenure, fellowships) and received sufficient honors.

I love making art—the process, I mean. And I have enough of a sense of what is my own art to feel good about that. At the same time, I know I’m the world’s uncoolest artist, and I’m OK with that. If what I make is not good enough, that’s its nature. That’s what I make and who I am: the world’s uncoolest artist.

You’ve incorporated both history and text (including pages from your own books) into your artwork, bringing your career into a glorious, unified circle. Would you say that you've found your voice? How would you summarize your artistic style and goals?
Thanks for “a glorious, unified circle,” which sounds really good! I hadn’t thought of my work in so assured a way. I saw more a long work-in-progress, a documentation of how one person’s work changes and grows over time as she starts over. I wanted to show some dumb early stuff and some pieces growing out of one another as closer and farther relations. I do feel I’ve found my manual + digital process, which you may call a “voice” or “style,” often related to history and sometimes embracing text. That sense of finding myself visually occurred with “Art History by Nell Painter,” which is why I pretty much end there. I don’t know that I have a “goal,” because I don’t feel myself going anywhere with an end or objective other than making art. Making the art that gratifies and interests me. Freedom attracted me to art making. Still does.

What are you working on now?
I just made four digital collages for the Three Hole Press publication of Daaimah Mubashshir’s plays, The Immeasurable Want of Light. Otherwise, tasks related to the publication and promotion of Old in Art School have taken up virtually all my time this year and precluded immersion on art. I have started something I call “Book Book” that will embody the experience of talking about my memoir over this year. It begins with two photos of me reading my Blackstone audiobook in a tiny studio on 9th Avenue in New York City last month.

I think about two or three artists’ books that will take time to envision and to make, as I have only fragments in mind right now. I will need to carve out time to work on them concentratedly.

How do you feel when you’re in that artistic “zone”?
I feel like I will never stop. Every image demands elaboration—into another shape or another color or another piece. This concentration, this play, makes me feel contented, even when I see I need more time to get to another place or a different image. When I have to stop, I’m usually among images I couldn’t have imagined when I started.

What advice do you have for other “old” people who might be contemplating reinventing themselves?
Advice?! As I say at the end of Old in Art School, people don’t usually want advice; they want to be listened to. So I’d say find someone who will listen to you and who knows something about what you’re thinking about doing. I’d say try it out for a little while. Take a class at your local community college. But my biggest, most important piece of advice, especially for old black women, for black women, for old women, for all women, for black people, for people young and old, for nonblack people is: Don’t see yourself through other people’s eyes.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Old in Art School.

A portion of this article was originally published in the July 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Author photo by John Emerson.

In her memoir Old in Art School, Nell Painter surprises everyone by returning to college in her 60s to earn degrees in one of her passions: painting.

NonfictionTrue CrimeHistory

Margalit Fox

Interview by Alice Cary

Margalit Fox vividly remembers the day she first read about a case she could hardly believe: Arthur Conan Doyle personally investigated and helped commute the sentence of Oscar Slater, a wrongfully imprisoned German immigrant in Glasgow, Scotland.

Fox was riding the A train on her way to work. “I almost dropped the book in the middle of the train,” she recalls. “I thought, my God, the creator of Sherlock Holmes turned real-life detective and used those same methods to overturn a wrongful conviction. Why on earth isn’t this story better known?”

That was about thirty years ago. Fast forward to the present, and Fox, now a New York Times journalist, has brought the story to light in the endlessly riveting Conan Doyle for the Defense: The True Story of a Sensational British Murder, a Quest for Justice, and the World’s Most Famous Detective Writer. The case was certainly a sensation in its time, and Fox begins her account in storybook fashion: “In Glasgow at the turn of the twentieth century, there lived an old lady whom few people liked.”

“She didn’t sound like a particularly nice woman,” Fox notes, speaking by phone from her office at the Times. “That said, she certainly didn’t deserve what happened to her.”

Eighty-two-year-old Marion Gilchrist was bludgeoned to death in her apartment on December 21, 1908, her face and skull smashed, most likely with a wooden chair. Gilchrist owned an expensive jewelry collection, but nothing was stolen except a diamond brooch. Residents in the apartment below heard strange noises, and one neighbor—along with Gilchrist’s maid who was returning from an errand—arrived at her doorstep just in time to see a mysterious, well-dressed man stroll out.

Slater was a Jewish immigrant from Germany, a gambler and an easy scapegoat for this high-profile crime. He was accused and wrongfully convicted, although police had determined his innocence within a week.

“It’s terrifying,” Fox says. “What just ripped my guts out is he had literally made arrangements for his own burial, and his sentence was commuted to a life at hard labor 48 hours before he knew he was going to be hanged. You’re not supposed to know the date of your own death. That just sends chills down my spine.”

Death is something that Fox deals with every day, having written obituaries for the Times since 2004 (she’s featured in Obit, a wonderful documentary film about the department). The work, it turns out, has been perfect training.

Speaking in the crisply enunciated, fact-filled sentences one might expect from a seasoned journalist, Fox elaborates: “Writing obits is really extraordinary training for writing narrative journalism in general, and particularly narrative journalism in which the lens of an individual life is used to examine larger social issues. And in this case, the social issues are all about the things that we see in the papers every day today: racism, xenophobia, class tension.”

As a writer who chooses each word with a surgeon’s precision, Fox could not be more clear-eyed about the importance of this story. “History is very, very much appearing to repeat itself,” she says, “so this 1908 murder in Glasgow has never been more relevant to America in 2018.”

Conan Doyle believed in Slater’s innocence from the start and became publicly involved with trying to free him in 1912. He was obsessed with the case; he scoured court documents and spotted myriad inconsistencies and fabrications by police and prosecutors. Despite Conan Doyle’s efforts, Slater continued to languish in prison for more than a decade, when a freed prisoner managed to carry a secret message—wadded into a tiny pellet hidden beneath his dentures—from Slater to Conan Doyle. The short message urged Conan Doyle to renew his efforts, and by 1927, Slater was freed, having spent more than 18 years in prison. Fox says, “Conan Doyle used almost to the letter the methodology of his most famous literary creation—and it worked.”

“History is very, very much appearing to repeat itself, so this 1908 murder in Glasgow has never been more relevant to America in 2018.”

The story has been largely untold, however, requiring herculean research on Fox’s part. She began in Scotland in 2014, requesting documents at various archives. She visited Peterhead Convict Prison in Aberdeenshire (which is now a museum), about which she notes: “It is freezing cold and wet and raining. I took a picture of the state of my umbrella after waiting for a bus for 20 minutes, and the umbrella had been completely decapitated and had its spine snapped. I can’t imagine 18-and-a-half years [there].”

Back at home, bulging files soon began arriving at Fox’s doorstep, “easily three or four thousand pages of documents,” including trial transcripts, police records, interview notes and letters to and from Slater’s family. It took Fox about 18 months to go through everything.

“I used the same skills we use doing daily obits on deadline,” she says. “The research is exactly the same. . . . [You’re] trying to distill all of these diverse, often atomized, often seemingly unrelated documents into one cogent narrative that one hopes gives the sense of a life.” In the meantime, she was riding back and forth to work and reading Sherlock Holmes stories during her daily commute. “Basically I was really tired and had no social life,” she admits.

The publication of Conan Doyle for the Defense marks a bittersweet time for Fox, who will soon retire to write books full time. She already has her next idea: a prisoner of war’s escape story.

“I know it has to be narrative nonfiction,” Fox confesses, “because I, unfortunately, was not born with a fiction gene. I would love to be able to just make stuff up and be relieved of the onus of having fealty to historical facts—but no such luck for me.”

 

This article has been modified from the edition originally published in the July 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Author photo by Ivan Farkas.

Margalit Fox vividly remembers the day she first read about a case she could hardly believe: Arthur Conan Doyle personally investigated and helped commute the sentence of Oscar Slater, a wrongfully imprisoned 36-year old immigrant in Glasgow, Scotland.

FictionDebut Fiction

Delia Owens

Interview by Alice Cary

When Delia Owens was growing up in Thomasville, Georgia, her mother encouraged her to venture deep into the wilderness, saying, “Go way out yonder where the crawdads sing.”

Owens took that advice to heart. After college, she headed to Africa and lived in the wild for decades while studying lions, brown hyenas and elephants in their natural habitats. Over the years, she’s co-authored several memoirs about her experiences, including the international bestseller Cry of the Kalahari.

Now this wildlife scientist and award-winning nature writer has turned to fiction, penning what she calls a “socio-biological thriller” with a titular nod to her mother’s early wisdom, Where the Crawdads Sing.

Set in the coastal swamps of North Carolina from the 1950s through 1970, Owens’ richly atmospheric debut centers on Kya Clark, who was abandoned by her family as a girl and is now surviving in the wild. Locals know her as the barefoot “Marsh Girl.”

Even though Owens’ fictional setting is worlds apart from the remote areas of Botswana and Zambia that she once called home, the experience influenced her tale. “One of the things that interested me most about the animals I was studying is that they live in very strong female social groups,” Owens says, speaking by phone from her current home in the mountains of northern Idaho. She began to wonder, what would happen to a young woman deprived of a pack?

“I was living in isolation,” she explains. “I became determined to write a novel that would explore how isolation affects people, especially a woman, and also how all of those instinctual behaviors I was seeing around me would play into the story.”

A North Carolina setting made sense to this Georgia-born naturalist since its moderate climate would offer plenty of food for foraging. “I wanted this story to be believable.”

A favorite book also helped inspire her literary pursuit: A Sand County Almanac, a classic collection of natural history essays by Aldo Leopold. When Owens frequently recommended the book to friends, however, they complained that it lacked a story. Their reactions led her to a pivotal conclusion: “Wouldn’t it be great to write a book that had a strong storyline but also nature writing?”

Because Owens had her novel’s ending in mind from the start, she began writing from the end, working backward, describing the writing process as “a big word puzzle―a 50,000-word puzzle.” An avid equestrian, Owens adds, “Writing nonfiction is like riding inside the corral, round and round inside the fence, while writing fiction is like taking off at a gait. You just go and see where [you end up], and if you don’t like it, you can make another turn and do something different.

“So I loved it,” she says. “I could kick my horse and go.”

At first Owens wrote chronologically, but she soon found herself with a good third of the story devoted solely to Kya’s childhood. Deciding that “there needed to be a bomb under the sofa that [signals that] something more happens in this book,” she began to interweave past and present, addressing both Kya’s childhood and the book’s murder in alternating chapters.

“It was a bear,” she says of the rewriting, noting that she often set her alarm for 4:30 a.m. to give herself time to write before tackling other duties, and worked on and off on the project for about a decade.

“Wouldn’t it be great to write a book that had a strong storyline but also nature writing?”

Owens knows a thing or two about bears. Now living in a remote valley, she mentions that she’s spotted a mother and cub in the last few days. Elk often wander near her back deck, and bears track across the hot-tub cover. “I just love it,” she says. “It’s where I feel like I belong.”

She shares these many acres with her ex-husband, Mark Owens, although they live in separate houses. The pair met years ago while studying at the University of Georgia, then headed to Africa. “We were great research partners and great friends, and we had a great working relationship for years and years. I think the stress of living there finally got the best of us.”

A question that ends up being central for Kya also remains an ongoing dilemma for her creator. As Owens writes: “How much do you trade to defeat loneliness?”

She admits to sometimes feeling lonely in her beloved Idaho home, acknowledging that her lifelong adventures have required sacrifice. “I realized my mother was right. You don’t really see wildlife, you don’t really understand nature until you get far away from man. And I learned that was my life. It is my life still.”

She based Kya’s struggles on an undeniable fact: “Survival of the wild can be very aggressive and intense,” she says. “And we still have those genes, and we will never understand who we are until we understand the genes that we have from those eons ago. This whole book is about trying to understand why we behave the way we do.”

In the end, Where the Crawdads Sing is about female empowerment. Before abandoning her, Kya’s mother taught her a valuable lesson, saying, “That’s what sisters and girlfriends are all about. Sticking together even in the mud, ’specially in mud.”

That lesson remains close to Owens’ heart. She dedicated her novel to three of her childhood friends who remain close, two of whom happen to be visiting her in Idaho at the time of this interview. “They’re here now,” Owens says, her voice filled with what sounds like a schoolgirl’s joy.

“You know,” she muses, “we all end up in the mud, and I can’t tell you how many times we’ve supported each other after all these years.”

 

This article was originally published in the August 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Author photo © Dawn Marie Tucker.

When Delia Owens was growing up in Thomasville, Georgia, her mother encouraged her to venture deep into the wilderness, saying, “Go way out yonder where the crawdads sing.”

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