Buried away in the small house she shares with her husband and their children, ages 11 and 13, are the abandoned pages of a novel Yangsze Choo worked on for eight years.

“It was really, really terrible and is hidden away forever. Forever!” Choo exclaims, laughing, during a call to her home in Palo Alto, California. But as she discusses her new novel, The Night Tiger, it is apparent just how deep and abiding those early themes have been in her writing life.

Choo, who speaks with a British accent, is from Malaysia and spent her early childhood in that former British colony before her father, a diplomat, was posted for extended periods to Japan and Germany and also Thailand and the Philippines. She went to Harvard, where she met her husband, and worked as a management consultant before the couple moved to California about 13 years ago. “I now describe myself as an unemployed housewife,” she says wryly.

Given her accent, you could imagine Choo to be kind of proper or a bit reserved. And you would be wrong. During our call, she is enthusiastic and funny. She laughs heartily. She jolts the conversation with exclamations like “I was super excited!” She describes “a really fab Victoria sponge cake” recipe that has recently forced her to “scamper on a treadmill like a hamster.” She marvels that there is now an app that replicates the clink and murmur of a coffee shop so you don’t feel lonely when you write. She sometimes interviews the interviewer.

Her well-received debut novel, The Ghost Bride (2013), is set in Malaya in the 1890s and concerns a young girl who, in accordance with a legendary Chinese tradition, receives a proposal from a family to become a ghost bride to their only son, who died under questionable circumstances. The Night Tiger is set in colonial Malaya in the 1930s, and the “night tiger” of its title lurks in the underbrush of a thicket of interconnected mysteries and unsolved killings.

Reserved? Proper? Hardly. “My mom said to me, ‘Can’t you write something cheerful? Dead people, ghosts, and now this book is about tigers eating people! Why don’t you write something uplifting?’”

Of course, Choo’s parents, and especially her mother, are sources of some of the stories and fables that wend their way into the narrative fabric of the book. Choo interviewed her parents frequently to develop a tactile sense of an earlier era in what is now Malaysia. Fascinated by the black and white bungalows built to house British civil servants, she learned that as a girl her mother had a young friend who worked as a maidservant in one of those houses.

“Growing up I realized that there was very little literature on Malaysia,” Choo says. “And what there was was primarily written by British writers like Somerset Maugham. But hearing my mom’s stories about her friend the maid, I thought, there is a whole other story about the local people. I realized that I’ve always been hearing the local side, and yet what is documented is really the colonial side.”

The Night Tiger follows the intersecting lives of two young Malayans. Ren is an 11-year-old houseboy in the service of a kindly, ailing British doctor who believes he has become a “weretiger,” a murderous, mythical beast that can assume human form during daylight. To put an end to the beast, the doctor makes Ren promise to locate and restore his missing finger to his corpse after he dies. Ren, who is also haunted by the death of his twin brother (and feels his presence still as a kind of electrical charge), has 49 days to accomplish this mission. At the same time, hoping to provide for the boy’s future, the doctor sends Ren to serve a British surgeon named William Acton. The surgeon is a guilt-ridden reprobate, and in his vicinity, deadly tiger attacks begin, to Ren’s alarm.

“I think at 11 you are at the zenith of childhood,” Choo says, explaining the combination of confidence and naivete in Ren. “My kids were growing up through these ages while I was writing this book. An 11-year-old knows how to do childhood well. You are big enough, strong enough, and you can walk quite far. You can do all the housework. But you haven’t hit puberty, so your world hasn’t started to change. You are at the very top form of being a child.”

The novel’s other central character is Ji Lin, a brilliant student whose stepfather believes she should work instead of going on to university. Her stepbrother, Shin, with whom she shares the same birthday and a love-hate relationship, is sent to study to become a doctor while she is apprenticed to a dressmaker. To help pay her mother’s gambling debts, Ji Lin also secretly works in a dance hall. She enters the story when an unlucky man, who carries the doctor’s missing finger for luck, spills a vial with the finger into her hand.

To create Ji Lin, Choo burrowed back into her abandoned novel, where she had tried to develop a character who worked in a dance hall. While researching that failed novel, Choo had read a book by an author who wrote about visiting “a strange dance hall [where] all these girls were for hire but afterward were strictly segregated. It was weirdly prudish.” Choo deftly captures that menacing strangeness in her fictionalized version.

In slowly bringing these two characters together—and resolving the mysteries of a series of perplexing deaths—Choo fashions a rich and intricate tale. One of the novel’s greatest pleasures is the depth of its understory. There is, first of all, a thread of upstairs-downstairs intrigue as Choo portrays the unbalanced relationships among the British and their local servants. More than that, there are what seem to be Choo’s obsessions, or as she prefers to call them, themes.

For example, she is interested in the Chinese fascination with lucky numbers. “The belief that certain rituals would guarantee you happiness was in the back of my mind.” So were the traditional Confucian virtues, for whom her characters are named. “I didn’t plan this, I’m not that clever, but it’s curious how my characters have become the opposite of those virtues.” And Choo’s abiding interest in the nature of twins also deepens the story. “The idea is interesting because this whole novel is about different worlds—natives and colonials, the world of night and the world of day, the world of the living and the world of the dead. It’s about a lot of our unresolved fears, I think.”

Surprisingly, Choo says she did not plan out this novel. With a laugh, she explains that she had her themes, but she “never knew what was happening.” The storylines proliferated to such a degree that she had to cut about half of them out of the final novel. She has considered a sequel.

“I am happy that a lot of the thoughts I had did come out here,” she says. “I feel proud of this book. It talks about a lot of things I’ve been mulling over for a long time.”

This article was originally published in the February 2019 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Author photo by James Cham.

Kate Quinn takes to the skies in her new novel of Nazi hunters, Night Witches and a truly evil stepmother. 

“Gentle or thrilling—you decide,” reads the ad for private charter company Fun Flights in Carlsbad, California. Although novelist Kate Quinn admits she is “not terribly fond of flying,” she opted for adrenaline when she booked a 1929 open cockpit biplane in the name of historical research for her latest novel, The Huntress, a spellbinding Nazi-hunting saga that spans continents and decades.

After her British pilot took off, Quinn found herself soaring through the air, experiencing the same kind of rush that her novel’s character, Nina Markova, might have felt during a World War II bombing run. After growing up in the wilds of Siberia, Nina becomes a fearless member of the Night Witches, the Soviet Union’s legendary all-female night bomber regiment. Quinn was mesmerized by the hair-raising escapades related to the Night Witches and the tales of navigators who climbed out on the wing in the middle of a flight to dislodge a stuck bomb. “I read that and said, ‘You people are crazy, and that’s totally going in the book!’” she says. “A lot of things they experienced I would not have dared to make up.”

So as Quinn’s aerial courage grew, she asked the pilot, nicknamed “Biggles,” if he would consider momentarily cutting the engine, imitating the method the Night Witches often used to silently descend over German troops before releasing their bombs. “Absolutely not,” Biggles quickly responded. “That is not going to happen!”

Spine-tingling bombing runs are just one of the many highlights of Quinn’s intricately plotted novel about a trio of characters that converge after World War II to locate “the Huntress,” the mistress of an SS officer who slaughtered six innocent souls on the shore of a Polish lake. Pilot Nina, who narrowly missed becoming one of the victims, later marries Ian Graham, a British journalist and brother to one of those killed. An unlikely pair and a study in opposites, Nina and Ian are determined to deliver this war criminal to justice.

In the novel, Quinn describes one of Ian’s articles as “Dynamite in ink,” writing: “He knew every pulse point to push in those paragraphs, every emotional trigger to pull.” Those words serve as an apt description of Quinn’s latest tale, which will no doubt appeal to fans of Kristin Hannah’s The Nightingale. Similarly, Quinn’s previous novel, The Alice Network, was a historical thriller involving real-life female spies in France. After that book’s tremendous success, Quinn knew she wanted to write something war-based and set in the 20th century. She experienced a “lightbulb moment” when she stumbled across the story of Hermine Braunsteiner, a Nazi war criminal discovered in the 1960s living as a housewife in Queens, New York. “That was the story I realized I wanted to tell,” Quinn says. “What does it mean for someone to discover someone in their family literally has this kind of past?”

To make such a complex story play out, Quinn had to interweave multiple characters, plot points and timelines. In addition to Nina and Ian, she introduces readers to Jordan McBride, a young girl growing up in Boston who begins to suspect that her new German stepmother, Anneliese Weber, may be hiding unspeakable secrets.

“I am really fascinated by aftermaths,” Quinn confesses. “Not just what happens, but what happens after. After VE-Day, a lot of people had to pick up and go on with lives that had been catastrophically, irrevocably altered. How did they do it? I find that an extremely interesting problem and an extremely interesting sort of character dilemma to examine through my fictional people.”

Quinn owes her fascination with history to her mother, a librarian and history scholar who entertained her with bedtime stories about Alexander and the Gordian Knot and Julius Caesar crossing the Rubicon. “I was really head-down in history from a very young age,” she says, “so when I started telling stories of my own, it was very natural to gravitate toward the past.” As a young writer, she relied on her mother’s deft editorial skills for critique, a practice she continues today. “She’s very incisive and doesn’t give me a pass just because she’s my mother.”

Today Quinn lives with two rescue dogs (Caesar and Calpurnia) and her husband, an active-duty member of the Navy whom she’s nicknamed “the Overseas Gladiator.” She’s already hard at work on her next book, tentatively called The Rose Code, about a group of female code breakers at Bletchley Park. 

Fortunately for readers, Quinn knows she’ll never tire of the power of historical fiction: “Often when we are examining issues that are delicate or sensitive or just dynamite, they feel too close in the modern age. But if you can examine some of the same issues through the lens of the past, it puts them in a slightly safer remove. That way it doesn’t hurt as much to look as closely at something that is perhaps a little too sensitive to examine in our own lives.”

Author photo by Laura Jucha Photography

Wild girls. Wanting to write about them—their realistic sexual experiences, their journeys of discovering their own pleasure—formed the initial spark for Elizabeth Gilbert’s latest novel, a sprawling saga that helped her navigate a sea of grief.

This subject especially enticed Gilbert because her previous novel, The Signature of All Things, chronicles the exact opposite: a 19th-century botanist who yearns to have sex but never does. “There was just this agony in writing that character,” Gilbert admits, speaking by phone from her home in New York City. So for City of Girls, she was determined to try something different. “Let’s take the corset off and let some people have some pleasure,” she says. 

Enjoyment, bliss, satisfaction—these emotions and more form the core of her big-hearted, rollicking new novel about a gaggle of lively New York showgirls. It’s narrated by Vivian Morris, who arrives in New York City in 1940 to live with her Aunt Peg, owner of the dilapidated Lily Playhouse, after being “excused” from Vassar College. (Vivian was ranked 361 in a class of 362, causing her father to remark, “Dear God, what was the other girl doing?”) In press materials for City of Girls, Gilbert compares Vivian’s story to a champagne cocktail, calling it “light and bright, crisp and fun.” She’s proud to write books that “go down easy,” she says. “I feel like it’s a real achievement to write a book that anybody can read. . . . One of the things I’ve said is I make bran muffins, but I frost them to look like cupcakes.”

The characters in City of Girls are “neither destroyed nor saved by sex,” Gilbert says, in contrast to the litany of literary heroines who face ruin or death in the face of sensuality, such as Anna Karenina, Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Emma Bovary, to name a few. “Most novels about women would have you think it’s one or the other,” Gilbert says. “And that’s just not been my experience, and it’s not the experience of anybody that I know.” She says that Vivian’s comical first sexual encounter is one of her favorite scenes she’s ever written. “I was literally alone in my house laughing my ass off,” Gilbert says. “It felt like such a vindication for all of the sort of horrible virginity-losing scenes in literature. And also all the ridiculously romantic ones.”

Of course, it’s no secret that Gilbert has had more than her own share of adventures, having written her blockbuster post-divorce memoir, Eat, Pray, Love, about eating in Italy, discovering the power of prayer in India and finding love again in Indonesia. However, despite having penned a 2015 article for the New York Times Magazine called “Confessions of a Seduction Addict,” Gilbert wasn’t initially sure she could pull off this wild-girl narrative—that is, until she met a former showgirl named Norma, an “unrepentant hedonist” who was once John Wayne’s girlfriend. 

“Part of my research anxiety was, how am I going to get this 95-year-old woman to talk to me about sex? But with Norma it was like, how am I going to get her to talk about anything but sex?” Gilbert says, laughing. “Every generation thinks that they invented sex, but there’s always people who are living on the edge, and Norma was one of them. She had absolutely no shame, remorse or regret about anything she’d ever done in her life. And she was fabulous.”

In addition to interviewing Norma, Gilbert and research partner Margaret Cordi (to whom the book is dedicated) poured several years into exploring a variety of topics. “My system of writing is heavily weighted in terms of hours of research,” Gilbert explains, “so 90 to 95% of the effort is gathering everything I need to feel competent enough to create a convincing world. It’s truly like learning a new language, and it takes a lot of years to get fluent.”

And then suddenly—still during the research phase, before the writing even began—everything came to a heart-stopping halt during an 18-month period of deep, dark sorrow. In 2016 Gilbert left Jose Nunes, the husband she had met in Bali, to partner with her best friend, Rayya Elias, who had just been diagnosed with liver and pancreatic cancer. Gilbert tossed everything aside to care for her and couldn’t even imagine writing. “It just wasn’t the time,” she says.

After Elias died in January 2018, Gilbert retreated to her country house to begin working on her manuscript, even though at first she could barely remember her characters’ names. “I didn’t leave for a couple months,” she says. “It was just me and the dog and the book, and it was really healing. Every once in a while I would think, is this good for grieving? Like, should I be around people? But in fact I was around people. I was around all the people in the book.”

Gilbert describes this isolation as exactly what she needed, “something so consuming that I would look up, and hours had passed, and I hadn’t remembered that Rayya had died,” she says. “I think that creativity is kind of the opposite of depression, the opposite of despair. And I really want to offer the book as a gift to everybody in these dark times. I hope it does for everyone what it did for me, which was cheer me up.”

But Gilbert soon faced another significant challenge: She didn’t know how the book would end. A short introduction is set in 2010, when 89-year-old Vivian receives a letter from the daughter of a man she once knew, asking Vivian to explain their relationship. The rest of the book, beginning in 1940, is Vivian’s “How I Met Your Father” response. “I love to be in control and feel like I know everything,” Gilbert acknowledges, “but you have to leave a little bit of a window open for that which will surprise you.” Luckily, the author soon lost herself in her narrator’s voice. “I would get up every morning and say to Vivian, ‘Let’s just tell everybody what happened.’ And I was able to kind of just become her.”

Gilbert took great pains to make sure Vivian’s voice rings true. “She cannot speak as though she’s got a degree in women’s studies from Bryn Mawr,” Gilbert says. “I needed to make sure that I didn’t put too much of my modern feminism into the book, that it had to be realistic to its time and to those girls.” Young Vivian adores the unbridled freedom she finds in New York with Aunt Peg, “the first freethinker [she’d] ever met,” whose theater company is “a living animation of glamour and grit and mayhem and fun.”

Gilbert herself grew up with freethinking parents, living on a small Christmas tree farm in Connecticut that her mom and dad still run. “My parents are really unconventional,” she says, “and my dad’s a real iconoclast. I feel very lucky to have been raised by a genuine eccentric. Everybody thinks their dad is weird, but my dad is really fucking weird. His disdain for anybody telling him what to do was so huge that I think I just inherited that.”

Tossing conventions to the wind, Gilbert’s own life often seems to swirl about her with plot twists like those found in her novels. In March she announced on Instagram that she’s in a new relationship with photographer Simon MacArthur, an old friend of both hers and Elias’. 

“My way of living involves flinging my heart into the world and seeing what it sticks to,” she says. “So there’s always a lot of love in my life.”

Portrait of Elizabeth Gilbert by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders

For years Lara Prescott hated her first name because people so often mispronounced or misspelled it. Today, she’s thankful, because it seems to have led directly to the publication of her debut novel—one she was practically born to write.

Lara Prescott’s first name was inspired by her mother’s love of both Boris Pasternak’s 1957 Russian novel Doctor Zhivago, a love story about Dr. Yuri Zhivago and Lara Antipova that spans the Russian Revolution and World War II, and the epic film adaptation by David Lean.

Naturally, Prescott always felt a connection to the tale, and now she’s written The Secrets We Kept, a fictional account of how Pasternak wrote his Nobel Prize winner—and how the CIA used it as political propaganda during the Cold War. 

“My mother definitely takes credit for the book after having named me Lara,” Prescott jokes, speaking from her home in Austin, Texas.

Prescott’s deft treatment of this little-known, stranger-than-fiction saga could hardly be more fascinating, and it’s sure to be a blockbuster, having reportedly sold for $2 million at auction. The deal unfolded just as Prescott graduated with an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at the University Texas at Austin, with her manuscript as her thesis.

“It was an almost unbelievable experience that I don’t think sunk in for months and months,” she recalls. “It has been life-changing and will continue to be.”

It’s hardly a stretch to say that Prescott’s first novel was a lifetime in the making. Growing up in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, she enjoyed watching the film Doctor Zhivago with her family and sought it out anytime it played at the local theater. In high school she tackled the novel, although she admits, “It’s not the easiest Russian novel to sink your teeth into.” Nonetheless, she found herself “having a connection to the words and the story,” and she says she sees new meaning every time she rereads it.

The tipping point came in 2014 when her father emailed her a Washington Post article about how the CIA secretly helped publish and distribute Russian editions of the novel, which was first given out at the 1958 world’s fair in Brussels. (A miniature paperback edition followed, many of which were given out at the 1959 World Youth Festival in Vienna.) The early CIA was pretty liberal, Prescott explains, with many recruits believing art and literature could be used to show Soviet citizens the freedoms and lack of censorship enjoyed by Americans, in contrast to their own government. As she writes in her fictional account, “The Agency became a bit of a book club with a black budget.” 

“It was almost the direct opposite of what the rest of the government was doing at the time—the FBI and the Red Scare and all of those things,” Prescott says. “They were definitely at odds with each other.”

Wanting to know more about the bookish mission, which was classified under code name “AEDINOSAUR,” Prescott began devouring newly released CIA documents. As she read so many of the names and places that had been redacted from these pages, she felt as though the many participants had “been pretty much erased from history except for the men who signed at the bottom of the secret document.” She began to wonder about the people who “typed these reports and memos and knew the secrets of these secret keepers.” She researched the roles women played in the early CIA, most often as typists, secretaries and record keepers, but sometimes spies as well. Suddenly a novel began to emerge.

“The first voice that came to me was the voice of the typists,” Prescott recalls. “It was one of those things that has never happened to me before. I heard the voice in my head in the middle of the night, and I emailed myself a few lines. This was the very first thing I wrote.”

She chronicles the lively office pool through this collective voice—their work, lives, loves and gossip—such as in her seemingly heaven–sent opening: “We typed a hundred words per minute and never missed a syllable. Our identical desks were each equipped with a mint-shelled Royal Quiet Deluxe typewriter, a black Western Electric rotary phone, and a stack of yellow steno pads. Our fingers flew across the keys.”

Having worked as a political campaigner in Washington, D.C., Prescott says she felt “a personal connection to these women,” adding, “You have these men in positions of power at the CIA—unchecked power, really—and women who could only reach a certain level. I wanted to explore these power dynamics, which often, unfortunately, still exist.”

Two characters soon rose to the forefront, both of whom narrate chapters of their own. There’s CIA newbie Irina Drozdova, a Russian American, and Sally Forrester, a former OSS agent and spy tasked with training Irina. As Sally notes, being a “keeper of secrets” is a “power that some, myself included, found more intoxicating than any drug, sex, or other means of quickening one’s heartbeat.”

Initially planning to write only about these female spies, Prescott soon realized that this was only half the story. It felt equally essential to chronicle the intricate saga of what was happening in Russia: how Doctor Zhivago was written; how Pasternak’s mistress, Olga Ivinskaya, inspired the character of Lara; how the Russian government forbid the novel’s publication and persecuted Pasternak; and how Ivinskaya was twice sent to the Gulag for her involvement with the literary giant.

“I wanted to give Olga a voice that I think she’s been denied throughout history,” Prescott says, “and make people aware of this woman behind the famous man.”

The project grew into an “obsession,” Prescott says. Her research was extensive, taking her to libraries galore; to Oxford, England, where she spoke with Pasternak’s niece; and to the dacha outside of Moscow where Pasternak wrote his masterpiece. It’s now a museum, and the author is buried in a nearby cemetery. Prescott describes standing at Pasternak’s grave as “a profound experience, one I will never forget.”

In the end, Prescott ties this world-spanning novel together with aplomb. With multiple narrators and two riveting but complicated plotlines set on opposite sides of the globe, The Secrets We Kept abounds with not only intrigue but also plenty of joy, heartbreak and, yes, humor. 

“I love books that deal with very serious topics and tragic circumstances but never lose sight of the humor,” Prescott says. “That is part of life. And that gallows humor is really important, especially in Russian culture.”

Ironically, when Prescott began her project, several publishing insiders informed her that readers were no longer particularly interested in Russia. Little could she anticipate how topical her novel would be when the 2016 presidential election helped to bring the Soviet Union back into the headlines. “After researching how the Cold War unfolded and [about] tactics that both the Americans and the Soviets used,” she muses, “I can’t help but think that, of course this has never ended. Why would it have?”

She cautions that she never intended to write a good-guy-versus-bad-guy, East-versus-West story, and further notes, “I continue to be fascinated with how words are used to change the hearts and minds of citizens, whether it be through books, as they did in the Cold War, or in the current climate in which tweets and fake news have the same effect.”

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The Secrets We Kept.

Philippa Gregory’s Tidelands represents a major new trajectory for an author who was propelled into literary superstardom in 2001 with the publication of The Other Boleyn Girl, the first in a 15-book series that centers on real historical women from the Plantagenet and Tudor lines. The new novel blossomed from an epiphany of sorts while Gregory was rereading John Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga. In a brief scene from the classic family epic, Soames Forsyte travels to a rural area of England in search of his family’s homestead, only to find himself completely alienated from his ancestral roots and literally stuck in the mud.

“I looked at the history of other families I know, and I looked at my own family, and I thought, most of us start in a muddy field somewhere,” Gregory says, “and so I thought, that’s where I want to start this story.”

Speaking by phone from London, the author reassures readers who may be apprehensive about her abandoning her royal roots: “I’ve already started writing book two of the series, and I have to say, I think it’s completely thrilling.”

Gregory published her first novel, Wideacre, in 1987, while she was completing a Ph.D. in 18th-century literature. Since then she’s written about the British slave trade, English colonists in Jamestown, Virginia, nearly every era of medieval English history and beyond. But a common thread runs rather ostentatiously throughout her extensive and eclectic bibliography. 

“I like stories about women,” Gregory says. “A lot of my books—The White Queen, The White Princess, The Lady of the Rivers—they are about the power that women have over each other’s lives as daughters and mothers and grandmothers.” 

One of the things that attracted Gregory to her Plantagenet and Tudor characters was the faintness of their official historical footprint. Though these heroines were well-born, Gregory says, “they don’t all have very well-recorded histories. We still don’t know, for instance, Anne Boleyn’s date of birth. I mean, it’s just extraordinary that we don’t. We don’t know how old Catherine Howard was, and that makes a huge difference to how you regard her. You know, [if] she’s a girl of 14 or a girl of 17, you read her behavior very, very differently.”

For Tidelands, however, which opens in 1648 during the English Civil War, there were indeed historical subplots (such as the attempted rescue of King Charles I from prison in the months leading up to his trial) that demanded what Gregory describes as “very tight, meticulous research,” but for the most part it is a study of the period’s social history. The story centers on the intelligent and dignified Alinor Reekie, an herbalist, midwife and lay healer. Abandoned by her feckless and abusive husband, Alinor lives alone with her children in the tidelands, a marshy estuarial region along England’s southern coast. 

Although Alinor is fictional, she represents a type of woman that would have been found in most rural communities of the era. Through the recorded social history, Gregory knows what would have gone on inside Alinor’s birthing chamber and what sort of medicine she might have used.

“It’s sort of funny that you would think when you’re writing an imaginary character, you’d be much freer of the research,” Gregory says, “but I’m not, because I never imagine the stuff that has been recorded. . . . So when I decided I wanted to write a book about a fictional woman, it was absolutely natural to go to someone whose life we can know about because we have some social history about the time. We know what she would be eating and what she would be paid for different tasks. I could create somebody, in one sense, that could stand for women in that time.” 

Of course, women in Alinor’s day were, as in most every other period of history, vulnerable to the whims and insecurities of the men who were formally in charge. As Gregory observes, “One of the things that happens when people don’t record women’s history is that they miss that almost hidden power structure.” In Alinor’s case, due to her livelihood as an herbalist and midwife, as well as the reputation of her mother and the insinuations of her absent husband, she lives in fear of being labeled a witch. 

Witchcraft as a catchall bogeyman is an age-old tool of social control, which has echoed into the future in other guises, such as the vilification of feminism. “[When I began] speaking out as a woman, if you said you were a feminist, certain people immediately assumed things about you,” Gregory says, “basically, that you were a man-hater, that you were emasculating, which was very like fears around witchcraft. Both of those things can be taken very badly by audiences who are frightened of what they might mean and give in to fear before inquiry.”

Tidelands is the first entry in what Gregory hopes will be a sweeping series of six to eight volumes that follow Alinor’s descendants up to nearly the 20th century, leading them, generation by generation, from poverty to prosperity. 

“I’ll have my people, as it were, scattered around the world in the most exciting places,” Gregory says with an audible twinkle. “That’s the joy of purely fictional writing. Before, I couldn’t really say, well, I’ll see where the story takes me, because I know what the story is. This is a whole new career in a way, and it feels very much freer.”

With The World That We Knew, Alice Hoffman has woven a new historical fantasy that combines an often under-acknowledged part of the history of the Holocaust—the stories of hidden Jewish children—with the universality and emotional weight of a fairy tale. It’s the story of a young girl’s journey to freedom from Berlin through France with the help of a golem, a mystical guide and protector straight out of Jewish folklore, and all the lives they touch along the way.

We spoke with Hoffman about the novel’s origins, her research into the history behind the tale and what she feels The World That We Knew has to say about the world we live in now.

This novel grew out of a chance encounter with a stranger who asked you tell her life story, as she was one of the Jewish children who hid in France during World War II. How long after that chance encounter did it take for the book to form in your mind?
Several years passed before I began to write the book, but I often thought about that meeting and her story. In the fall of 2016, I began to write and to interview survivors. I realize now that the stranger gave me a great gift.

Did you always intend this story to become a kind of fairy tale involving various supernatural elements, or did that simply emerge in the telling of Lea’s story?
I didn’t know how I could write about such darkness in a realistic way. First of all, it’s been done many times. But more importantly, I think writers have a style and a voice, and for whatever the reason, perhaps because I grew up on fairy tales and my Russian grandmother's stories, this is the voice that came to me.

Was Ava always intended to be such a fully formed character in the story, or did the idea of her discovering herself beyond the purpose she was created for arrive later?
All of my characters change and grow during the writing of a novel. I think I know them, I think I know everything about them, and then I’m surprised. We both discovered what her fate was together.

“I had no idea how people survive such dark times. For me it was a learning experience and a very deep sort.”

The heron is both a fascinating character and metaphorical presence in the book. How did he come to you?
Sometimes you write an outline, which I do, and you think you know everything that’s going to happen in your novel. But really, a novel takes on a life of its own. I didn’t plan the heron’s appearance. I will say that herons have a very personal and private meeting for me, so I was not surprised when he arrived.

You included a reading list of research at the end of the novel. What surprised you most in your research about the hidden Jewish children of World War II?
I knew nothing about the situation of Jews and refugees in France during World War II. I had no idea the children were separated from their parents. I had no idea that the rules keep changing. And I had no idea of how brave people had been. To interview child survivors who are now in their 80s and 90s was a complete honor for me.

The book is a powerful depiction of the glimmers of hope and humanity blossoming in a monstrous time. How did you balance the more hopeful elements with the horrors?
I think this is a book that’s about hope. It’s a book I know I needed right now, considering our current situation, and I think I needed to be reminded of the past. I wanted to speak with survivors because I had no idea how people survive such dark times. For me it was a learning experience and a very deep sort.

Were there other characters within this world of hidden children that could have grown into bigger presences in the novel? How did you decide which points of view would carry the narrative?
Those things are decided in the process of writing and rewriting and rewriting again. There can always be characters that could have been or should have been or would have been, but when it comes down to it, the book is just the book it’s meant to be.

The World That We Knew is a book about the importance of love in a hateful time, making it perhaps more timely and relevant than anyone in 1944 might have imagined it being in 2019. What did you learn about love and humanity while writing it that you hope readers also take away?
This is a very big and beautiful question and a very personal one. I think it’s a very timely book, and I think we all have to look at what’s happening around us right now and think about what happened in France during World War II, when people were so afraid of anyone who was different, Jews and refugees both. In the end, love is the only thing that matters, even when you’re living through a time filled with hate.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The World That We Knew.

Author photo by Deborah Feingold

With her new novel, Maaza Mengiste pushes against what is told and what is remembered.

Four years into the nine-year marathon that would result in The Shadow King, Ethiopian-American novelist Maaza Mengiste’s stunning second novel about the 1935 Italian Fascist invasion of Ethiopia, the author hit a wall.

“I had published a novel, so when I started this one, I thought I knew how to write a novel,” she says wryly during a call to her home in Queens, New York. Mengiste came to the United States as a child after Ethiopia’s brutal 1970s-era revolution toppled Emperor Haile Selassie, experiences that formed the foundation of her first novel, Beneath the Lion’s Gaze. Mengiste is now a professor in the MFA program at Queens College in New York and is married to a fellow writer/professor. After four years of frustration writing the new book, Mengiste says she really had “to relearn the craft in order to do this.”

One of the problems with her first draft, she says now, is that it was too closely tied to the facts of the war in Ethiopia. For those who don’t know, Italy believed it had been denied its fair share of African colonies after World War I and, using a border incident as pretext, invaded Ethiopia (then called Abyssinia) in 1934 and briefly annexed it. 

Mengiste’s early draft “was completely attached to the historical facts and the historical data. Everything that I wrote was absolutely accurate, and the book that emerged was dry, and it was boring, and the characters were wooden, and I was completely defeated by what I had done.”

Another trap for her was the Ethiopian mythology about their ultimate victory in this war. “As a child, you hear these stories of heroism. These men were poorly equipped with old guns, charging a very highly weaponized European army and winning. While doing research, I started thinking about the myths and legends of war, and I realized that if Italy had its propaganda machine, then I also had to accept the fact that Ethiopia had its mythologies about this war. I realized I needed to break apart the myths and legends and propaganda and look deeper.”

That deep dive revealed the often hidden but undeniable role of Ethiopian women in the conflict. From that realization Mengiste developed her central character, Hirut, a young, often abused servant girl who displays a shrewd toughness and rises to become a leader. Mengiste also felt free to invent the character of “the shadow king,” a poor man with enough physical resemblance to Emperor Selassie, who had gone into exile, that he could be cultivated and trained to inspire Ethiopian fighters.

“In Ethiopian culture, the emperor is always in the front line. Always. But past leaders also had a doppelganger, somebody who looked like them on the battlefield to inspire morale and serve as a decoy,” Mengiste explains.

She quickly adds, “Part of my concern in this book was to center the story on people who are often not written about in history—the farmers, the peasants, the servants who don’t have the social standing to make them newsworthy—because the stories that get remembered are so often about people who are already famous or noteworthy.”

Freeing herself from being factually scrupulous also allowed Mengiste to be adventurous with the form of this novel. Yes, there are standard chapters, but there are also descriptions of photographs (one of the Italian characters in the novel is a morally compromised photographer forced to document the Italian army’s horrific atrocities); “interludes,” which describe Haile Selassie in exile in Britain; and a chorus that comments on the activities of the novel’s characters. The result is an epic novel reminiscent of the great Greek tragedies.

At Queens College, Mengiste often teaches a course on the literature of conflict, and the class always begins by reading a Greek tragedy. “I love the Greek tragedies,” she says. “I don’t know how many times I’ve read [the story of] Agamemnon and the Iliad. . . . I wanted to have the chorus because I was thinking that the way history is told is not the way that it unfolded. The chorus was a way to push against what is told and remembered.”

Mengiste also looked to the Iliad for inspiration in writing her incredibly gripping battle scenes. “I would read those battle scenes and not be able to breathe because there was just so much momentum in the prose. It gave me a great sense of the movement of battle, and I wanted to emulate that the best I could. It was fun. I really let the voice go free during battle.”

Asked what she is most proud of in The Shadow King, Mengiste points to “the freedom I gave myself. I’m really proud of the structure of the book. People will either like it or hate it, but I was willing to take the risk because I wanted to push myself as a writer—not just as a thinker but as a writer. Some of my favorite writers are those who break form. I wanted to see if I could do that under their tutelage. I’m really proud of being able to combine the stories of the Ethiopians and the Italians, to force questions about both of them, about loyalty, about racism, about being subjugated by the very people who should be protecting you. These were the questions I wanted to bring forward.”

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a review of The Shadow King.

The answer to whether or not professional wrestling is scripted or authentic is complicated, with the protection of kayfabe—the concept of maintaining the veracity of staged events—considered to be one of the sport’s highest tenets. If the wrestlers play along, then so does the audience—even when we know it’s an act. And isn’t this wild, sweaty show better when we all play along?

Pro wrestling serves as a clever metaphor in Chris McCormick’s second novel, The Gimmicks, a complex exploration of fakery, authenticity, luck and survival. It follows two cousins in the wake of the Armenian genocide as they search for their place in history and attempt to define the extent of their loyalty. While Ruben escapes to France and beyond, Avo becomes a pro wrestler in America. Mina, a mutual friend and love interest, enlists Terry, Avo’s manager, to help provide answers about the brothers’ whereabouts.

We reached out to McCormick, who’s an assistant professor at Minnesota State University, to hear more about this engaging tale.

What is your relationship to professional wrestling?
The title of the book comes from the wrestling term for the characters a wrestler portrays in the ring. I’m interested in the ways not only wrestlers but all of us perform different versions of ourselves. When pro wrestling is done well, it can play with those boundaries between authenticity and performance in ways I find fascinating. As a fiction writer, I find it useful to learn about my own capacities for suspension of disbelief, narrative justice and sheer storytelling joy. I grew up believing pro wrestling was real, and then I learned it was orchestrated. Now I know it’s both.

“I grew up believing pro wrestling was real, and then I learned it was orchestrated. Now I know it’s both.”

What was your process for researching pro wrestling and the Armenian genocide? Did you research your more tangential topics, like cat breeding and backgammon?
Although fictional, the novel is heavily researched and incorporates historical characters and events. Because my mother and my extended family immigrated from Armenia, I grew up learning about Armenian history. Researching the book, though, I needed more than my family’s accounts of the genocide and of the country. I read countless thousands of pages of history, including Ronald Grigor Suny’s remarkable contextualization of the late Ottoman Empire, “They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else”: A History of the Armenian Genocide, and Michael J. Arlen’s classic personal journey to Soviet Armenia, Passage to Ararat. In addition to historical research, I traveled to Armenia myself.

Similarly, my understanding of the complex inner workings of the professional wrestling industry in the late 1970s and early 1980s, at the end of the so-called “territory days,” when wrestlers traveled the country to keep their gimmicks fresh to new audiences, required serious research. Chief among my sources were David Shoemaker’s book, The Squared Circle: Life, Death, and Professional Wrestling, and Scott Beekman’s Ringside: A History of Professional Wrestling in America. I’m also indebted to countless hours of “shoot” interviews online with current and former pro wrestlers, whose road stories influenced the voice and perspective of my novel’s old-school ambassador to the sport, Terry “Angel Hair” Krill.

The best part about writing a novel is that you get to use everything you’re interested in. Because I’d grown up watching the old Armenians in my family play backgammon at every gathering, I learned about the game and used it in the story. As for cat breeding, I can’t say I’m interested in it, but my character seemed to be, and I was curious about his interest. That’s where the internet comes in handy.

“Writing the book helped me map my own fluctuating hopefulness and fears, my own evolving capacity to suspend my disbelief in America.”

Describe your writing process. Specifically, how do you balance teaching and writing?
The balancing act can be stressful, but I find the attempt meaningful. When I’m teaching well—when my students and I are engaged in the turbulent fun of reading closely, when questions of craft and questions of meaning synthesize into multihearted conversations about human experiences—I find that my own writing improves, too. More controlled, my prose becomes paradoxically more adventurous; my characters contradict themselves more surprisingly, and they begin to interfere with the world as much as the world interferes with them. The big questions I find myself dramatizing in fiction—about performance and authenticity, about the costs and benefits of inherited identities—are treated both with more scrutiny and more generosity.

Same goes for the other way around. When I’m energized by a good stretch of writing, I feel better equipped to inspire and cultivate in my students a serious curiosity about the ways in which language can superimpose what’s missing onto what’s right in front of our eyes and expose our own messiest contradictions. There’s a contagious relationship between the enthusiasm my students and I bring to our reading and the energy we take home to our writing.

As for process, I focus more on consistency than efficiency. I write a little every day, and I don’t use an outline until the revision process. I need to spend a lot of time with my characters to see who I’m dealing with. What are they protecting, and why? What are they willing to give up to go on protecting it? Then I have to figure out the narrator’s attitude toward the story, the tone. With The Gimmicks, all of the above took me about two and a half years. Then came two and a half more years of working out the structure. Five years later, here we are!

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The Gimmicks.

Who was the most difficult character to develop?
Inventing individual characters is relatively straightforward compared to developing convincing relationships between characters. Figuring out how and why my characters depended on one another, felt confined by one another, protected and/or betrayed one another—that took years of writing and revising. It became like a jigsaw puzzle: The individual pieces were important insofar as how their shapes—their emotional and psychological contours—allowed or disallowed their fitting together with the other pieces. Of course there’s a crucial difference between a puzzle and a novel: In a novel the conjoining pieces bend and stretch each other’s shapes over time, so that what once fit perfectly no longer does.

In the book, you write that the wrestling ring is the only place where men can take real care of each other. Do you agree?
That’s not me talking. That’s a man in the novel who, after a lifetime spent building protective barriers around himself, is finally grappling with his own failures to express his love for the men in his life. Reflecting on his decades in wrestling, he realizes that although the sport is a performance of violence between men, what’s actually happening in that ring is a profound and mutual tenderness.

How did the writing of this novel change you? Did it change your mind on anything?
Writing this book brought me to Armenia, literally and otherwise. I feel a deeper connection to my own origins. But the book became a reflection of my faith in my own country, too, and its future. The American dream—reinvention, meritocracy, blind justice—is a gimmick, a fiction that can only be made real if believed in and worked toward. Writing the book helped me map my own fluctuating hopefulness and fears, my own evolving capacity to suspend my disbelief in America.

What is your favorite scene in the book?
There’s a sequence at the Black Sea I like for its tonal range and movement. And I’m grateful that the ending, which came to me one day almost fully formed, still seems to me exactly right.

What’s something people might not know about Armenia?
There are 36 letters in the Armenian alphabet, which was invented in the early fifth century after millenia of Armenian as a spoken language. Although Armenian is famously unique—it belongs to its own independent branch of east Indo-European languages—the shapes of many Armenian letters were inspired by the shapes of letters in the Ethiopian alphabet. Ethiopians and Armenians looking at one another’s books might get confused, though: the sounds of the shared symbols have nothing in common.

Can you hint at any new projects you’re working on?
It’s too early to say, but music—classical and jazz, which I grew up playing (badly)—seems to be involved.

Author photo © Jenna Meacham.

Isabel Allende is a recipient of both the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the PEN Center Lifetime Achievement Award. Her latest novel, A Long Petal of the Sea, is an epic saga set during the Spanish Civil War that follows two young people as they escape aboard poet Pablo Neruda’s real-life ship, the SS Winnipeg.

Tell us about your favorite library from when you were a child.
There were no libraries where kids could go in Chile during the 1940s—not even at school. My library was at home. I had an uncle who collected books, and I was allowed to read whatever I wanted. No censorship.

While researching your books, has there ever been a librarian who was especially helpful, or a surprising discovery among the stacks?
Usually I find the most valuable help from booksellers, because I tend to buy the books I use for research for my novels. When I need original documents for a historical novel, I contact librarians from the Library of Congress.

What are your bookstore rituals?
I go every day to my local bookstore (Book Passage) for coffee and browsing in the morning. First, I stop at the audiobooks shelf because I need stories for my commute. Then I talk to whichever bookseller happens to be there and get some input about new books, especially novels. Once a week, I talk to Susan in the children’s department. She keeps a list of my favorite books to give to kids when I need a gift and new releases she thinks I would like.

Read our review of A Long Petal of the Sea by Isabel Allende.

What’s the last thing you checked out from your library or bought at your local bookstore?
A CD of Tom Hanks’ short story collection, Uncommon Type, Ann Patchett’s recent novel, The Dutch House, as well as five children’s and young adult books for my husband’s grandchildren.

What’s your favorite library in the world?
It’s hard to name just one. I have visited several famous libraries, like the Library of Congress, where I received an award. If I had to choose, I would say the Melk Abbey library near Vienna. I was invited there to a meeting of religious leaders from all over the world and had the privilege of visiting the vault where the most valuable ancient manuscripts are kept. It was a memorable experience. I was even allowed to touch an incunable with white cotton gloves—while being watched closely by a Benedictine librarian who was almost as ancient as the book.

Do you have a “bucket list” of bookstores and libraries you’d love to visit but haven’t yet?
Two come to mind: Shakespeare & Company in Paris and El Ateneo Grand Splendid in Buenos Aires. The first because I have been there with no time to browse properly (it’s charming!), and the second because it’s set in a beautiful, old opera house. In a city with more bookstores per capita than any other in the world, El Ateneo is considered the most stunning.

Do you have a favorite bookstore or library from literature?
Probably the haunting library called the Cemetery of Forgotten Books in Carlos Ruis Zafón’s The Shadow of the Wind. But I am sure there are many more.

Bookstore cats or bookstore dogs?
I like all animals, but given the choice, I would like to have dogs at my favorite bookstore, so I could pet them while I browse and have my morning coffee.

What’s your favorite snack when browsing in a bookstore?
Hopefully excellent coffee and biscotti.

Author photo by Lori Barra

Elizabeth Wetmore’s debut, Valentine, explores the aftermath of a violent sexual assault on a young Mexican American girl by a white man in the 1970s. West Texas may be overrun by oil men, but the women are the heartbeat of this brutal and beautiful story. Wetmore answered our questions about this heartfelt novel and its explorations of racism, morality, justice, abandonment, oppression and, ultimately, hope.

What was the first spark of an idea that led you to write this brave and vulnerable novel?
I promise I’m not being coy, but I honestly can’t remember a single spark. In some ways, I feel like I’ve been listening to these stories my whole life. Don’t get me wrong: The characters and the story are fiction, but the place and the voices are real—or at least I hope they are. I guess the rhythm of the story, both the beat and the lyrics, those are the sparks. That’s a vague answer, I know. I would also add that, because I grew up in the area, I was aware of the change in the city’s demeanor when an oil boom began. I read newspapers, eavesdropped on my parents, heard rumors and stories about terrible things that happened—accidents, murders, rapes, as well as the usual bar fights and rough living that seems to thrive in oil towns.

How was the landscape of West Texas, with its glaring sun, big sky, dust and tumbleweeds, an inspiration to you, and how did it play into the novel?
I was born and raised in Odessa, the small city that provides the setting for Valentine. When I left at 18, I could not wait to get away from my hometown. I was away for many years before I began to write about it. In some ways, I think, I was waiting for the moment when I was able to see West Texas differently, and maybe even begin to long for it again, if that makes any sense. I needed to miss it, to fall in love with my hometown enough to be able to write about it. That took a long time—many years—and when I did, it was by first falling in love with land and that epic sky.

“While I hope I did justice to Glory and her family, I am also hopeful that the book shines a light on the town in ways that are complex, and nuanced, and true.”

One theme of the novel is the oil business moving to town and its toll on both the land and the people. Did you see this in your childhood?
Yes, Odessa is an oil town at the southern end of the Permian Basin. Oil, natural gas and some cattle (although those are dwindling all the time, it seems), maybe a little cotton or sorghum—those are the underpinnings of the economy. In recent years, they’ve started to see more wind farms. And of course, both the oil boom and climate change are having an impact on the little bit of agriculture there is. Fracking and horizontal drilling are changing my hometown in ways that will have long-term consequences for the people who live and work out there.

My father worked for 30 years at the petrochemical plant on the outskirts of Odessa. When I was a kid, most of the men in my family—on both sides—worked in the oil patch, at least for a few years. It was then, as it is now, terribly hard work—dangerous and poorly regulated. And I had a summer job after high school where I painted silos and cooling towers out at that same plant where my father worked. It was hot, terrifying, hard work. I’ve never forgotten it.

I loved the depth of each character in Valentine. Which character was hardest to write? The most exciting?
I have to look at things for a long time, and my first instincts are usually not my best. I thought (foolishly) that these characters would come pretty easily to me. Their voices were those of people I had spent my entire childhood listening to, especially the women’s voices. I think I believed that, because the voices were so clear to me, I would understand the women and girls behind them—and build characters and, to some degree, a story from there. But I didn’t understand them, not in ways that were meaningful enough to write fiction. It took me a long time to see each character—years. And also: I’m a terribly slow writer, so I can be loath to give something up, after I’ve worked so hard for it—even when it’s in the best interest of the book. And that can slow me down.

But if I had to choose, I’d say Glory was the hardest character to write. I was second-guessing myself the whole way with her, for all kinds of reasons and from the get-go. Her voice was the least familiar voice to me, and so I really had to question why she was my character, why I had chosen a 14-year-old girl of Mexican American heritage to be my character. What did it mean to observe her suffering? Or to ask a reader to? And most importantly, having seen that suffering, as Mary Rose does early in the book, what was my response to that? What’s my responsibility to her as a character? I’ll be honest with you: Of all my characters, she’s the one I most worry that I didn’t quite get it right.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Valentine.

Racism and white supremacy appear in Valentine, and readers will likely wonder if justice would be served differently if Glory were a white girl. I recall this passage: “To speak up would require courage that we cannot even begin to imagine. Are we guilty? We are guilty as sin, guilty as the day is long.” Did you know from the beginning that white supremacy and racism were a central theme, or did that work its way in as the novel evolved?
I knew almost from the beginning that I could not write a novel about my hometown without reckoning—or at least trying to reckon—with the racism and xenophobia that I had witnessed growing up, and that lingers to this day. And that’s a complicated thing to write about, because the temptation sometimes, I think, is to believe that people who say and do racist things, who are racist, are wholly defined by that terrible, terrible sin. When, in fact, those of us who grew up in such places also know these people as neighbors, friends, co-workers, we also know them as mothers and fathers, as beloved brothers, as teachers and coaches. We know them as people who are doing their best to pay the bills and keep a roof over their heads, as hardworking and decent people.

And yet, there’s this poison coursing through the community’s veins. I couldn’t not write about that. People of color sure don’t have that luxury, and neither do immigrants or queer folks, or anyone else who doesn’t fit into this narrow paradigm, really just a sliver of space that everyone’s supposed to squeeze themselves into, if they can. It’s a completely untenable system that can’t die quick enough, but God, what damage it wreaks on those it sees standing in the way, what wrath it rains down on peoples’ heads. So I had to write about it, as best I could, and let the chips fall where they may. And while I hope I did justice to Glory and her family, I am also hopeful that the book shines a light on the town in ways that are complex, and nuanced, and true.

“Stories are everywhere, and absolutely inescapable.”

I’ve breastfed two children and read hundreds of novels. Not many novels portray breastfeeding at all, and if they do, it’s in passing. I was struck by Mary Rose’s storyline, in particular the detail you gave to her breastfeeding a young baby. How important was it for you to include those details? 
It was important to me to be true to the realities of these characters’ lives and days. If I wanted them, and their stories, to be real and to be true, then how could I pass over it? I breastfed my son for about 18 months—and I was one of those lucky, lucky people whose kid took right to it. We didn’t struggle with it at all. (We struggled with other things—like sleep. Oh God, the sleep. My kid’s 15, and sometimes I think I’m still not over those months and years of not sleeping.) And even with all that good luck, it was a major part of my life for a year and a half. During those weeks and months that you’re breastfeeding a baby, you never forget it, or at least that’s how it was for me. I found it to be an absolute pleasure, and a wonder, and also terribly, terribly wearing.

From a narrative standpoint, I was interested in that interdependence between mother and infant: the give and take of breastfeeding, and how something unexpected, like getting thrown in jail for a few hours, would add an extra layer of . . . I don’t know what word I’m looking for here, maybe low-grade trauma? Because when you’re away from a breastfeeding baby, the clock is ticking, always, and I found this to be super useful to telling Mary Rose’s story.

Teachers have a special place in my heart, and one of the characters fights to return to her teaching career at a time when most women choose to stay home with their children. What is your relationship with teaching and teachers? Was there a special teacher in your own life who encouraged your writing from a young age?
I haven’t done a lot of teaching, but when I have, I’ve loved it. It’s an honor to have the opportunity to teach (and learn) from a group of teenagers, or adult learners, or other writers in a community workshop. I guess another way to put it is: I love shooting the breeze about topics that interest me.

But like you, teachers have a special place in my heart. My husband, Jorge, is both a poet and a high school English teacher, and I witness every day how devoted he is to his students, and how devoted they are to him. And I’m a parent, so teachers are always in my orbit. I’m frequently blown away by their kindness and patience, how much they love what they do, how hard they work.

In a lot of ways, the people who taught me the most—maybe not about writing but certainly about stories—weren’t teachers at all, not in any formal sense. They were other waitresses at my jobs, some of them much older than me, or kind-hearted landlords, or neighbors, or random people I’ve met along the way—a park ranger, a stranger on a trail in the Superstition Mountains, someone I asked directions from in downtown Flagstaff and ended up hanging out with for a few hours. There were the fellow regulars at the neighborhood pub or at the library. Serendipitous encounters, I guess you’d call them.

Stories are everywhere, and absolutely inescapable. And of course, because writing is all about heart, I have also been instructed in my writing by those who held my heart, for a time, or broke it—and those whose hearts I held, or broke.

What’s your writing life like? Do you have a strict routine?
OK, but I warn you: It’s not terribly exciting. Every morning, I give my kid a lift to school. He’s 15 and could totally get himself to school, but I enjoy him (and I’m not a morning person anyway, so coffee and a lift to school is about the best I can do for at least an hour or so). And I suppose that I’ve been starting to feel a little nostalgic and mindful of the passage of time. Fifteen! How is my kid 15?! Plus, the drive to school is where I get my best information about what’s going on in his life.

Once he’s been delivered to school, I spend an hour or so dealing with assorted business—email, other correspondence, domestic whatevers. Then I put on some music and read for a bit before I get to work. I really like to read poetry in the morning. Right now, I’m toggling between Elizabeth Bishop’s Poems, Jericho Brown’s The New Testament and Tarfia Faizullah’s Registers of Illuminated Villages. I almost always have something by Larry Levis close by, too, and that’s been the case for several years now.

I always start out writing longhand, which is kind of new for me. It’s a habit I fell into about five years ago. I like to start by revising a bit. Actually, it’s my favorite strategy for a writing day: revise a bit at the beginning of the day, write something new, revise again at the end. When I’m just slogging it out, I’ll wrap it up at 5:00 or so. But when I feel like I’m starting to catch the rhythm of the story, the music and the lyrics, as I said before, then I’ll pretty much start ignoring everyone and everything. I’ll spend long hours hunched over my desk, working until it’s done—a draft, a story, a chapter or even just odd rambling that might eventually, someday, maybe, become something.

Can you tell us anything about your current writing projects?
I love to write short stories. I’ve been working on a new one, and revising two others. And I’m starting to turn my eye toward the first hundred (rough, rough) pages of the next book, which is going to be set a few years after Valentine takes place in . . . Odessa!