Tuesday, June 25, 2019

TBR: Dual Citizens by Alix Ohlin

TBR [to be read] is a semi-regular, invitation-only interview series with authors of newly released/forthcoming, interesting books who will tell us about their new work as well as offer tips on writing, stories about the publishing biz, and from time to time, a recipe! 


Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?

Dual Citizens is a love story about the complicated, lifelong bond between two half-sisters, Lark and Robin.  It’s about art, ambition, sisterhood, and redefining what a family can be.

Which character did you most enjoy creating? Why? And, which character gave you the most trouble, and why?

Lark and Robin are vastly different characters: Lark, the narrator, is shy and studious, deeply observant, and most comfortable when she feels invisible.  She becomes a film editor because she’s happiest working alone, stitching together footage to make sense of a story.  Robin, on the other hand, is wild and unconventional, determined to forge her own path through the world, and she walks away from a promising career as a classical pianist because it feels too confining for her.  I’m closer in temperament in Lark, so I could channel her with ease.  Writing Robin was harder, but also fun because she’s a character who isn’t afraid of anything, and who disregards all the rules.

Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.

Most of my writing process involves wrong turns that seem comical after the fact.  Did I really have a subplot involving a 1970s Quebecois terrorist organization?  Did I really spend months researching artificial intelligence only to disregard the material entirely?  Yes I did.  Looking back it seems absurd that I ever thought these things were going to be part of the book.  But all those detours were necessary for the book to become itself in the final version.

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

When I was in graduate school I kept going around to my various teachers asking them for tips on how to write a novel.  I think what I really wanted was permission, a green light, someone to tell me I was capable of it.  None of what I heard was particularly helpful in that regard, except for the Scottish writer James Kelman, who told me “Be bold, make art.  Don’t wait another second.” It’s the best advice I can think of.

My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?

Both the sisters in my book wind up choosing unconventional paths towards artistic fulfillment.  Robin ditches her musical career to work as a waitress and start a wolf preserve in the Laurentian mountains in Quebec.  Lark becomes an editor for reality TV shows and discovers that she finds great satisfaction and artistic fulfillment there.  I didn’t plan for either of them to make these choices but they both seemed right to me, and interesting to write about too.

How did you find the title of your book?

I’m a dual citizen of the US and Canada, and so are Robin and Lark, who have a (shared) Canadian mother and (different) American fathers.   As soon as I hit on Dual Citizens as the title, I thought it had so much resonance, political and personal; ideas about citizenship, belonging, and the complexities of home thread through the book.

Inquiring foodies and hungry book clubs want to know: Any food/s associated with your book? (Any recipes I might share?)

My narrator Lark is a terrible cook and self-declared “food agnostic.”  Literally everything she makes in the book is awful.  In lieu of a recipe I will therefore provide a list of my favorite Canadian snack foods:

1.     Coffee Crisp chocolate bars
2.     Miss Vickie’s Sea Salt and Malt Vinegar potato chips
3.     Kraft Dinner (Americans would call this Mac & Cheese, but it’s KD in Canada, always and forever)
4.     Dare Maple Leaf cookies
5.     Mackintosh’s Toffee

All classics, strongly recommended.

****

READ MORE ABOUT THIS AUTHOR & BOOK: www.alixohlinauthor.com

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Tuesday, June 18, 2019

TBR: Claiming a Body by Amanda Marbais

TBR [to be read] is a semi-regular, invitation-only interview series with authors of newly released/forthcoming, interesting books who will tell us about their new work as well as offer tips on writing, stories about the publishing biz, and from time to time, a recipe! 


Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?

Claiming a Body is a collection of short stories, many of them in the literary crime genre. It’s set in the Midwest and focuses on characters dealing with relationship issues, climate change, and economic uncertainty. It also contains stories of those living life after trauma. Their worldview has permanently shifted, and they’ve come out with a certain amount of levity and dark humor. Yet, these characters don’t want your pity. They are down but not out.


Which character did you most enjoy creating? Why? And, which character gave you the most trouble, and why?

One character I really enjoy is Liz from “The Calumet”. Yet she often makes choices I wouldn’t. I suppose she’s not as careful as I am. Maybe I’m drawn to Liz’s motivation to be judicious about who she loves or who she befriends.  Yet, it’s her soft spot, her sympathy for Rich, that ultimately gets her into trouble. She’s certainly not heroic, but she is human as well as strong in some unrealized ways.

I struggled most with the narrator in “Buried”. The genesis of this story was grounded in some personal experience in the construction industry. So, I had some firsthand experience with the logistics of housing during the start of the fracking boom in North Dakota. But I wouldn’t have made the choices the narrator makes. Certainly, her love and loyalty to her brother is more understandable. At the same time, I like the gritty action scenes that came out in that piece.

Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.

Certainly the high point was the phone call from the editor Mike Czyzniejewski to say I’d won the fiction prize. Then it was telling friends and family. I also enjoyed revisiting characters while making small edits to the galley.

The lows for this book were the amount of times I was a finalist for fiction prizes at a number of contests. I won’t give you the number here, but it’s pretty substantial.

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

I think it’s “Write what you’d like to read.” This always seems like the most straightforward advice. I think I’ve reached the other incarnation of this which is “Why am I writing this?” I feel like in the face of our contemporary political system and culture, this is something I constantly say to myself now. It usually forces me to drop any pretense and write something that really means something to me.

My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?

All these stories went through several iterations where I was trying to uncover what they were actually about.Faker” is the story that surprised me the most. I went into it thinking it was about a high school student, Brett, who does not want to work on his dad’s chicken farm because it’s brutal, and his dad isn’t taking care of the waste properly. A lot of these stories have this environmental concern that gets wrapped up in the landscape.

So, he is thinking about how he might make an anonymous tip and trigger an unscheduled inspection of the farm. But as the characters took on a life of their own, it began to be about this young guy who has cheated on his girlfriend. The girlfriend has a  fantasy of taking revenge, which she begins to act on as the story progresses. And the boyfriend tries to figure out how likely it is that she’ll enact these plans.

What surprised me about this story is how scary it is. A lot of characters in this book struggle to make the right decision. But Zoe is having some strong emotions absent any impulse control. And, I think many of us remember what it’s like to be an impulsive teenager. But this story deals in extremes.

Most of these stories also have this subtext of how identity is formed by film and TV. So, because characters spend so much time watching visual media, their only point of reference is this shared experience with TV / film. But, it’s double-edged because they don’t form their own identity in a more meaningful way. And so that’s why the main character at the end of “Faker” asks Amy about their shared experience in the state parks.

The subtext of identity being formed by TV and film leads to moments of absurdity. And one challenge for me, when dealing with dark subject matter, is to balance the gallows humor with respect for the character’s circumstances.


What’s something about your book that you want readers to know?

I would like to talk a little more about the theme of “life after trauma” in this book. There are a lot of people walking around with some level of trauma. Many deal with it differently. Some have buried it, put it in the past, or have sought professional help. I’m interested in highlighting the perspectives that come after trauma, however messy they may be. I feel that there’s hope and optimism in those voices.


Inquiring foodies and hungry book clubs want to know: Any food/s associated with your book? (Any recipes I might share?)

In “Werewolf DNA” there’s a lot of cataloguing of Chicago cuisine as characters have tension-filled business lunches. I was picturing Fulton Market as the setting. So, in association with this book, I would recommend upscale comfort food, which Chicago is great for -- the inspired street taco or the booze-infused donut. Any of the Stephanie Izard restaurants are amazing.

But when I’m making food for friends, I return to this recipe below. So, let’s imagine we’re meeting for book club. Here’s my toffee. 

This recipe is adapted from Smitten Kitchen’s Coffee Toffee Recipe

Peanut Butter Toffee
1 cup (2 sticks or 8 ounces) butter
1/2 cup light brown sugar
1/2 cup white sugar
1 tablespoon molasses
1 teaspoon salt (Reserve some salt to sprinkle over the peanut butter layer.)
Dash of cinnamon (This is optional. I have a thing about cinnamon.)
1 cup peanut butter chips
2 cup dark chocolate chips, of chop up whatever dark chocolate bars you have stashed in your cupboard
1/2 cup toasted and chopped walnuts


Toast the walnuts. Chop finely and set aside.

In a medium heavy saucepan add the butter, brown sugar, white sugar, molasses, and ½ the salt. Use a candy thermometer. Ideally, clip it to the pan. Do not have small children around. Watch out for your pet. Use a seriously protective hot pad of the mitten persuasion to hold the handle of the pan. This brew has to get up to 300 F. And, you can’t skip that, otherwise it won’t crack or have the right consistency.

As it heats up, it gets a little frothy, so whisk it. I whisk continually, and that works well.

Pour it immediately onto a parchment covered baking sheet and spread evenly with a spatula. Sprinkle peanut butter chips and let them melt. Spread the melted chips evenly and lightly salt. You know the drill. Add that dark chocolate. I pop the whole thing in the oven at 200 for five minutes. Spread the dark chocolate evenly. Sprinkle with walnuts.

I let it sit overnight. Need to be someplace ASAP? Put it in the refrigerator. Just be aware that chocolate can get weird if it doesn’t have a chance to rest comfortably--just like us.

Break it into pieces and share.

****

READ MORE ABOUT THIS AUTHOR: Amanda Marbais

READ MORE ABOUT THIS PUBLISHER AND THIS BOOK: Moon City Press

ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR OWN TBR SHELF: University of Arkansas Press

READ A STORY FROM THIS BOOK: Horribilis - Electric Literature; May 2019



Monday, June 10, 2019

TBR: Nirvana Is Here: A Novel by Aaron Hamburger


TBR [to be read] is a semi-regular, invitation-only interview series with authors of newly released/forthcoming, interesting books who will tell us about their new work as well as offer tips on writing, stories about the publishing biz, and from time to time, a recipe! 


Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?

When his ex-husband is accused of sexual harassment in the #metoo era, history professor Ari Silverman is forced to confront long-buried trauma from his childhood, where he and his high school crush bonded over the raw emotion of Kurt Cobain’s lyrics in the segregated suburbs of 1990s Detroit. Nirvana Is Here explores issues of identity, race, sex, and family with both poignancy and unexpected humor. Imagine Call Me By Your Name with a grunge-era soundtrack.

Which character did you most enjoy creating? Why? And, which character gave you the most trouble, and why?

I loved all these characters. I think you have to be a little in love with your characters when you write, even the ones who behave badly, in order to see them as they see themselves, and write about them with what the writer Breena Clarke calls “radical empathy.” There is one supporting character in the book, an English teacher named Mr. Wentworth, with whom I initially had the most trouble, but then in the end I particularly enjoyed developing. At first I saw Mr. Wentworth as a bit of a villain. The main character of Ari, who’s in high school during the 1990s, resents Mr. W. for being a rather pedantic and not very competent teacher. In my early drafts, Wentworth was just as Ari saw him: a bit of a caricature. But then as I revised his character and looked for ways to open him up, I remembered teachers from high school who were in the closet for fear of losing their jobs. I began to think, what if Mr. Wentworth were a closeted gay man who wants to reach out to Ari, to help him, and yet feels constrained by his own life decisions. He wants to be Ari’s friend and feels hurt by Ari’s rejection, yet at the same time because of his position of authority, he has to discipline Ari as well. In the final version of the book, Mr. Wentworth engendered so much sympathy in me because of his vulnerability. Working on him reinforced such a great lesson about how to make characters memorable, how to round them out by trying to see the world as they see it.

Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.

After I published my first two books of fiction, I worked on another novel that no one wanted to read or publish. It was really hard to accept that after all the work I’d done,  the research trips, the countless revisions, the time and effort, that this book wasn’t going to make it.

A non-writer friend of mine suggested that I turn next to short stories for a while. That way, he said, if they don’t work out, you’ve only written a failed story rather than a failed novel.

At the same time, a criticism I had heard about my writing was that it wasn’t emotionally engaging enough. It didn’t feel personal enough. So I thought I might work on a few stories inspired by things I’d seen, heard about, or experienced, and by doing so I might learn to capture some of that emotional quality that had been lacking.

After a while, I accumulated several stories that seemed related, so I toyed with the idea of a linked story collection, which then became a novel-in-stories, until finally my wise friend and colleague, the writer Cait Johnson, said, “Oh, just call it a novel. It’s a novel!”

Finally it came time to seek publication. Working with “big” publishers and “big” agents in the past has been immensely helpful in a lot of ways. And yet I also found that in terms of marketing and getting my work out there in the world, I’d done a lot of the work on my own. I also noticed that the big publishers can have difficulty seeing your book in a variety of ways. For example, I wrote a novel called Faith for Beginners with two main characters: a straight woman with a gay son, both of whom were Jewish. I imagined the book might appeal to both Jewish and gay audiences, and I was surprised that my publisher thought it couldn’t be marketed both ways, that it had to be only one thing, which meant in this case that it had to be mainly a gay book.

As I started speaking to agents about this book, I heard two things over and over: A) It’s a wonderful book and B) I don’t know how to sell it. (To which, I kept thinking, uh, isn’t that your job?) Their main issue seemed to be that much of the book describes the main character while he’s in his teens, and yet it isn’t a young adult novel, so they couldn’t figure out how to pigeonhole it for marketing purposes.

Finally, I decided, you know what, let me find a great indie press that gets this book, loves it as much as I do, and let’s work on it together, and that’s exactly what happened. A friend recommended Three Rooms Press to me, and they responded immediately to my query, and more importantly, they understood immediately what I was trying to do artistically, that this was a book for anyone of any age who’s revisiting his or her past to try to understand the present.

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

Do I have to pick just one? Here are a few of my top pieces of advice, all from other writers:

There are two of you -- one who wants to write and one who doesn't. The one who wants to write better keep tricking the one who doesn't."
- Maria Irene Fornes

The most important skill for a writer is how to notice the right things.
--paraphrased from Tina Brown

Write from what you know into what you don't know.
Grace Paley

I’d also say—and this is more publishing than writing advice—is that as a writer, my job is to get 100 rejections a year. Why? Because when I get rejected 100 times, I publish 10 times. But when I don’t get rejected at all because I’m afraid of sending my work out and getting a negative response, I don’t get published at all. Another possibility: if I’m not getting rejected and I’m still publishing, that means I’m aiming too low.

My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?

Great question. I was surprised that a story with so much potential for pain or anger could also have so much love in it. Familial love, romantic love, the love of art, history, and culture, and the love of friends for each other. I feel like the topic of friendship, particularly male friendship, is so under-explored in literature. I’m glad I had the chance to take it on here.

Another surprise, on a more mundane level. For a very minor character in the book, I had to research bathroom attendants, the people who stand in the bathroom of fancy restaurants and give you a hand towel. I learned a couple of things. First, those attendants have to pay for their own candy that people take on their way out. Second, one attendant said in an interview that he can understand if people don’t tip if they come into pee, but that if they poop, he expects at least a couple of bucks.

These are the kinds of things you find out that you never expect to when you’re writing a novel.

What’s something about your book that you want readers to know?

Something I want readers to know is that this book has a lot of humor in it. We as humans find humor in the most unexpected of places, and that it’s one of the things that reminds us we’re alive and surviving, often in the darkest of times. I love using humor in my writing, particularly in dramatic moments. It’s important to keep in mind here, there’s such a great variety of shadings with humor, ranging from the slapstick ha-ha funny of the Marx Brothers to the bitter, biting dark humor of something like Tadeusz Borowski’s collection of stories about the Holocaust titled This Way to the Gas Chambers, Ladies and Gentlemen.

Inquiring foodies and hungry book clubs want to know: Any food/s associated with your book? (Any recipes I might share?)

Yes, as a young man, the main character of Ari becomes obsessed with food and one of his great moments of awakening occurs while dining at a gourmet establishment based on a real restaurant, The Golden Mushroom, which was a well-known, top-rated restaurant in the Detroit area when I was young.

I’m also a foodie, an avid baker of desserts, and have done some food writing in the past. Actually, a memoir essay I wrote about a piece of candy called Smarties for a special candy-themed issue of Tin House was very helpful to me in the writing of this book:  https://tinhouse.com/sweetness-mattered/

And here’s an original recipe of mine for a seven-layer cake, a traditional dessert served at functions in the Jewish community of Detroit, where part of the book is set:

*****

FOR MORE INFORMATION ABOUT THE AUTHOR: www.aaronhamburger.com;

ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR TBR PILE: