TBR: How to Disappear and Why by Kyle Minor

Established in 2018, TBR [to be read] is a semi-regular, invitation-only interview series with authors of newly released/forthcoming, interesting books.  

 

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

 

These essays are interested in all varieties of disappearance: Voluntary, involuntary, coerced, professional, intellectual, transcendent, mortal. Ghosts of dead friends, driving Uber after Hollywood work dried up, narcissism in writers, social class and upward mobility, the Polish diplomat Jan Karski who failed to stop the Holocaust, folk art and synesthesia and transcendence, Bernard Moitessier and c. diff. and the sickness that might find its way into our song.

 

Which essay did you most enjoy writing? Why?

 

The real pleasure was writing “Junk Temples,” a novella-length essay-in-digressions toward the end of the book that is intensely interested in the notion of transcendence in art and the idea of how we make temples out of all kinds of things, including junk, and ascribe elevated meaning to them. I got to visit the folk artist Howard Finster’s Paradise Gardens, a couple of acres of his life’s work in junk collage and painting on everything, which is located right across the street from a state prison, and in a neighborhood full of Rottweilers chained to rickety stakes in every other front yard. And I got to spend time in the work of Henry Darger, who left behind one of the largest books ever assembled, which has at its center a phalanx of Charmin-girl angels with penises fighting a Civil War in some kind of troubled heaven. And I got to think about the nature of love and forgetting and music and books alongside Susan Sontag and William Goyen and a lot of poets, all through an overlay of synesthetic color and light.

 

 And which essay gave you the most trouble, and why?

 

The most difficult essay was the one at the end, “The Sickness and the Song,” which is an attempt at a personal reckoning with what art and writing are for, and how narcissism distorts, and what matters in life, even if you are chasing art. I was thinking about an around-the-world boat race in which the Frenchman Bernard Moitessier was in the lead, but he quit because the sailing—the water, the wind, the sky, the fish—had come to matter more than the race.

 

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

 

I injured my brain a little playing hockey, and for a little while I had some trouble reading. Then I got sad. Then there were some complications with clearing permissions. The book was a little late to press. By then, the world had changed again, and it started to mean new things it hadn’t meant when I wrote it. Maybe it was for the best.

 

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

 

Quit this shit and go to medical school, so you can make enough money to eat.

 

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

 

I think I might have found a path out of despair and into hope.

 

Who is your ideal reader?

 

You.

 

*****

 

READ MORE ABOUT THIS BOOK: http://sarabandebooks.org/

 

ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR OWN TBR STACK:  https://shop.skylarkbookshop.com/search?q=how%20to%20disappear%20and%20why

 

READ AN ESSAY FROM THIS BOOK, “The Uber Diaries”:  https://newohioreview.org/2019/10/02/the-uber-diaries/ 

 

 

 

 

 

TBR: The Last Supper by Wendy J. Fox

Established in 2018, TBR [to be read] is a semi-regular, invitation-only interview series with authors of newly released/forthcoming, interesting books.    

 

 

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

 

The Last Supper follows three months in the chaotic life of Amanda, who has just turned 40, has two young children, and is searching for something more in her life. She's failed at being a momfluencer, she's failed at MLM entrepreneurship, and she’s living in terror of what to make for dinner. Desperate for something more than the isolated world of her suburban home, but consumed by parenting, her illusory stability collapses when the cracks in her marriage finally split open so wide she sees a way out, and a pathway to reclaim her own creative and economic agency.

 

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

 

The character I most enjoyed creating was the mother in the novel—Camille is a successful attorney who specializes in family law and clawed her way into financial stability after being a single parent. The reason I felt energized when I was in her perspective is because she’s a successful woman who is not defined by caregiving relationships. She’s just who she is and doesn’t really care what other people think about her.

 

The character who gave me the most trouble—and I think this will track for other writers—was the protagonist, Amanda. She is the hinge the door of the novel hangs on, and it is from her perspective the plot unfolds.

 

With the most space and time with a protagonist, there’s also more chance for narrative discontinuity or character motivation issues to arise. She goes through a period of awaking in the novel, and while I think it is fair to say all writers of literary fiction or character-driven fiction want to represent the change that occurs, sometimes I have to work on not being didactic or too interior.

 

Still, from a process perspective, I enjoy the building of a character, inclusive of the hard parts. (This is why I don’t understand would-be creatives leaning on generative AI.)

 

If you can’t sit with your characters and really think about them, what’s the point?

 

While sure, it can be difficult, there’s also so much joy in figuring out a tricky sentence, so much satisfaction in revising a critical scene.

 

How I have come to think about AI chatbots (which you didn’t ask about but is on my mind all the time) is that chatbots are all output, in contrast to creative writing being largely about input.

 

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

 

This is my fifth book, so at this point I can mostly roll with anything. That said, for me there is always the high of getting to contract with a manuscript, and the low of worrying about it.

 

The thing that has not changed at all—the thing I roll less well with is worrying how the book will be received.

 

I often say to people that I have this conundrum of: What if nobody reads it? And then: Oh crap, what if they do?!

 

Writing and publishing are just two different animals.

 

However, I do want to say to anyone out there shopping a manuscript: you might (will probably) at some point have a weird interaction with an agent, an editor, a publisher that will shake you. You might wake up in the middle of the night wondering if you wasted the last five years or more of your life.

 

It’s fine. Not every editor will get you. Lots of agents won’t. Do your work.

 

When you find the right publishing partner/model, you will know.

 

The lows are getting through the doubt. The highs are knowing you honored your work—whether it is published or not.

 

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

 

Over a decade ago, before I had a single book in print, I went to a panel where Andre Dubus III talked about the need for tension in every narrative.

 

That idea has crystallized over the years into really thinking about stakes.

 

On the panel, Dubus III said something like “If there’s no tension, who cares?” I think about that a lot.

 

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

 

I love your writing advice.

 

What surprised me in writing The Last Supper was the way the manuscript changed over time. At first, I was writing from a character sketch, then I was developing in earnest. The beginning versions were very different, both in tone and plot.

 

But! That’s part of the whole point of the process. Which is also, again, why I can’t get down with AI, as there’s no process there.

 

How did you find the title of your book?

 

I am notoriously bad at titles.

 

Once, I turned in a book to my publisher called “Office Stories” – and talk about a snooze in the title department (thank goodness I was already under contract). And definitely no tension there, à la Dubus III. With some help, the title of the book became What If We Were Somewhere Else, which does have tension and also is appropriately descriptive of what it feels like to work in an office.

 

The title for The Last Supper came from a highly trusted reader.

 

I’m pretty transparent as a person and a writer, but my beta titles for what became The Last Supper are too embarrassingly bad for even me to share publicly.

 

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

 

There is a lot of food in this book. The protagonist is trying to organize dinner every night to feed her children and husband. Sometimes it works, but mostly it does not: think mistaking vanilla yogurt for sour cream for a taco topper, burned meat of every variety, backup meals of microwaved nuggets.

 

I have feelings about food, and when I worked a tech job, absolutely hating to cook was a massive understatement. Now that I have more time, I’m into it. I cook every day.

 

I’m not including recipe from the book, because I like foodies and book clubs.

 

Instead, here is a recipe that my protagonist, Amanda, would love if she had the damn time or brain space to do it. The ingredients are from the back of a Bob’s Red Mill flour bag. The instructions are mine.

 

Still, this emblematic of certain type of thinking about cooking: basic pantry items can really yield deliciousness, but again, that’s all predicated on time.

 

Overnight No Knead Bread

 

Ingredients:

 

3 cups bread flour

¼  teaspoon active dry yeast

½ teaspoon salt

1 ½ cup warm water

 

Directions:

 

Before you go to bed, mix up all the ingredients in a bowl to form a shaggy dough. Cover it with a clean kitchen towel and stash in the warmest part of your abode.

 

Then go to bed!

 

In the morning, after you have slept for hopefully 6 – 8 hours (if you slept longer, even better)*, generously flour your hands and form the dough into something loaf-like. Don’t overthink the shape! It’s not a competition. Return your dough to the bowl and cover with the same towel.

 

Put your baking vessel in the oven and pre-heat to 450F. A Dutch oven works well, but anything that is oven-safe is fine.

 

Wait 30 minutes so the dough can proof again after you just handled it, and to ensure the oven is properly hot.

 

Use more flour on your hands to retrieve your loaf or loaf-adjacent dough-shape from the bowl and plop it onto the hot baking vessel.

 

Cover and cook for 30 minutes.

 

Uncover and cook for 10- 12 minutes to crisp up the outsides.

 

*Don’t even worry if you forget about this dough for over a day. It is very forgiving.

  

*****

 READ MORE ABOUT THIS AUTHOR: www.wendyjfox.com

 

ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR TBR STACK: https://www.sfwp.com/books/lastsupper

 

READ AN EXCERPT FROM THIS NOVEL: https://writerschronicle.awpwriter.org/TWC/2026-february/preview/20-The-Last-Supper.aspx

 

 

 

TBR: Mothers and Other Fictional Characters by Nicole Graev Lipson

Established in 2018, TBR [to be read] is a semi-regular, invitation-only interview series with authors of newly released/forthcoming, interesting books.

  

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

 

Mothers and Other Fictional Characters explores the world’s strange and relentless desire to reduce women to stock characters, and how easy it is to find ourselves complicit in this process, until we no longer know what parts of us are real. I mine this territory by writing as intimately and honestly as I possibly can about the ways fiction has infiltrated my life—as a girl, a young adult, a mother, and a woman at middle age—and by searching the work of my literary foremothers for clues to truer ways of being. In some ways, Mothers and Other Fictional Characters is as much about the subversive power of reading as it is about womanhood.  

 

What boundaries did you break in the writing of this memoir? Where does that sort of courage come from?

 

My whole purpose in writing this book was to break boundaries! The boundaries imposed on women to keep us in our place, the boundaries between the surface stories we tell about ourselves and the messier truths below, the boundaries between our genuine selves and the selves we’ve been conditioned to project.

 

To crack through these boundaries, I knew I had to be as honest about my experiences and internal weather as possible, which often led me into territory considered taboo, especially for women. In one essay, I write about my brief but utterly destabilizing extramarital attraction to a younger man when I hit middle age. In another, I explore the tension of being both an introvert and a mother of three, and my recurring urges to flee my family for solitude; and in another, I write about the difficult chemistry between me and my middle child, whose temperament is so different than mine.

 

These are all things we as women aren’t supposed to feel or admit to. We aren’t supposed to lust after other men when we are happily married; we aren’t supposed to fantasize about abandoning our family; and we aren’t supposed to talk honestly about the difficult aspects of our relationships with our children. But these urges and desires and complexities are precisely what make us human. I’ve tried to show in my book that when a woman stifles her own complexity, she stifles her humanity—which I’d argue, in a patriarchal culture, is precisely the point. In her beautiful blurb, Kelly McMasters describes Mothers and Other Fictional Characters as an “urgent searchlight, shining across the most complicated parts of existing as a multidimensional woman in a binary world.” I love this description so much. This is precisely what I longed to do on every page.

In terms of courage, I have my children to thank for this. Becoming a mother magnified all of the concerns and injustices that had always consumed me, because having children made the stakes more urgent than ever. It was one thing, say, for our culture’s misogynistic beauty standards to turn me against my own body, but the thought of my daughters one day despising their own perfect bodies, or of my son suppressing his tender spirit to adhere to masculine norms, pulled me to the page in whole new way.

 

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

 

One of the high points has been the incredible creative community writing and publishing this book helped me find. I began the writing process in a very solitary way—it was just me and a vision and the page, and this could often feel scary and lonely. But over time, working on the book became a portal to incredible friendships and connections with other writers and aspiring authors, both here in Boston where I live, and elsewhere--thanks to the internet, online writing groups, and conferences. I’ve drawn so much comfort and inspiration from these relationships.

 

I wouldn’t necessarily call this a “low,” but one challenge I grappled with was navigating writing about loved ones. My story is so rooted in domestic life and the nuances of family relationships, and it was impossible to tell such a story without conjuring the people who animate the landscape of my daily life: my husband, my children, my parents, and my dearest friends. I wished so often that there were a single hard and fast rule I could follow to ensure I would handle this flawlessly, but really, I just had to feel my way through, making sure at every turn that I’d rendered the people in my life with truthfulness, compassion and kindness. I don’t mean a saccharine or glossed-over sort of kindness, but rather a spirit of deep regard for the humanity, complexity, and struggles of others. I don’t think what we as humans most deeply yearn for is to be seen as perfect. I think we yearn to be seen in all of our complexity and imperfection, and loved nonetheless. It was this type of love that guided my choices on the page.  

 

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

 

I’ve recommended Brenda Ueland’s totally charming craft book If You Want to Write to so many fellow writers and aspiring authors over the years. It’s frank, big-hearted and full of helpful wisdom. Ueland wrote the book in 1938, which is miraculous to me because her insights feel so modern. You’ll have to excuse the dated universal male pronouns in my favorite quote from the book, which is: “Everybody is original if he tells the truth, if he speaks from himself. But it must be from his true self, and not from the self he thinks he should be.”

 

This is such simple but profound advice. I know firsthand how easy it is to default to writing from a place of should, which in the end is a pretty dreary place to write from. While I was working on Mothers and Other Fictional Characters, pushing past should to write from a place of what is—in all its messiness and weirdness and beauty and splendor—made the writing process far more interesting and unexpected than it would otherwise have been. And I’m hopeful that this openness of spirit shows up in the writing.  

 

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

 

As a bookworm and former high school English teacher, I knew that my encounters with literature would be an important part of the book. From the start, there were some writers I knew I’d focus on—like Kate Chopin and Adrienne Rich—because their influence has been so central to my life. But otherwise, the process of weaving in literature was very organic, and I was often surprised by the connections that emerged between my reading life and whatever lived experience I was writing about: Philip Roth shows up in an essay about raising a son. Gwendolyn Brooks shows up in an essay about trying to decide what do with my unused frozen embryos. Michel de Montaigne shows up in an essay about my love for my closest friend Sara. I wasn’t aware how much these writers had shaped my world view until they showed up unannounced in my work!

 

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

 

I want readers to know that I wrote the book for them. Over coffee recently, a novelist friend of mine mentioned that he never thinks about his audience when writing. “The moment I picture a reader,” he said, “I start doubting myself, ruining the entire process.” While I was working on Mothers and Other Fictional Characters, my feelings toward my own imagined readers could not have been more different. I wrote with an awareness that my words—like any writer’s words—were only half the story, a tale lying dormant until another human stepped in to give it pulse and meaning. My greatest hope for the book is that it helps readers feel seen, understood, and a little less alone.

 

Inquiring foodies and hungry book clubs want to know: Any food/s associated with your book?

 

I love this question! I had to go back through the book to jog my memory, and a few tasty things do appear in its pages, including cherry wine, birthday cake, mint chocolate chip ice cream, cheese fondue, tostones, hamburgers, macaroni, Runts, lasagna, canned soup, potato chips. It’s dawning on me that I may need to see a nutritionist.

 

*****

 

READ MORE ABOUT THIS AUTHOR: https://nicolegraevlipson.com/

 

ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR OWN TBR STACK: https://bookshop.org/p/books/mothers-and-other-fictional-characters-a-memoir-in-essays-nicole-graev-lipson/21565078?ean=9781797228563

 

READ AN EXCERPT, “Macho Baby”: https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/22506-macho-baby

 

 

 

TBR: Popular Song by Harry Man

TBR [to be read], a semi-regular, invitation-only interview series with authors of newly released/forthcoming, interesting books.  

 

We don’t expect an elevator pitch from a poet, but can you tell us about your work in 2-3 sentences?

 

Pound, Hope Mirrlees and Eliot and later modernists were writing in response to mass-production and the rise in literacy and psychoanalysis. From the 60s until now, the big subjects have been advertising and the environment. Now that great subject is ourselves. Congruent with that is the question of popularity. Online attention as popularity (particularly divisive attention) and thus the favouring by algorithms of the popular, the separation of self between the online persona whom we perhaps believe is more popular than our unvarnished selves, and also poems that reflect on what that popularity means. These are all hiding in the wings. The collection itself is concerned with discovery, humour and invention that takes its cues from the Invisible Man, assorted British wildlife, Kubla Kahn and David Bowie among others. In other words, nerdy, but fun nerdy.

 

 

What boundaries did you break in the writing of this book?

 

I was already working on poems after Ed Sheeran, Tones and I and The Weeknd, to challenge myself. All three have penned some of the most streamed songs of all time. I did also write poems in response to some of the UK’s favourite poems including Wordsworth’s ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’ (aka ‘Daffodils’). A working title for my first pamphlet was Pilots and I think that tradition in my work of every poem being a test shot into the unknown continues. With that comes the risk of spectacular failure. In order to send work out, I have to be okay with that. This of course is alongside any chance of success. If I can inspire poems by people who had previously felt intimidated or alienated by poetry, then that is greatest reward and that for me is where the poems take off into new lives.

 

I also like poems that offer a valuable journey to a reader who wants to spend more time casting around and isn’t afraid to get out their own answer to literary sonar in search of ancient ruins, revealing treasures and uncovering histories for themselves. (You can see a little bit of this in poems like ‘Alphabets of the Human Heart in Languages of the World’)

 

 

Where does that sort of courage come from?

 

I read a news story the other day about a local guy so high he took a kid’s little yellow bicycle and tried to outrun the police on it. Courage comes from all sorts of different places. To be more serious about it, post-pandemic, I think like a lot of people, I needed to talk myself back into a hard-truth, yet highly empathetic reality.

 

There’s more to it, and I tend not to wear it on my sleeve, but I am dyslexic and I am on the spectrum, what people used to call Asperger’s. I think dyslexia gives me the most courage. You not only think, see, and hear the world differently, but you also learn the true weight of a blow. This can help you to understand how to inspire other people to fight for what they want to write and what they want to say and that’s exciting. For yourself that opens a space to write and create without limitation, but of course there are some cold light of day dangers to that too(!). Days and nights at the keys are all very well and good but you should also absolutely take a break and listen to the birds. Anthony Minghella, director of The English Patient said he had the affliction of being uxorious. That’s an affliction I also share that gives me the most courage (pukeworthy, but also true!).

 

 

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

 

The book spans twelve years of writing. In that time my poems have blasted off to Mars, others have been printed on cakes, cast in ice, put onto train station platforms and one was turned into a turning steel monument another performed with a jazz orchestra in Rotterdam. They’re young, they need to get out there and do their own thing. It’s hard to have a favourite. I think one of the best was when I heard Kathleen Jamie say she liked my work. I think my pulse has not quite been the same since. I read poems on stage with Pete Brown (who wrote the lyrics to Cream’s ‘White Room’ among other songs – probably the one song in the world that for me that most epitomises pre-internet London) before he passed and that was really very special. I also got to shake hands and share a glass with Jan Erik Vold – a privilege I will never forget. I walked with Nikola Madžirov and had one of those life-changing conversations about writing and the imagination and I got to watch the tempestuous Norwegian Sea rise and fall around black cliffs at midnight with Endre Ruset – and see how deservedly adored he is. I banged my head against a desk in frustration at my own poems while talking to Alice Oswald. The world turned. I worked nights at the supermarket during the pandemic. I wrote. I lived in a caravan, then in a shepherd’s hut and wrote a meditation for the birds and I translated secret codewords from the Russian military into English (for a poem). A close friend died of cancer. I wrote poems with Julia Lewis. At night I walked across the fields by moonlight to my house. I held my bed for six months while waiting for a doctor’s appointment because I thought my heart was going to explode. I conducted interviews with the trees and my niece wrote a story where everyone on Earth left got in a rocket and set off, leaving me behind with a bunch of dinosaurs, a canoe and a chocolate cookie. Poems about some of this ended up in the book. There is so much to explain, but I am grateful for all of it.

  

 

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

 

Don’t finish that day’s writing when you’ve finished the thought, but rather when you know what the next sentence will be.

 

It’s more for prose writers than for poets, but building that rhythm and swinging across the gap from one sentence to the next to keep that pace going… Invaluable.

 

 

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

 

I was working on a piece about ‘The Empire Strikes Back in Reverse’. For a reader, it’s all over in a few minutes, but for me it’s been a quarter of my life. I always knew the poem had its own secrets. I took the two main characters outside of the cramped conditions of the car where most of the poem is set and it broadened and suddenly all this light came into the room and the relationship between them opened up in its scale and conversely it focussed their intimacy and that was revelatory. I started that poem in 2013 and finished it eleven years later… the amount of times I’ve seen a Tauntaun regain its innards and come miraculously back to life… It was all that time to find that one secret.

 

 

How did you find the title of your book?

 

An earlier version was called Spooky Action at a Distance. It has that feeling. People travel to Mars and lose contact with Earth, others the reader steps into a cassette tape and becomes the song on the album. Gradually, working like a selected poems, it became more of a mixtape and more about song and sound.

  

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

 

Gremolata Linguine. A perfect spring or summer afternoon recipe. It is zesty, tangy, a little bit spicy and feels warming and indulgent. It does not strictly feature in the book, but this is a big recipe from my childhood (minus the wine) and my childhood does feature – as does time travel, so if I travel back in time from the future, maybe it will go into the book somewhere!

 

Here’s how to make it:

 

Ingredients:

 

3 garlic cloves

1 lemon (zested, then juiced)

60g wild rocket [known as arugula in the US]

100g parsley

1 red chilli

300g cooked and peeled prawns (will also work with breadcrumbs, olives and rosemary)

300g linguine

250ml dry white wine

 

Pepper, salt, olive oil

 

You will need:  A boiling pan, a food processor, two large bowls.

 

 

Method:

 

Add two tablespoons of salt to a large pan of water and bring to the boil. Cook the linguine to one minute less than it says on the packet instructions, so it still has a little “al dente” bite to it. Pour a little of the cooking water out of the pan before you strain it. I usually drain the pasta and then, while it is still dripping, toss it back into the pan with a drizzle of olive oil. Stir. Empty this into a bowl and chill in the fridge for at least 60 minutes. If time is of the essence you can re-fill the pan with ice and water to cool it quickly. Meanwhile zest and juice the lemon. Wash the rocket and parsley. Peel the garlic. Add the lemon juice and zest, the rocket and parsley, the garlic and that 250ml (or just a glass of wine) to a food processor and blitz. Taste to check. Because the pasta is slightly sweet, you need good acidity, good salt and a little spiciness to the sauce. Add as much chilli as feels comfortable and a generous amount of salt and plenty of black pepper. Give it another blitz. Once the pasta is perfectly chilled, toss it together with the sauce and add in the prawns. The prawns like to holiday at the bottom of the pan, so keep an eye out so everyone gets their fair share. Serve immediately. Watch out for your time-travelling self coming back for seconds… or is it firsts?

 

It’s a good travelling dish, and meeting poets, I have made this with variations using butter instead of olive oil, local giant sourdough loaves, sliced tomatoes and I have made my own fresh pasta with local eggs too. A real crowdpleaser.

 

*****

READ MORE ABOUT THIS AUTHOR: www.manmadebooks.co.uk

 

 

ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR OWN TBR STACK: https://ninearchespress.com/publications/poetry-collections/popular-song

 

 

 

 

TBR: The Requirement of Grief by Danielle Ariano

TBR [to be read], a semi-regular, invitation-only interview series with authors of newly released/forthcoming, interesting books.  

 

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

 

The Requirement of Grief recounts the unique bond between two sisters and offers an unflinching perspective on what remains in the wake of one sibling’s tragic suicide.

 

 

What boundaries did you break in the writing of this memoir?

 

The first chapter is written from my sister Alexis’ imagined perspective and it takes place on the last day of her life. There are several other chapters like this throughout the memoir. While I did my best to adhere to the factual circumstances of my sister’s suicide/life, these chapters are fiction.

 

Some would say that they have no place in a memoir. I might even agree with these people, and yet I felt that Alexis’s perspective needed to be considered. Since this was impossible, I did my best to recreate it in these chapters. Alexis kept journals throughout her life and I drew on these as a way to understand how she saw the world, especially in the deepest throes of her addiction and mental illness. When I gave myself permission to write these chapters, I felt as though the manuscript finally came to life.

 

I had only seen this done once before in one chapter of Marion Winik’s memoir, First Comes Love, and it had a huge impact on me as a reader. She shifted into the imagined point of view of her husband Tony, who died of AIDS. Even 15 years after reading this book, I still remember the emotional impact that chapter of the book had on me. Seeing this technique used effectively in another memoir, gave me the courage to try it.

 

 

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

 

When my son was a baby, there was an entire year when he preferred my wife Lindsay to me. I would walk into his room in the morning and he would squeal that he wanted her, not me. Logically, I understood that this was normal and that it would not last forever, but emotionally it was devastating to be rejected by him. There were days that I questioned myself as a mother.

 

Getting rejected over and over as I sent my manuscript out felt eerily similar. Even though I believed in the quality of my writing and believed that there was value in the subject matter, I found myself going into tailspins of self-doubt as the no’s piled up. Logically, I knew this was all part of the process and I had to press on, but unfortunately my emotion didn’t care about logic.

 

Thankfully my writing partner, Judith Krummeck, had an unwavering belief in the manuscript. I have so much respect for Judith and her writing that her words buoyed me at the lowest points.

 

 

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

 

You want to be a writer? Write.

 

 

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

 

One night I went out to dinner with a writing mentor to talk to her about my manuscript. When I told her about the chapters written from my sister’s perspective, she asked me if I had written one about the day that Alexis ended her life. The moment she asked, I knew that I needed to write this. Even though it wasn’t something I’d planned or wanted to do, I could see that it was essential to the story. Eventually this became the first chapter of the book.

 

 

How did you find the title of your book?

 

Titles are usually so difficult for me. Typically, my essay/chapters/books are untitled until the very end, but this one came to me as I was revising a chapter that contained the following text:

 

“As time passes, I learn that grief’s only requirement is that it must be carried. It does not care if you are ready for it or if its weight is too much to bear or if you are in the throes of the deepest joy.

"It cannot be set aside even for the briefest moment while you sit on a park bench and enjoy a beautiful sunset. Even then, it must be carried. Carried even as you watch in wonder on the day your son comes into the world. Carried when you bear witness to your parents holding their only grandchild for the very first time. Carried always.”

I was struck with the realization that The Requirement of Grief was my title.

*****

 

READ MORE ABOUT THIS AUTHOR:

www.danielleariano.com

 

ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR OWN TBR STACK: www.bookshop.org

 

 

TBR: Truth Is the Arrow, Mercy Is the Bow: A DIY Kit for the Construction of Stories by Steve Almond

TBR [to be read], a semi-regular, invitation-only interview series with authors of newly released/forthcoming, interesting books.  

 

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

 

Truth is a book of essays about the whole creative process: the elements of craft, where stories come from, and (most important of all) all the evil voices that haunt us, and hold us back, at the keyboard. I’ve been writing it—in my head, in the classroom, and at various writing conferences—for three decades.

 

Which essay did you most enjoy writing? Why?

 

There’s an essay called “Writer’s Block: A Love Story,” which I loved writing, because I think our ideas about writer’s block is really misguided. We treat it like the black plague, something to be endured in shameful isolation. But the truth is, writer’s block is an inevitable part of the writing process. It describes moments when our doubts and inhibitions overtake our capacities to create. That happens all the time. I’ve re-written sentences and paragraphs a hundred times because I’m blocked. I’ve also been so blocked that I can’t even get myself to the keyboard. It’s very upsetting. But it can also be really clarifying. Because we stop asking the question, “What should I write?” and start asking a much more useful question: “What do I really want to write? What will get me to the keyboard again?”

 

And, which essay gave you the most trouble, and why?

 

The title essay was a bruiser, because I was trying to write into the heart of the anxieties we face when we know we have to write a story, but we’re scared to death about breaking a long held silence. To write that essay, I had to break a few silences myself, so I was going through the kind of anxiety I was writing about.

 

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

 

The publishing experience itself has been terrific. My editor, Emily Bell, is a genius, and the folks at Zando have been great. The lows came more in my attempts, over the years, to confront the darker truths in the book. I experience a lot of doubt when I write, so it was hard for me to write a book that purports to guide others. I dealt with this by writing mostly about my struggles, and failures, which are sadly abundant but also almost always instructive.

 

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

 

Write about what you can’t get rid of by other means.

 

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

 

I had a lot of fun. That was a huge surprise. I’m mostly miserable when I write. My family and friends can confirm that. But with this one, I really enjoyed gathering all my thoughts and experiences into one place. I enjoy teaching far more than writing, and this book was endowed, I guess, with some of that joy.

 

How did you find the title of your book?

 

I know it’s mouthful, but I’m so happy Zando let me use “Truth Is the Arrow, Mercy Is the Bow” as a title. Because it’s really a distillation of what I have to say about writing. You’re only going to travel into the truth as far as mercy gets you. You have to be driven by a desire to understand and forgive. That’s what allows you to go back into all those painful rooms and see clearly what was happening.

 

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

 

Steve’s Smoked Maple Crunch Chicken Salad

 

Two cups of smoked chicken (diced straight from the grill)

1.5 cups diced McIntosh apples

1 cup thinly sliced celery

1 cup roasted cashew halves

¾ cup of golden raisins

½ cup mayo (more or less to taste)

1 teaspoon curry powder

 

Directions:

1. Dump ingredients in a large bowl

2. Mix

 

Suggested serving:

Straight out of the bowl, with a large wooden spoon.

It also tastes good on a nice, puffy Portuguese roll.

 

*****

READ MORE ABOUT THIS AUTHOR: www.stevealmondjoy.org

 

ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR OWN TBR STACK: https://www.amazon.com/Truth-Arrow-Mercy-Bow-Construction/dp/1638931305

 

 

WATCH STEVE ALMOND TALK ABOUT WRITING & ABOUT THE NOVEL “STONER”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkUa68CUpTU&t=4411s