TBR: The Belles by Lacey N. Dunham

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?

 

Deena Williams is an outsider with a secretive past who will risk everything—including her life—to fit in. 

At secluded Bellerton College, Deena is desperate to join a powerful clique of wealthy girls anointed the Belles. She’s welcomed into their group with the gift of a black velvet ribbon, and the comfortable life she’s always dreamed of is within reach. 

But Bellerton hides a sinister history, and soon Deena is caught in a web of secrets, lies, and dangerous games in this chilling Southern gothic dark academia debut mashup of THE SECRET HISTORY, BUNNY, and HEATHERS.

 

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

 

I loved writing so many of my characters, it’s hard to pick! Ada May was a character who conjured herself, which is appropriate to her character’s genteel sinisterness. I hadn’t originally envisioned her in the book, but she quickly became the foil to my protagonist, Deena, and with her presence the book became a better, more interesting story. I also loved writing Fred, an iconoclastic young woman who is utterly unapologetic about who she is. Fred might be my favorite character in the novel.

 

Mary’s character was more challenging to write than I expected. I knew her background and her role in the story’s plot, but figuring out how to put her on the page while revealing the bits of mystery surrounding her at the right moments was difficult.

 

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

Publishing is a journey of highs and lows! I’m very lucky and privileged to have landed with an editor, the terrific Laura Brown, who understood my vision of the book and worked with me to elevate it to the greatest version of itself. And Atria has been terrific, the whole team there has been wonderful to work with.

 

One aspect of the publishing journey that isn’t talked about as much as the agent query process is the submission process. Writers are immensely focused on getting an agent—an important thing, especially if you’re interested in publishing with Big 5 and prestige indie presses like Graywolf or Algonquin—but for every book an agent has sold, they have five books from clients whose died on submission. I was, again, very lucky that this didn’t happen to The Belles—but it could have!

 

I think it’s important for writers to know that the journey doesn’t stop with getting an agent. There are no guarantees in this business. The journey continues for a long time beyond the agent, and it’s an emotionally challenging and difficult journey with no security at any point. Your book, and your career, face numerous hurdles every step of the way. And again with the next book. And again beyond that.

 

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

 

Stay connected to your creativity. The writing is yours; publishing is a business, and it’s a brutal one. There’s so much romanticization around book publishing. I encourage writers to stay grounded. Write for you, first and foremost. Not towards trends. Not towards what you think you “should” be writing. Not to the critics in your head. Not to the readers in your head. Write for you.

 

Then, worry about all the other stuff later. It becomes all-consuming and gets in the way of the creative work.

 

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

 

I have a drawer novel that I labored over for a decade. That novel was a book I wrote out of shoulds. It was not a book I wrote out of my own interests or obsessions, though I didn’t recognize it at the time. When I decided to write The Belles, I had two rules for myself, and the first one was that I wanted to write a book I would enjoy reading. A book that was wholly composed of things I love. What surprised me most was how much I enjoyed the actual writing process of The Belles once I followed my own obsessions, tastes, and interests rather than someone else’s ideas of a book.

 

How did you find the title of your book?

 

I’m terrible at titles! I think most writers are. The working title for The Belles was awful for a long time. I can’t remember when I decided on The Belles, but it’s perfect. It’s a title that references the group, and the consequences of conformity are a major theme in the book. The novel is set in Virginia, and the word “belles” is evocative of Southern Belles, a deeply complicated heritage that the young women in my book would be emerging from. The word “belles” also means “beauty” in French, and toxic white femininity is one of the core themes of my novel.

 

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

 

The young women of Bellerton College love drinking sweet iced tea on the shaded porches of their dormitories. I personally can’t stand sweet tea—I drink unsweetened tea only.

 

***

READ MORE ABOUT THIS AUTHOR: www.laceyndunham.com

 

READ MORE ABOUT THIS BOOK: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Belles/Lacey-N-Dunham/9781668084861

 

ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR OWN TBR STACK:

https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-belles-lacey-n-dunham/22287589?ean=9781668084861&next=t

 

SUBSTACK: laceyndunham.substack.com

 

TBR: The Unmapping by Denise S. Robbins

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?

 

A mysterious phenomenon called ‘the unmapping’ causes city streets and neighborhoods to entirely rearrange each day, leading to broken down power grids and other such chaos. Our two main characters, Esme Green and Arjun Varma, work in the New York City Emergency Management Department; Arjun is in love with Esme, but Esme has a fiancé, who disappears on the first day. The book is about climate change, about disasters, and ultimately about humanity. Also, lucid dreaming cults.

 

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

 

I loved writing from Arjun’s perspective. He tries so hard—at his job, at friendship, at love—and fails in ways that are endearing to me and generally brings levity to this disaster story with his particular brand of neuroticism.

 

As for the one that gave me trouble, each chapter features a brief perspective from an unnamed character, and the hardest one to write was one of these side characters known as ‘the wife’. Her husband is a disaster prepper yet he himself goes missing the first day, and the wife, meanwhile, stays locked up at home, full of fear, until she gets pulled into a strange lucid-dreaming cult. At one point, I realized I didn’t know very much about her—who she was before all this. That bothered me, the not-knowing. Then I realized this missing sense of self was actually perfect for the story—that’s the type of person who would get swept away in dangerous ideas. I thought her story was about fear, but I learned it was about a missing selfhood.

 

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

 

Three years elapsed between when I finished the book and when I got the book deal. In that time, as I secured an agent and my agent pitched out The Unmapping, I kept writing madly, finishing two more books: a novel and a novella collection. When I heard that Bindery had put in an offer to publish The Unmapping, it was both a high and a low, because I went back to my draft and realized how much I had changed as a writer, and how much I wanted to change in this book. I’d really grown in three years! Luckily, they were responsive to my wishes to make some pretty massive edits, which were in line with what they wanted, too, so I said yes, then embarked on an utterly insane two months of rewriting. It was the hardest I’ve ever worked in my life, and very difficult, but also wonderful, with my mind always at least one foot in the dreamscape of the novel. Since then it’s only been high after high, working with an amazing team on editing, choosing the cover, and everything else that goes into turning a book from words on a page to a physical reality.

 

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

 

I am a diehard reader of George Saunders’s Substack, Story Club. In many of his essays he talks about the importance of finding and following the energy of a piece. Basically, when you read back what you wrote, what is it that gives off little sparks? Follow that. Let that energy lead the story. Take it as far as it can go.

 

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

 

Writing this story involved discovery on every level. In a broad sense, when I was first working on this years ago, I didn’t realize I was writing a slanted analogy of climate change. I work in climate change advocacy, but considered my fiction as an escape from reality. Nope. It’s a disaster story very much about our own reality, even as it’s based on an unreal premise, and once I realized this, a lot clicked into place. On a smaller scale, when I was reviewing the book for copy edits I laughed out loud at a joke I’d included in the penultimate chapter—one I’d completely forgotten about. I took that as a good sign that I’d created characters with a life of their own.

 

How did you find the title of your book?

 

I initially called it “Sidewalk n.” I graduated undergrad with a degree in statistics, so this is a super nerdy math reference, because in statistics, instead of solving for “x,” you work with “n,” which is the number of observations in your sample. The idea was that if all the sidewalks rearrange (along with everything else), the one you’re looking at is “n”: it could be anything. Also, the name sort of rhymes with “sidewalk ends.” My husband also loved this title because he’s also a big math nerd, but I secretly knew it was too esoteric, that no one would get it, and right there on the first page people were talking about cities becoming “unmapped,” so it just became obvious that I should name it after that.

 

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

 

Oh, lord. In this book, people are mostly eating to survive. There are microwaved pizzas and American cheese sandwiches and Oreos and granola bars. Actually, there is one strange scene involving a table full of smoked fish. So maybe make a good bagel with cream cheese and lox while you eat this. That would probably taste better than the cheese sandwich.

 

*****

 

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

 

ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR TBR STACK: https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-unmapping-denise-s-robbins/21660442?ean=9781964721064

 

SUBSTACK: https://deniserobbins.substack.com/

 

 

TBR: Behold the Bird in Flight, A Novel of an Abducted Queen by Terri Lewis

 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?

 

Behold the Bird in Flight is a coming-of-age story and a royal love triangle filled with danger and longing and inspired by real historical figures—Isabelle d’Angoulême, her fiancé Hugh de Lusignan, and King John of Magna Carta fame. Set in a period that valued women only for their dowries and childbearing, Isabelle has been mainly erased by men, but the medieval chronicles suggest a woman who developed her own power and wielded it.

 

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

 

Isabelle was an absolute delight. I imagined her as a stubborn young girl with romantic tendencies and let her loose. That stubbornness served her well in a world where women were disregarded; the romantic fantasies got her into trouble. I loved watching her grow into a strong woman capable of acting to save herself and even others.

 

Isabelle’s betrothed, Hugh de Lusignan, was the most difficult. He came to me as a dreamer, not a doer, and under the thumb of his powerful father, but somehow Isabelle had to love him.

 

 

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

 

I started the novel in 2009 and began to query in 2014. Several agents mentioned a problem with Isabelle’s youth, but she was a real historical figure and I couldn’t just make her older. I set the novel aside to marinate. When I picked it up again, I decided to show how a medieval girl prepared for the world earlier than a modern girl. After another round of queries (87 in all, with seven requests), a friend suggested I try another route. The novel was accepted by She Writes Press two months after submission, a nanosecond in publishing time.

 

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

 

Editing is not rewriting. Polishing the prose won’t fix structural or character issues. Your words may seem engraved on the page, especially if you’ve lived with them for years, but be brave: cut, write new, merge characters. That lesson took me a long time to learn.

 

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

 

I was surprised how entertaining I found King John. His reputation as the worst English king is probably earned, but in person he was growly, full of excuses and complaints, oddly insecure, but when he got mad, he let loose. Not the kind of character I’d written before. I mean, swords and threats and swearing. As I wrote, I became convinced he really loved Isabelle and only treated her badly when he felt she didn’t love him alone. Which of course, she didn’t, at least in my telling.

 

How did you find the title of your book?

 

My title came late. Because religion resonated through the middle ages, I had given each chapter a quasi Biblical quote. Curse Not the King. Suffer the Little Children. Also, Isabelle always noticed birds, not only in the sky and woods, but the hawks men carried, a little chicken she took into her heart. After several misfires, my subconscious handed me Behold the Bird. I added in Flight for her curiosity about the world and her need to flee danger. Voila!

 

 

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

 

 

Isabelle has a sweet tooth and loves honey balls. (She uses them to bribe a skinny guard…) She also loves eels which look like a ball of black string licorice. I doubt a modern audience would like the latter, but here’s a recipe to the former, baked not deep fried for ease: https://www.almanac.com/recipe/baked-honey-balls-italian-struffoli

 

*****

 

READ MORE ABOUT THIS AUTHOR: https://TerriLewis1.com

 

ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR OWN TBR STACK: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Behold-the-Bird-in-Flight/Terri-Lewis/9781647429102

 

SUBSTACK: TerriLewis1.Substack.com

 

           

 

TBR: ARE YOU HAPPY? by Lori Ostlund

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 nine stories in this collection explore class, identity, loneliness, and the specter of violence that looms over women and the LGBTQ+ community. For personal reasons, I spend a lot of time with characters who  try—and often fail—to make peace with their pasts while navigating their present relationships and notions of self. I often say that I write sad, funny stories, and I think that is true of this collection.

 

Which story did you most enjoy writing? Why? And which story gave you the most trouble, and why?

 

The answer to both questions is the same: the final story, which is a short novella entitled “Just Another Family,” gave me the most trouble and the most pleasure, probably for the same reason. That is, when you struggle for a long time with a story, as I did with this one, the pleasure of finally figuring it out is considerable. I don’t know when I started the story, but my records indicate that I got my first rejection in 2015. I kept rewriting and sending it out, and it kept getting rejected. I set it aside finally for around five years, and when I returned to it in late 2022, the voice just kicked in and pulled me along, and the story nearly tripled in length. In the process, the story became more hopeful, the humor darker, the main character more dynamic.

 

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

 

During the pandemic, my former agent went out with a novel that was not quite ready. She was struggling with the pressures of the pandemic, as we nearly all were, and the submission process fell apart. We had always had a good relationship, so it was with some sadness that I parted ways with her. By this point, I had stopped writing, a fallow period that lasted a couple of years. I wondered whether I would ever write again, but then one day something turned back on, and I sat down at my desk and opened up the novella that I mentioned above. I wrote several more stories, and these combined with stories that I had written and published in journals earlier formed the basis of ARE YOU HAPPY?, which meant that I found myself in the awful position of having to query agents with a story collection. I was lucky enough to secure representation by an agent I had long admired. The process of selling the collection in some ways went smoothly, and in other ways was stressful as hell. I got an offer from Emily Bell, whom I had nearly worked with on my last book. Since then, she had moved from FSG to Zando, and shortly after I accepted the offer for a two-book deal, she moved to Astra House, ultimately taking me with her. There were lots of twists and turns along the way, but that is the tame version.

 

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

 

Kurt Vonnegut’s advice to write for an audience of one. The advice, on the surface, seems counterintuitive, but the most unusual voices—which is what I am always drawn to—details and observations evolve out of this advice, I think. In my case, if my wife—who is my first and usually only reader—laughs or understands the nuance, I go with it.

 

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

 

Oh, lots of things surprised me, but one of the things that surprised me only later, when a reader pointed it out during the galleys process, was that there were lots of cats in the book and they were all named Gertrude. I have never had a cat named Gertrude, but I thought it was a funny name for a cat, I guess, and somehow the joke just kept getting retold.

 

How did you find the title of your book?

 

When I submitted the book to my now agent during the querying process, I had tentatively titled it JUST ANOTHER FAMILY, which was the name of the novella. The title works for the novella, but felt flat as a book title, not memorable. Another story was entitled “The Peeping Toms,” and I had toyed with that as a title also, since some of the stories deal with themes of voyeurism and being or feeling watched. When my agent and I had our first conversation about the book, he said, “Why not call it Are You Happy?” That was the name of another story, yet somehow I had never considered this as a title, but as soon as Henry said it, I knew that this was the title.

 

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

 

In “Clear as Cake,” several of the scenes take place in a dive bar that I spent a lot of time in during college, and the only food available came from a huge jar that sat on the counter. It was filled with pickled gizzards, which I occasionally sampled. In the story, I went with pickled eggs.

 

*****

 

FOR MORE INFORMATION ABOUT THIS AUTHOR:

https://www.loriostlund.com/

 

ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR OWN TBR STACK: Either your favorite independent bookstore or Bookshop.org: https://bookshop.org/p/books/are-you-happy-stories-lori-ostlund/21741930

 

READ A STORY FROM THIS BOOK, “The Gap Year”:

https://electricliterature.com/the-gap-year-by-lori-ostlund/?fbclid=IwY2xjawJ_GixleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBicmlkETFhVmRRTVROd2ZKNmRaSkRNAR6-H4MdyotRY5R41hpOPgBGlEQ_p1fSFIibs7GQObHcrEP28_GPH1WB2LsAlg_aem_b__YCipHXPXDOl6kzDlSlQ

 

TBR: If You Say So by Michelle Herman

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?

 

If You Say So is a set of true stories about loss and reinvention, longing, loneliness, friendship, community, and family. It’s also about grief, and the way it lives in the body—and joy, and the way it lives in the body too.

 

Which essay did you most enjoy writing? Why? And, which essay gave you the most trouble, and why?

 

“Enjoy” is such a funny word when it comes to writing! (Or is that just me?) I mean, if I’m not writing (something, anything), I feel pretty miserable, so just working on a new essay or story or novel is enjoyable by comparison (my paternal grandma used to say, if I complained about being bored and unhappy, “Go bang your head against the wall”—presumably to make me better appreciate the feeling of not banging my head against the wall—but I digress). Still, I guess I could say that the two essays I most “enjoyed” writing were the one called “Old House” (both because it required me to do research on the turn-of-the-twentieth-century house I’ve lived in for going on four decades—and research with a personal angle is one of my favorite things—and because I wrote it in the months directly following my retirement from full-time university professing, thus wrote pretty joyously all the livelong day) and the one called “On Balance,” because I wrote it very fast and with great certainty, clarity, and ease, which doesn’t happen all that often (and which, come to think of it, is a pretty meta thing to say about this essay).

 

The one that gave me the most trouble was the book’s final and title essay, “If You Say So.” I started writing it in the immediate wake of a close friend’s death, while still in the thick of dealing with it (not just my grief, but all of her belongings and everything else that a death leaves behind), which in itself made it hard to get my arms around (but I felt I had no choice—I had to write it, then and there; I feared that if I didn’t, my heart and brain would explode), but I also had to figure out what it was “really” about, which took a while and a bunch of drafts.

 

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

 

I could tell a long version, full of heartbreak, but as I went on at such length in my answer to the last question, I’ll just say this, about the lows: My former literary agent read it and said, “Nope, can’t send out a miscellaneous essay collection! Nobody’s publishing them.” My current literary agent declined to read it at all (“What’s the point?”). And so I sent it out myself, carefully--agonzingly. The “high” in this road is having landed at Galileo Press, where working with my editor, Barrett Warner, has been a dream.

 

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

 

If you’re stuck, it’s most likely not a writing problem—it’s a thinking problem.

 

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

 

I wrote each of these essays separately over a period of about five years. When I put them together—and especially when I read the final one in the context of the others—I was stunned to see the threads that ran through all of them and bound them tightly together. So, not a “miscellaneous collection” at all! When I revised them as a whole, now thinking of them as a whole, I kept that surprise in mind . . . and let myself be surprised along the way, all over again.

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

 

This book is a love letter: to my friend Judith—who used to say, “If you say so,” sweetly and utterly insincerely, whenever I said something she didn’t agree with or just didn’t want to hear (which was often)—and to the tight community of serious amateur dancers we were, and I still am, a part of; to my father, who looms as large in my life a decade after his death as he did for the six decades before it; to all the rest of my human family, as well as all the animals (the dog who was supposed to be mine, but who was singularly devoted to my father; the dog who was supposed to be my daughter’s, but was singularly devoted to me, and was my closest companion and only consolation after my father’s death; and all the others—including, most painfully, the pandemic-adopted puppy whose life story is at the heart of the essay “Animal Behavior”) I have considered family; the Victorian-era house that has come to feel like part of me; and, well, to be completely honest, just about all the other things and people that constitute the story of my life. (Except for a few things/people that it’s the opposite of a love letter to, like my high school boyfriend, or a love/hate letter to, like the cigarettes I smoked for fifteen years.)

 

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

 

Oh, my goodness, one of the essays in the book—“Like an Egg”—is all about food (yes, so also a love letter to the objectively disgusting foods of my childhood—the TV dinners and canned ravioli and instant mashed potatoes—and the wonderful ones my grandmother cooked and taught me how to cook, and to learning to cook, and cooking for friends, and now cooking for my mother). I actually had considered including recipes in that essay, but I decided they would have overtaken the essay itself. So I am delighted to offer the recipe here for the “healthy” (it isn’t) pound cake my daughter and I invented together over a quarter of a century ago, inspired by the “plain, unfrosted cake” mentioned in the Betsy-Tacy* books by Maud Hart Lovelace—books that she and I were/are in love with. It’s dense and moist and delicious and sort of healthy, in that it calls for whole wheat instead of white flour.

 

 

 

Michelle and Grace’s Plain, Unfrosted Pound Cake

 

Ingredients

1 ¼ cups good quality butter

2 tsp vanilla

5 large eggs

2 ¾ to 3 cups sugar (depending on just how sweet you want it)

3 cups whole wheat flour

1 tsp baking powder

¼ tsp salt

½ tsp cinnamon

¼ tsp nutmeg

¼ tsp ginger

8 to 10 ounces evaporated milk or canned full-fat coconut milk (see below)

 

-        Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Butter up a tube pan, springform pan, or bundt cake pan.

-        Let the butter soften so that it’s easy to beat (microwaving on lower power very briefly is OK—just don’t let it liquify).

-        Beat softened butter, vanilla, eggs, and sugar together in a large bowl (I use an immersion blender—I use an immersion blender for everything, always).

-        In a separate bowl, stir together flour, baking powder, salt, and spices.

-        Add the dry mix and the canned milk alternately to the large bowl, beating gently after each addition (you’ll want the batter to be very moist but not soupy; you’ll need at least 8 oz of milk, but after that, proceed carefully, a very little bit at a time, alternating with pinches of the dry mix).

-        Pour into pan and bake. Start checking on it at an hour and five minutes in (wood toothpick-test). It’s never needed more than an hour and fifteen minutes for me, but every oven and kitchen is different.

-        Let cool completely before turning the cake upside down onto a plate from the pan. (Or, if you’re lazy like me, release the sides of a springform pan and just leave the cake in the bottom of the pan.)

-        It’s very good while still warm, but even better, I think, after it’s been in the refrigerator. (I bet it would be better still taken out to a little bench on the top of a hill and shared with your best friend.) (I should admit here that I used to send Grace to elementary school sometimes with nothing but a big hunk of it, wrapped in foil, for lunch [it was full of fiber, in the form of whole wheat flour, and protein, thanks to all those eggs, after all], but that’s probably not the most excellent parenting.)

 

 

*****

 

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

 

ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR OWN TBR STACK: https://freegalileo.com/

(but anywhere else books are sold would be fine too J)

 

READ AN ESSAY FROM THIS BOOK, “Armed for a Panic”:

 

https://theamericanscholar.org/armed-for-a-pandemic/

 

---

* As an adult, my daughter’s constellation of tattoos includes a quite large one of Lois Lenski’s drawing of Betsy and Tacy’s beloved tree—the one Betsy climbs, in the first book, in order to carefully place a dyed-blue Easter egg in a bird’s nest in one of its highest branches, “for” Tacy’s baby sister, who has died. This was my daughter’s introduction to the idea of death—and its aftermath for those who remain. (The nest and blue egg are part of the tattoo too.)

TBR: The Mary Years by Julie Marie Wade

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 Mary Years is a nonfiction novella that chronicles one young woman’s quarter-century love affair with The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Part bildungsroman and part televisual ekphrasis, this is the story of Mary Richards re-seen through the eyes of Julie Marie Wade.

 

Which essay did you most enjoy writing? Why? And which essay gave you the most trouble, and why?

 

My students tell me about writing fan fiction, how satisfying it is for them to take characters that exist in books and films and video games and create additional stories, even alternative stories, for their lives. Mistakenly, for years, I’ve thought I didn’t know anything at all about fan fiction, but the truth is, The Mary Years is a work of fan nonfiction, and I think I felt compelled to write it for similar reasons to those that inspire fan fiction: I wanted to explore how a fictional character (many, actually—a cast of fictional characters) can have as much influence over our lives as the real people who live and breathe alongside us.

 

Maybe we all live between real and fictional realms anyway, so this memoir, arranged in chapters that were individually published as “essays in episodes,” is my attempt at showing the ongoing straddle between my personal history and the television show that has been a touchstone for it since The Mary Tyler Moore Show first premiered on Nick at Nite in 1992. I’m not sure if the writing of this collection exemplifies any kind of courage, but I knew I had to write the book after Mary Tyler Moore, the real person who embodied the fictional character who deeply informed my real coming-of-age, passed away in early 2017. The Mary Years is nothing if not an elegy to her and for her as well.

 

I loved writing each essay in episodes, considering my own childhood in an insular Seattle suburb called Fauntlee Hills as an analog to Mary Richards’s Roseburg, the fictional Minnesota town where the character was from (“Fauntlee Hills Was My Roseburg: An Essay in Episodes, Prairie Schooner, 2020); exploring my first residence as an autonomous adult in Pittsburgh, the early years of wondering whether my partner Angie and I would “make it after all” in a place neither of us had ever visited before moving across the country together and starting a new life there (“Pittsburgh Was My Minneapolis: An Essay in Episodes, Tupelo Quarterly, 2018); and of course these more recent years in Miami, my life as a professor and mentor, taking on a kind of work where I might become a role model for others in the way Mary—both the person and the character—became a role model for me (“Miami is My Tipperary: An Essay in Episodes,” The Normal School, 2020). Let’s hope!

 

I might have had the most conspicuous fun writing “Lamonts Might Be My WJM” (Grist: A Journal of the Literary Arts, 2019) which explored my first real job—the one that wasn’t babysitting or teaching piano lessons or walking neighbors’ dogs—the first job where I earned a proper paycheck on a grainy blue background with those little perforated tabs you have to tear along the sides. The Mary Tyler Moore Show kindled in me a desire not only to work as part of a professional team but a desire for the friendships and camaraderie that might be forged because of working together. At seventeen, just before graduating from high school, I was hired by the (sadly now-defunct) department store Lamonts as a sales associate. Even the title sounded fancy to me! And I started meeting all these people—mostly middle-aged and older women—who had so much life experience in addition to their decades of retail experience, and most of whom were more than willing to share that experience with me. I wanted to bring my initiation into that workplace—but also into that new realm of womanhood—onto the page. I still think so often about my colleagues at Lamonts, who were really mentors, and all that I learned from them. They didn’t seem like Mary Richards, not one of them, but they shaped my life in significant ways, too. And when I finally left that job and moved onto a commissioned position selling shoes for JCPenney, I remember one of my mentors hugged me good-bye in the break room and said, knowing my deep love of The Mary Tyler Moore Show (everyone knew about that!), “We’re going to miss you, our sweet Mary girl.”

 

Probably the hardest part of this book to write was near the end of the essay-chapter “Miami Is My Tipperary,” the night I learned Mary Tyler Moore had died. I was teaching when it happened, which seemed fitting—I was doing the thing I love most—and my phone was filling up with voicemails and texts offering condolences from people across my life. But I didn’t see these messages until hours later. Usually, as a writer with strong commitments to memoir, I’m writing at a distance from my memories, not trying to document events so close to when they actually happened. As I was writing that part of the essay, splicing the messages I hadn’t seen yet with what we were talking about in class—ekphrasis, of all things—writing in response to various kinds of art, including television—I realized I was crying. Tears were pouring down my face as I typed. It may be the first time I have ever experienced such an immediate and intense catharsis while shaping memory into scene on the page.

 

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

 

I’m actually astonished—and so grateful, beyond grateful—that Michael Martone chose this book for the Clay Reynolds Novella Prize in 2023. I don’t remember offhand how many times I circulated the book to various possible publishers—mostly memoir and nonfiction book prizes—or even what possessed me to send The Mary Years to a novella prize. It’s about 40,000 words, so it qualifies as a novella length-wise, but I wasn’t sure if novellas were restricted implicitly to fictional works. Then again, Mary Richards is a fictional character, and WJM is a fictional workplace, so certainly this is a nonfiction work that interacts in a sustained way with fiction—just the fiction of someone else’s creation!

 

I was astonished every time one of the individual essay-chapters found a home in a literary journal (and ultimately, they all did), but I wasn’t sure if the idiosyncratic nature of my project would set it apart from other manuscripts in an enticing way or a limiting way. As writers, we never really know, do we?

 

I circulated this book as a book for far less time than many of my other collections, and I’m used to waiting a long time for a project to find the right home. So I think it was all highs really, the biggest high being the fact that I wrote it, the homage I needed to write, and in the process, I discovered so much about my own history that I would never have learned without my eye poised to the lens of the MTM kaleidoscope.

 

Sometimes people ask memoirists, or those who work broadly in the self-referential arts, how we don’t “run out” of material. I think it’s not about the quantity of material at all but about finding new ways of looking at our lives and considering all the lenses we have available to facilitate that looking.

 

An ekphrastic lens is so exciting and revelatory to me that I’m actually building a multi-genre graduate seminar around this expansive concept. In “The New Ekphrasis,” I want to consider with my students some recent innovative works of contemporary ekphrasis including—but not limited to!—Ander Monson’s Predator: a Memoir, a Movie, an Obsession, Hilary Plum’s Hole Studies (literary ekphrasis), Patricia Smith’s Unshuttered, Hanif Abdurraqib’s They Can’t Kill Us Till They Kill Us (aural ekphrasis), Sibbie O’Sullivan’s My Private Lennon: Explorations from a Fan Who Never Screamed.

 

 

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

 

I’m not sure it was intended specifically as writing advice—maybe as life and writing advice—but when I was graduating from college and preparing to head to my first graduate program, one of the great mentors of my life, Tom Campbell, said this: “Let nothing be wasted on you.” Tom was my undergraduate English professor and advisor, an exemplary teacher who I still channel in my own classrooms.

 

I take his words to mean, simply put, use everything; learn from everything; value everything. If you love a particular television show, write about it. If you have a strange or surprising hobby you think no one would else appreciate, write about it. Whatever is important to you in your life can be shaped for a reading audience. Your reader will care if you care enough and are artful enough in translating your own experience to the page.

 

And in another sense, don’t let rejections and disappointments (which every person and every artist experience) stop you from pursuing what you love. I am thousands of rejections deep in my 21 years of submitting work for publication. I have lost far more contests than I have won or could ever hope to win—as is inevitable—but I work hard to learn from those rejections, to let them spur me forward rather than hold me back.

 

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

 

Oh, that’s wonderful advice! I’m always surprised when writing. I look forward to being surprised. In The Mary Years, I was surprised by the small things I discovered through sustained attention. For instance, I discovered that WJM, the newsroom where Mary Richards works for all seven seasons on the show, mirrors my own name’s initials, each time I am asked to print my last name first, followed by first and middle. Also, after all those years watching The Mary Tyler Moore Show and reading biographies (and autobiographies!) about her life, I had realized the framed picture on Mary Richards’s table, the one just outside her balcony doors, was a picture of her real-life son, Richie Meeker, but it did not dawn on me until writing this book that her character’s last name Richards was most likely an homage to her son, whose given name was Richard.

 

How did you find the title of your book?

 

My book’s title—The Mary Years—comes from an idiosyncratic reference that I have used since I first became a devotee of the series as a twelve-year-old. On The Mary Tyler Moore Show, we meet Mary Richards when the character is 30 years old, and the series ends, seven seasons later, when she is 37. So all those years as I was moving through my adolescence and then through my 20s, I was anticipating my own “Mary years,” wondering what my 30s would be like—and how they would differ from Mary’s. I always talked about people, specifically women, in that age range as being “in their Mary years.”

 

Here’s a sweet story that also appears in the book: when I entered my own Mary years, I was a PhD student living with my long-time partner in Louisville, Kentucky, and some of our friends from my academic program conspired with Angie to surprise me with a Mary-themed birthday party. Our friend Carol hosted, and she served Brandy Alexanders as the signature cocktail—which all you MTM fans will recall is the drink Mary asks for on her job interview with Lou Grant when he insists she have a drink with him. Our friend Elijah listened to the Mary Tyler Moore theme song “Love is All Around” so many times that he learned the song by heart and then brought his band to Carol’s house to play that song as I walked through the door.

 

Then, when I reached the end of my own Mary years, Mary Tyler Moore passed away, and I knew it was time to write—from the other side of that milestone era—what my own journey toward and through “the Mary years” had meant to me.

 

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

 

https://www.liquor.com/recipes/brandy-alexander/

 

*****

READ MORE ABOUT THIS AUTHOR: www.juliemariewade.com

 

READ MORE ABOUT THIS PUBLISHER: https://texasreviewpress.org/submissions/

 

ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR OWN TBR STACK:  https://www.tamupress.com/book/9781680033885/the-mary-years/

 

READ A SELECTION FROM THIS BOOK, “PITTSBURGH WAS MY MINNEAPOLIS: An Essay in Episodes”: https://www.tupeloquarterly.com/prose/pittsburgh-was-my-minneapolis-an-essay-in-episodes-by-julie-marie-wade/

 

 

TBR: The Decade of Letting Things Go (A Post Menopause Memoir) by Cris Mazza

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?

 

It’s about loss… the growing load of losses we carry, some without even realizing, both the expected (parents, pets, relationships, keepsakes, homes) as well as losses we don’t realize are being lost, such as identities (daughter, sibling, even author). And it’s about continuing the search for meaning and contentment through what seems like the loss of hope.

 

Which essay did you most enjoy writing? Why? And which essay gave you the most trouble, and why?

 

Perhaps “Northwoods Nap” was the easiest … so did I enjoy it most? It was easiest because there was a particular mini event to supply shape and movement: my dog continually waking me during a nap until I realized what was bothering him. But the writing journey of discovery just in unpacking this small event was both satisfying and comforting -- because it made me feel even closer to my dog.

 

The most difficult could be the last one, “Day of Reckoning,” because while I was exploring how a childhood perception that I was decidedly not the “preferred” child in my family had created unhealthy and even ugly adult tendencies, behavior, and sensibility … something happened in my personal relationship that was so germane that I had to include it, but was something deeply personal to my partner. So I wrestled with it, knowing I did have to include it, but how? … and I ended up putting it into a text box, almost an aside, and said that it might be the biggest day of reckoning of all.

 

 

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

 

The high was definitely being taken by the University of Georgia Press CRUX CNF series. What a powerful list of names came before me!

The lows were being outright ignored by agents and some larger independent publishers, even when I was personally recommended.

 

 

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

 

Yours! (Below.) Because it’s how I’ve learned to work. I was probably surprised by something in every essay, then surprised all over again when the essays made a whole story, with repeating characters, threads of continuing story, repeated motifs, etc.  Many times, while writing, the surprise discovery or thought did signal “this is the ending” and I knew to just stop there. Other times the surprise(s) helped me. So I’ll just say your advice in a different way: don’t have a hard-and-fast ending planned before you start to write.

 

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

 

As alluded to above, the biggest surprise was that separate essays written over a 10+ year span – never thinking they would be in a book let alone make a book – were actually a woven-together story. I like to think this is represented in the cover art. I told the designer to look for an image that was a “single line,” where the artist never lifts the pencil until completely finished. It represents the “unbroken-line” threads that can be tugged in one essay to reel-in other parts of the same story in other essays, but also the designer tripled the line, so it represents multiple pull-through threads.

 

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

 

I want readers to know that there’s drama, tension, discovery and relief to be found in stories that are not victim-to-victory narratives. Searching for complicity is a foundation of the kind of exploration I do in nonfiction writing. In fact, sometimes realizing one’s own complicity is itself a personal gut punch to stagger away from and then try to stand up again.

 

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

 

 

In “The Summer of Letting Things Go” there’s a vignette that was originally published in Brevity, titled “Feeding Time.” It describes my family’s custom of family dinner, and ends with a description of having fresh coconut for dessert, starting with the hard brown fruit, progressing through the drilling, cracking it with a hammer, then prying the white meat from the shell.

 

*****

 

READ MORE ABOUT THIS AUTHOR: https://cris-mazza.com/

 

ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR OWN TBR STACK: https://ugapress.org/book/9780820367545/the-decade-of-letting-things-go/

 

READ AN ESSAY FROM THIS BOOK, “Oneiric (another word I’ve never said)”:

https://therumpus.net/2014/03/23/the-sunday-rumpus-essay-oneiric-another-word-ive-never-said/

 

 

 

TBR: In the Sky Lord by Mary Troy

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?

 

A restaurant worker steals from a donation jar meant to collect money for a dying boy; a young woman held up at gunpoint is asked to choose which of her coworkers should be shot; a woman in her fifties suffers near debilitating guilt over all the small things she should have done, the times she looked away; a woman who believes herself to be mean operates a kennel for  stray and dumped dogs against a city ordinance; a newlywed hides her dying husband from his mother; a woman takes her father to the Kalaupapa leper colony for what they both know is a non-existent award; a former Archangel from the Pearly Gates Men’s Cub tries turn her life around as she operates a marina in a poverty stricken area of Missouri. These stories and more are in IN THE SKY LORD. All ten stories are about inventiveness, resilience, survival, yearnings, strength, and hope, but mostly they are about the strong need to connect to another.

 

Which story did you most enjoy writing? Why? And which story gave you the most trouble, and why?

 

The title story, “In The Sky Lord,” gave me the most trouble because the character, Belinda, became more complex with each draft, never stopping to become someone I could grasp. Not for years. And though she is the second oldest woman in here, she changes in unanticipated ways, maybe changes more than others. Because “In The Sky Lord,” was the hardest, it was also the most enjoyable, that is if enjoyable means frustrating and haunting. Also “Rent-to-Kill,” the first story in the book, is about Millie Kick, formerly Millie Holmes who was the protagonist in “Do You Believe In the Chicken Hanger?” a story I wrote 20 something years ago that was one of the runners up for the Nelson Algren Award. It was fun to do a sequel.

 

 

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

 

Oh, IN THE SKY LORD has a great story. In 2018 it was accepted as a collection, nine stories I had published over the previous 6 years as I was working on the novel, Swimming on Hwy N. The publisher, though, soon decided he would prefer to use the new work in a larger book of New and Selected, highlight it as part of the press’s 50^th anniversary celebration.  I was excited, humbled but excited. But the press was connected to a university, and as COVID lingered, the press lost funding. The publisher told me not to worry, at first, as they were getting endowments and would continue to publish as an independent. But alas, that never quite worked. In the meantime, partly because I had just retired and partly because COVID kept me isolated, I decided to take each of the nine stories apart and make them even better. So I did, eventually dropping two of them but writing two new ones. I saw a chance—with lots of changes—to connect the stories, and I enjoyed that, too. So sometime in ’21 I sent the new collection to Braddock Avenue Books.  Why Braddock? I had just read Kerry Neville’s collection, and discovered not only her but also Braddock, a press I’d not heard of yet, but one that does great stuff. Nine months after I sent the manuscript, it was accepted, but set for publication two years away. I continued to refine the stories in those two years, and even at the very last minute added a very new one set in the town of Wolf Pass, Illinois, a town I created for the book.

 

 

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

 

True characters are flawed and frightened and weird and absurd and confused and much more, just like us. If they are squinted at just right, though, seen from different perspectives, their stories told “slant,” as Emily Dickinson advised, their uniqueness can come through. Not one of us, not one character, is what they seem.

 

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

 

That the endings changed so from the way they were originally published, that they all now end in a sort of hope. I don’t normally consider myself a hopeful sort, but I believe in the inventiveness and inner strength of all these women.

 

How did you get the title?

 

“Will the Circle Be Unbroken” is a hymn from 1907 or so, yet more than a hundred years later still recorded by Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, The Neville Brothers, the Staple Singers and many others. The lyrics tell us there is a better world a’waitin’,  “in the sky, Lord, in the sky.”  That line always made me laugh. A world in the sky! A better one! I said long ago, someday I will write a book titled IN THE SKY LORD. This was long before I wrote the short story with that title, and decades before the book was even an idea.

 

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

 

Many of my previous books, most especially Beauties, about two women running a café, are about food and recipes. In fact, my cousin makes my meatball recipe from Beauties every year over the holidays, and his children call it Mary’s meatballs. But this book is full of diner fried fish and chips, waffles and home fries, pulled pork and macaroni salad, delivered pizzas, fast foods, canned chili and cheap hot dogs, etc.. I had not realized that until you asked. Maybe because these are all foods I no longer eat but did like at times. Well, “Butter Cakes” is about a man who makes butter cakes for last meals in prisons, but he has not revealed the recipe except to say each contains a pound of butter.

 

*****

ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR OWN TBR STACK: https://shop.braddockavenuebooks.com/pages/books/133/mary-troy/in-the-sky-lord