TBR: Help Me, Information by David Kirby

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.

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

 

My poems have always been action-packed. They move the way the mind does on a good day, puddle-jumping from one topic to another and then coming in for a nice soft landing. That said, I wanted to try some new moves here, so you’ll also see poems that might recall the compactness of Jack Gilbert, the sweep of Allen Ginsberg, and the exuberance of Frank O’Hara. I’m hoping readers will like both the familiar sounds and the new ones as well.

 

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

 

A few years ago, I caught myself wondering why I wasn’t so crazy any more about some of my favorite living poets. One day, the light bulb came on: they were still writing good poems, but it was the same good poem over and over again. So I started trying for some new sounds the way you do when you’re singing in the shower and pitch your voice higher or lower.

 

I wrote so many Jack Gilbert poems one summer that I told my wife Barbara I was afraid I was turning into him. She told me to go ahead because sooner or later I’d incorporate what I was learning from Jack Gilbert into what she calls “Dave Kirby poems,” which is what happened. It didn’t take any special courage to make the change. All I had to do is remember what I tell my students all the time, which is to try new things.

 

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

 

I’m happy to say I went through my lows years ago. When I won the Brittingham Prize in Poetry in 1987, I figured I had it made. What happened was just the opposite: I couldn’t get anybody to even look at my next manuscript. Finally, tiny Orchises Press published it and the several books that followed. I hated to say good-bye to Orchises, but I switched to Louisiana State University Press because their distribution system made it possible to get my books out more widely, and I’ve been with LSU ever since.

 

James Long, my editor there, is very tolerant of me, I think because my poetry collections sell in the hundreds annually as opposed to the tens. That said, in the words of Bin Ramke, as a poet you’re in a state of either absolute or relative obscurity. I’m clinging to relative obscurity with all my might.

 

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

 

Funny you should ask. In addition to Help Me, Information, I’ve just written a textbook that will also be released this summer; it’s modestly entitled The Knowledge: Where Poems Come From and How to Write Them. At its heart is the one thing I tell my students over and over, which is that art is the deliberate transformed by the accidental.

 

In other words, you make coffee, lay out your pages, lick the tip of your pencil, and go at it like a tax auditor until something – a phone call, a childhood memory, a cry in the street – derails you. You go back to your task, but what you’re writing looks different now. You’ve got to start deliberately, but you have to be open to the accidents that will change your work for the better.

 

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

 

Oh, heavens. Let me count the ways. This is poetry, remember, so the surprises come fast and furious. I’m not the Vin Diesel of American poetry, but when I said earlier that my poems tend to be action-packed, that means I welcome all the twists and turns that occur when you think you know what you’re doing, and pow! you get sent in a new direction by pure serendipity. Maybe I am the Vin Diesel of American poetry. Or the Samuel Taylor Coleridge whose “Kubla Khan” was famously knocked off the tracks by a visitor from Porlock. Some writers do everything they can to avoid interruptions, but I love them. They always jump-start a new line or stanza. 

 

How did you find the title of your book?

 

I tried on a dozen titles. None fit. For a while I called it A Baby in the Piazza, which is one of those action-packed poems in the book (I’ll include the link to it below). That title’s wings didn’t quite cover the whole book, though. Then I remembered the first line of the second verse of Chuck Berry’s “Memphis, Tennessee,” which is “Help me, information,” and said aw, yeah. Everything’s information, from a Wikipedia article to a dog’s tongue on your face when you’re trying to sleep. Don’t we need all the help we can get? I sure do.

 

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

 

Well, I do have a poem about/recipe for pruno in Help Me, Information. If that’s not a beverage you drink regularly and serve to your guests, let me say that pruno is an alcoholic drink typically made from ingredients that might include apples, oranges, fruit cocktail, candy, ketchup, sugar, milk, and crumbled bread.  It’s made in prisons, where it can be concocted with such limited equipment— a plastic bag, hot water, a sock—as is available to the guests of the state who are its vintners. Fun! The name of the poem is “Pruno,” by the way.

 

*****

 

READ MORE ABOUT THIS BOOK:

https://lsupress.org/books/detail/help-me-information/

 

ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR OWN TBR STACK: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=david+kirby+help+me+information&i=stripbooks&ref=nb_sb_noss

 

READ A POEM FROM THIS BOOK, “A Baby in the Piazza”:

https://kenyonreview.org/kr-online-issue/2020-janfeb/selections/david-kirby-763879/

 

TBR: The Good Poetic Mother: A Daughter’s Memoir by Irene Hoge Smith

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?

 

 After a bad marriage and worse divorce, my mother left me and my three sisters with our D.C. bureaucrat father and escaped to Los Angeles, Charles Bukowski (with whom she had a fifth daughter) and a re-invented life as the respected Southern California poet known as francEyE.  The book is about my life before and after she left, and the long and complicated quest to find out what happened and why, and who my mother really was.

 

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

 

I wrote the story that my mother could not bring herself to include even in her own late-life memoir—the two decades when she was married to my father and had her first four daughters. That required a kind of dogged determination to break a multigenerational cycle of forgetting and repeating in order to create a comprehensible narrative where none had existed before.

 

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice? 

 

When someone tells you something’s not working, listen to them. When they tell you what to do about it, listen to yourself. 

 

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

 

Having spent too many years trying to convince myself I didn’t need or care about my mother, I was surprised to discover how much I had loved her.

 

How did you find the title of your book?

 

I got my title from my mother’s lover Charles Bukowski, when I was fifteen years old. His break-out book It Catches My Heart in Its Hands was released in 1963, and although I hadn’t seen my mother in almost two years I received a copy of the gorgeous book with this inscription by the author:  “To Irene Smith / Of the good poetic mother.” It took me another lifetime to be able to appreciate his book, and to write my own.

 

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

 

There is a “food” associated with the book, but I can’t recommend it.  In our final year together, my mother was trying to take care of me and my sisters (with not enough money from my father) when she discovered something called “MultiPurpose Food,” a cheap food supplement developed for overseas aid and domestic fallout shelters.  My sisters and I loathed the stuff, and thought we should someday write a book called Mama and the MPF. 

The Meals for Millions Foundation and Multi-Purpose Food: Work with Soyfoods

*****

 

READ MORE ABOUT THIS AUTHOR: IreneHogeSmith.Com

 

ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR OWN TBR STACK: IPBooks 

 

READ AN EXCERPT, "Anxious Attachment”: https://www.amsterdamquarterly.org/aq_issues/aq12-writers-writerswriting/irene-hoge-smith-anxious-attachment/

 

 

TBR: RED RIVIERA: A Daria Vinci Investigation; Murder on the Italian Riviera by David Downie

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?

 

Dateline Portofino: a hot, clear April morning on the Italian Riviera, wildfires burning everywhere. An aging superrich former CIA operative of Italian origin disappears while swimming as the water-bombers circle overhead then dive to scoop up seawater to dump on the fires. Commissioner Daria Vinci of DIGOS—the Italian FBI—is called to the scene by another aging former spook and finds herself entangled in a uniquely Italian-American imbroglio.

 

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

 

This is the first Commissioner Daria Vinci Investigation. Daria looks set to have a long and adventurous life fighting crime, sometimes where she least expects to find it—within the police and military hierarchy, for instance. She’s a complicated, paradoxical character and I fell in love with her as she came to life on the screen of my laptop. Like certain real-life people I know and love, Daria is strong, determined, opinionated and seems armor-clad. Yet she is surprisingly idealistic, sensitive and romantic. Does the hard-soft contrapuntal nature of her character arise from her mixed-up background or maybe her long martial arts training?

 

She has a number of things in common with the author. He happens to be of the male gender though he likes to think he’s adept at insinuating himself into people of all types, all genders, all backgrounds. He practiced Goju Ryu Shorei-Kan karate for decades—the “hard and soft” style of karate. Daria has done other forms of martial arts but the outcome seems to be similar.

 

Daria is genetically half-Italian and half-American, also like her creator. It’s not that she’s got divided loyalties—she’s loyal to both her countries. She’s also plagued by the constant need to question received-wisdom and many rules and regulations. This often lands her in trouble, and damages her career. Again, in this way, she’s like the author.

 

In Red Riviera, Daria definitely asks a few too many questions and gets answers she doesn’t accept and, yes, she gets in trouble. That’s going to be a pattern with Daria Vinci, I’m afraid.

 

So, Daria was the most challenging character in the novel to create, the one I care most for, though I will add that I also really loved inventing the hundred-year-old marquise, and the nonagenarian former Dutch spy and fighter pilot, and Daria’s sidekick, Inspector Osvaldo Morbido… The book is fast-paced and several early readers tell me it’s unputdownable, but I’m very proud to think it’s also very much character-driven.

 

 

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

 

In a word, COVID. The book’s pub date (June 25, 2021) is a year (more, actually) later than expected.

 

The longer story is, I was underwhelmed by the way a number of the publishers with whom I have had relationships in recent years handled my latest books. Communications were often slow and intermittent, there was a lack of initiative or flexibility and feeling of unwieldy bigness. The bigger the publisher, the bigger the overhead, the bigger the pressure on editors to buy and promote big-selling books and let the midlist slide.

 

A pair of friends (who, like me, are veteran writers) had been working happily with Alan Squire Publishing (ASP) for years. They put me onto ASP. Happily, my editors fell in love with Daria and Red Riviera. So far it has been a huge pleasure to be on their list. As Napoleon’s mother famously said—“Pourvu que ça dure!” which means, essentially, “Let’s hope it lasts!”

 

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

 

“Don’t write it if it isn’t urgent.”

 

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

 

Wow, so many things surprised me that I wouldn’t know where to start. Daria and the other characters in Red Riviera took shape as if conjured and then they ran wild. I had a hell of a time keeping them under control. It’s as if they were really alive and simply refused to obey the will of their creator.

 

Also surprising, I discovered that some of the things I had dreamed up and considered pretty outlandish were not only feasible but had actually occurred. Water-bombers do sometimes scoop up things—I won’t go into detail—other than water. Ancient Roman shipwrecks have been found exactly where I said one would be—a year or more after I’d finished writing the novel. The character I based the marquise on did in fact turn a hundred years old after I’d written the book and before its pub date.

 

How did you find the title of your book?

 

The title Red Riviera found me. I was on the Italian Riviera—that’s where I spend part of each year and have done since the 1980s. The sand blowing over the Mediterranean from North Africa in the sirocco wind was red. The hillsides were red from blazing wildfires. The flame-retardant chemicals being dropped by the Canadair water-bombers were red and left a red powdery stain on the landscape. The bougainvillea vines growing everywhere had red (or purple) blooms.

 

Lastly, red used to be the color of communism everywhere, right? Reds, pinkos? (That’s one reason I never understood the GOP’s adoption of the color, though I admit, I understand nothing about the GOP, most of all its continued existence). Italy had one of the world’s biggest communist parties and one of the strongholds of communism in the country was Genoa. Genoa is the capital of Liguria, the official name of the Italian Riviera. There has always been this juxtaposition of Genova la rossa—Red Genoa—and the black, fascistic, rich, glitzy Riviera spreading on either side of the big old industrial city. Then the politics shifted in the 2010s and the colors got muddled and everything started to look black and mottled and stained blood-red. At least, it did to me.

 

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

 

Daria Vinci is lanky and thin and eats like a horse. One of her favorite foods is focaccia, particularly the kind from Genoa and the Eastern Riviera—Rapallo, Santa Margherita, Recco. She gobbles multiple slices daily and guess what? She never puts on weight. Now, it just so happens that her creator has authored several cookbooks and food/travel or food/history books. He also loves focaccia. It’s really hard to make well in a home oven. But here’s a recipe that works, taken from my book Enchanted Liguria: A Celebration of the Culture, Lifestyle and Food of the Italian Riviera (Rizzoli International).

 

Focaccia

Classic Ligurian olive oil focaccia

4 cups (500 gr) flour

2 tablespoons dry yeast

1 teaspoon sugar

½ teaspoon malt syrup (optional)

Excellent Olive Oil

Coarse sea salt (Kosher salt)

The focaccia may be topped with fresh rosemary, sage or very thinly sliced onions just before baking.

Sift the flour into two mounds of about 1/3 and 2/3 the amount, each in separate bowls. Dissolve the yeast, sugar and malt in about ¾ cup (1 cup UK) tepid water, form a well in the smaller mound of flour and add the dissolved mixture. Mix slowly and knead for about 5 minutes; cover with a cloth and set aside to rise in a warm spot for about 3 hours to develop into a starter. When the starter has risen and become spongy and porous, place it in the larger mound of flour, add about 1 cup warm water. Incorporate the flour and knead for about 7 minutes, adding warm water as needed, until the dough is smooth and elastic; cover with a clean towel and set aside to rise in a warm spot for 2 to 3 hours.

Generously oil a round or rectangular baking pan (the largest that will fit in your oven), preferably one with a thick bottom. Stretch the dough into the pan, pressing down firmly with your fingers to make indentations every ½ inch. Mix a pinch of salt with about 3 tablespoons water and 3 tablespoons oil. When the salt has partially dissolved, drizzle the mixture over the dough and work it into the indentations with your fingers.

Preheat the oven to 450° F./230° C. Allow the dough to sit for about ½ hour, then bake for 15 to 20 minutes, until the focaccia is golden. Serve hot or at room temperature.

 

*****

READ MORE ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

www.davidddownie.com

  

ORDER A COPY OF THIS BOOK FOR YOUR OWN TBR STACK:  https://alansquirepublishing.com/bookstore/red-riviera/

 

TBR: Embassy Wife by Katie Crouch

TBR [to be read] is an invitation-only interview series with authors of newly released, 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?

 

Amanda Evans and her children leave everything to move to Namibia for her husband’s job, only to find out he’s come to Africa for other reasons.  Meanwhile, her new friend Persephone is convinced her State Department husband is a CIA agent. The two get involved in an international crisis. Hilarity ensues.

 

Which character did you most enjoy creating? Why?

 

Persephone Wilder. She’s long-time State Department wife, and one of those terrific ladies you meet who are NEVER WRONG. Anytime I get to write about a misguided character, I get excited, because there’s so much to play with between their perception and reality. She’s also very glamorous and drinks too much.

 

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

 

Amanda Evans. I needed her to be steady because Persephone’s so extravagant and all over the place. But she couldn’t be flat! My answer was to write fifty-ish pages of backstory, so I could really know her. I cut most of those out.

 

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

 

My original editor left my publishing house before anyone saw this. I’d recently published Abroad, which was very different. I was really worried about what would come next.

 

Then I had a baby at forty-three and moved to Namibia in real life with my own family. Any time I had to sit around being anxious about what an editor I’d never met might think of a book I hadn’t written…well, those hours evaporated.

 

Happily, living abroad gave me a lot of ideas, and I went full throttle on this for a year or so. My new editor really liked the book! So here we are.

 

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

 

Turn off the Internet.

 

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

 

I had no idea how I was going to figure out the plot threads I’d started. And there are kind of a lot. But then my characters just sort came up with answers.

 

I am endlessly surprised and delighted by the power of the subconscious.

 

 

What is something you would like readers to know about the book?

 

State Department life is not always elegant. The families of the diplomats I met had to sleep in bedrooms that were gated off and locked from the rest of the house, as to ward off night attackers. They called it the “Safe Haven”.

 

So, if you ever meet an American diplomat, thank them for their service! They’re out there helping to broker world peace. And it’s not all fancy dinners.

 

(Though it sometimes is. I went to some.)

 

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

 

In Namibia, tea shops are popular little places to get a coffee and a pastry. There’s just a lot more time there somehow to sit and chat. These shops all serve “meltert”, or milk tart. It’s basically a super creamy custard pie.

 

If life were fair, I would be able to crawl into a milk tart and take a long, sweet nap. 

 

Here’s a recipe for the filling. I never met anyone who bothered with the crust. Those we bought pre-made at a store called Woolworth’s¾not the American version.

 

• 2 1/2 cups milk
• 1 cinnamon stick
• 1 egg
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 2 tbsp flour
• 2 tbsp corn flour
• 1 tsp vanilla paste
• large tbsp butter
• 1 tsp ground cinnamon

 For the filling:

1. Place milk and cinnamon stick into a pot 
2. Bring to the boil then discard cinnamon stick
3. Whisk together eggs, flour, sugar, corn flour and vanilla
4. Pour the hot milk into the egg mixture, whisking continuously 
5. Return milk mixture to the pot and cook on medium heat until thickened
6. Stir through a spoonful of butter
7. Pour milk mixture into baked pastry shell
8. Sprinkle over ground cinnamon
9. Leave tart to cool completely before serving

 

*****

 

READ MORE ABOUT THE PUBLISHER HERE: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374280345

 

BUY THIS BOOK (with a signed bookplate) FOR YOUR OWN TBR STACK:

http://bluebicyclebooks.bigcartel.com/product/katie-crouch-em-embassy-wife-em-signed 

 

TBR: Morningside Heights by Joshua Henkin

 

 

 TBR [to be read] is an invitation-only interview series with authors of newly released, 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 Ohio-born Pru Steiner arrives in New York in 1976, she follows in a long tradition of young people determined to take the city by storm. But when she falls in love with Spence Robin, her hotshot young Shakespeare professor, her life takes a turn she couldn’t have anticipated. Morningside Heights is about the love between women and men, and children and parents, about the things we give up in the face of adversity, and about what endures when life turns out differently from what we thought we signed up for.

 

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

 

The character I most enjoyed writing: Arlo, Spence’s estranged son from his first marriage. Arlo is angry and needy and complicated, and he defies expectations, certainly his father’s expectations. It wasn’t until several years into the writing process that Arlo even existed. But once I settled on him, the novel really took off.

 

The character who gave me the most trouble: Enid, Spence’s developmentally disabled older sister. She’s an important character—she gives us a window onto Spence’s inner life—but she doesn’t take up much real estate in the book, so I needed to evoke her in only a few brushstrokes. I wanted to give the reader a full sense of her without making her an object of pity.

 

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

Morningside Heights was originally supposed to be come out in June 2020, but publication got delayed a year because of Covid. A friend of mine said it’s like carrying a baby past term. I wouldn’t know about that personally, but that sounds about right! People ask me if the wait was frustrating, but mostly it was a relief. 2021 is a much better time to have a book come out. Good things come to those who wait.

 

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

It has to be bad before it’s good.

 

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

 

Everything surprised me. I always start with just a seed, and I have no idea what that seed will grow into. If there’s no surprise for the writer, then there’s no surprise for the reader.

How do you approach revision?

 

It took me eight years to write Morningside Heights. I wrote three thousand pages and found the book inside all that mess. That’s how I always write. There are hundreds of drafts along the way. Ninety percent of what I write gets thrown out, some of it material I like, but just because you like something doesn’t mean it belongs in your novel. I’m always telling my MFA students that you need to bark up a lot of wrong trees in order to get to the right tree. There are no shortcuts around those early mistakes. They’re an essential part of the book’s discovery.

 

 

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

 

There’s a wide range of food interests in Morningside Heights. Pru, who grew up in a kosher home in Columbus, Ohio, catches her mother eating breaded shrimp. Arlo is a meat and potatoes guy, who goes with his father to a Jewish deli on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where they split a pastrami sandwich and a corned beef sandwich. Sarah is a vegetarian, and her grandmother orders for her a banh mi tofu sandwich, though Sarah doesn’t like tofu. (“Her grandmother wasn’t alone in thinking that if you were a vegetarian you had to like tofu, as if it were an obligation you’d incurred.”) Recipe links:

 

https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/16824/easy-breaded-shrimp/

https://www.delish.com/cooking/recipe-ideas/a26595080/corned-beef-sandwich-recipe/

https://www.cookinglight.com/recipes/vegetarian-banh-mi-with-crispy-tofu

 

*****

READ MORE ABOUT THIS AUTHOR: http://www.joshuahenkin.com

 

ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR TBR STACK:  https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/606142/morningside-heights-by-joshua-henkin/

 

 

 

 

 

TBR: Mona at Sea by Elizabeth Gonzalez James

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?

 

Mona at Sea is a dark comedy about Mona Mireles, a Millennial overachiever who has lost her Wall Street job during the Great Recession, and has to figure out what she’s going to do with the rest of her life. And once she figures that out, will she be brave enough to go after it?

 

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

 

My favorite character I think is Mona’s brother, Danny, whose grades, shall we say, have always tended toward the left side of the bell curve. But what he lacks in intellect he more than makes up for in emotional intelligence…most of the time. He’s a senior in college and the president of his fraternity, and I really loved crafting a frat boy who wasn’t an ugly caricature, who was actually a wonderful person.   

 

I had a lot of trouble nailing down Mona’s mother and figuring out what her big, psychic wound was. Maybe that’s because, when I started writing this book, I had only been a mom for a few months, and now I’m ten years into it. Maybe I didn’t know enough about being a human while also being a mother, and how we’re basically supposed to stop being a human once we have kids, and become this ideal. But I think I did eventually figure out that Mona’s mom feels unloved and invisible, and hopefully that comes through in the story. 

 

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

 

Oh jeez, there were a lot! I’ll just say briefly that it was a very long road to publication, and I’m very grateful that after many years of trying to find a publisher, my book has finally found a home. Shout out to all small presses everywhere. They’re doing the Lord’s work.

 

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

 

It’s an oldie but a goodie: To paraphrase Henry James, a writer should try to be a person upon whom nothing is lost. This is good advice for everyone, not just for writers. To me it means taking everything in, all five senses plus your whole heart and mind, and putting that into your work.

 

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

 

I was surprised to find out how funny Mona is, and how incapable she is of avoiding public scenes. I think I’m sort of funny, but Mona is hilarious, and she definitely says some things I would never voice out loud. I’m also pathologically averse to making scenes in public. I’m positively Victorian in that regard, and so it was funny to see Mona steering into that constantly. It was surprising to see her character take on a life of her own.

 

Who is your ideal reader?

 

I think my ideal reader is someone who has an open heart and comes to books without judgement. Mona as a character is not going to appeal to everyone. She’s spoiled, sarcastic, morose, self-centered, and histrionic, which are traits that may not endear her to every reader. But I think Mona is sympathetic and ultimately relatable, as long as readers come to the novel knowing that it is a story about growth and someone undergoing an emotional journey. 

 

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

 

This is a tough one since Mona is just out of college, incorrigibly lazy, and would not likely cook anything more difficult than pasta. But I will share one favorite recipe that is delicious and takes only 30 seconds to make.

 

The world’s laziest quesadilla:

 

INGREDIENTS:

 

1 flour tortilla (I prefer Trader Joe’s Truly Handmade Flour Tortillas)

1 mozzarella string cheese

 

INSTRUCTIONS:

 

Lay a paper towel down in a microwave. Place the flour tortilla on top of the paper towel. Place cheese stick (unwrapped) in the center of the tortilla. Microwave for 20-30 seconds. Roll up your quesadilla in the paper towel, making sure to spread melted cheese around evenly, and enjoy!  

 

*****

 

READ MORE ABOUT THIS AUTHOR: https://www.elizabethgonzalezjames.com/ 

 

BUY THIS BOOK FOR YOUR OWN TBR STACK: https://www.greenapplebooks.com/book/9781951631017

 

 

 

 

 

 

TBR: Truth Like Oil by Connie Biewald

TBR [to be read] is an invitation-only interview series with authors of newly released, 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?

 

TRUTH LIKE OIL is the story of two mothers in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Nadine Antoine, a Haitian-American nurses’ aide, and Hazel Watkins, a white, cantankerous nonagenarian felled by a stroke, who struggle with each other and their sons.

 

 

Which character did you most enjoy creating? Why?

 

I’ve really thought about this question and keep coming back to the unsatisfying answer that I can’t answer it because I enjoy them all in such different ways—even characters with cameo appearances. They all have their stories, the reasons they act and think the way they do, and figuring all that out is actually the thing I love most about writing. The tricky thing about this book is that I began with two main characters, Nadine, the Haitian-American CNA and Hazel, the ninety-year-old white woman felled by a stroke, and in the first draft they had equal time. As the drafts evolved, Nadine became more central, and Hazel, though still important, had a lot less pages. Readers made the point that a little of her went a long way. Some people even wanted me to cut her from the book, but that was not going to happen.

  

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

 

I wouldn’t call it trouble, but Nadine, the driving reason for the book, is the reason I began going to Haiti. I needed to learn a lot about her culture and background to do her justice on the page. For more than a decade I returned to Haiti once or twice a year to give workshops on writing and progressive education to teachers and kids at Lekòl Kominotè Matènwa on Lagonav, Haiti. I learned some Haitian Creole in the process and developed a lot of relationships—all of which took time away from writing. That’s part of why this book was thirteen years from idea to publication.

 

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

 

I started writing this book in 2007 when it never occurred to me to be hesitant about writing a Haitian character. If Nadine began whispering in my ear now, in the current literary climate clamoring for more stories by POC, I don’t think I would have wanted to take her on. I am all for people telling their own stories. In the beginning, Hazel and Nadine had almost equal time in the book, but as I mentioned, in each draft, I cut Hazel’s part more and more. I think even now, I’d feel more comfortable as a white person having written this, if Hazel had a bigger role, and it wasn’t as much a Haitian book. It’s interesting to think about—I have less in common with Hazel than Nadine, but I worry more about my right to write about Nadine, than Hazel. I’m very aware of White Supremacy as a terrible presence in the founding of our country and society today and don’t want to be contributing to it with my writing. Agents and publishers were also reluctant to take this on, maybe for that same reason. Still, it’s fiction, and one of the main reasons I write is to discover what it’s like to walk in someone else’s shoes—someone different from myself. I sincerely hope I’ve done it well enough.

 

 What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

 

I’ve been blessed with many inspiring writing mentors, but the most influential one is Grace Paley. Notice the verb tense. She died in 2007, and I still think about her almost every day—actually, maybe every day. She is famous for saying that if you want to be writer keep your expenses low and never live with anyone who doesn’t support your writing. I have followed that advice and do believe it is fundamental.

 

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

 

A lot of things surprised me about this book, but the biggest one is how a fictional character could change my life so profoundly outside of writing. Because I wanted to understand Nadine more than I could from talking with Haitian people I know in Cambridge, I traveled to Haiti and even though I insisted I was going one time as a writer and NOT a teacher, I went back often and had the privilege of participating in that amazing school and community on the island of Lagonav.

 

How did you find the title of your book?

For all the years I spent writing this book it was called The Heart of the Yam. I love nouns and I love food. I was sure that was the title. It was accepted for publication with that title. Then, in a brilliant call, a friend of mine, not Haitian but a woman of color, said she thought it was problematic. She said that if I’m worried about being a white person writing about a Black main character (which I was/am—see above) I shouldn’t use the word “yam,” so connected to Africa, right in the title next to my Germanic author name. Heart of the Yam comes from a proverb (as does Truth Like Oil). I was already worrying about using proverbs due to their role in the essentialization of culture, even though I love them in any culture and some Haitian people I know use them a lot. I looked through the other proverbs I’d used as section titles, hoping one would work. Truth Like Oil jumped out. One thing I love about it is that “Truth, like oil, always comes to the surface,”is a proverb in many cultures, and my book is about people connecting cross culturally.

 

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

Best question ever! I am a huge fan of cole slaw, and Haitian cole slaw is the best. And it has the best name—pikliz. It’s commonly served with fritay--fried plantains and other fried foods--but I became known in Haiti as the person who enjoyed pikliz most by itself. This recipe I found online looks great, but my friends in Haiti always included a cube of maggi:

https://www.sidechef.com/recipes/2368/haitian_pikliz_picklese/

 

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MORE INFORMATION ABOUT THIS AUTHOR: www.conniebiewald.com

 

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