All posts by Leslie Pietrzyk

Interview with Denise S. Robbins

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reprinted with permission from www.workinprogressinprogress.com


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.

Interview with Lori Ostlund

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reprinted with permission from www.workinprogressinprogress.com

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.

Interview with Martha Anne Toll

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reprinted with permission from www.workinprogressinprogress.com

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

Duet for One is a lush and rewarding love story that follows the journey from grief to love within the world of classical music.

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

I most enjoyed creating three members of the supporting cast. The first is Thaddeus, a cellist who looks and sounds more like a lumberjack. Thaddeus is a person who calls it like it is. He’s an important counterweight to Adam Pearl, as Adam pushes through/and avoids grief following his mother’s death.

I also loved fleshing out Yvette, a professor of Caribbean studies at Penn who is humorous and grounded, in contrast to Dara’s tendencies toward seriousness and self-absorption. The same is true for Dara’s old friend Lydia, a fierce pianist whose cynicism masks a compassionate person whose life is filled with struggle.

I have worked hard to bring Adam Pearl to the page. Over time, as he’s moved to center stage, it’s been a challenge to render him with nuance. He’s a gifted violinist, who needs to know himself a lot better. He can be angsty but also kind and generous. He’s conflicted, like all of us.  

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

This book took twenty years to get born. There were a lot of lows. Too many rejections to count, including an agent in the distant past. Highs include my yearly revision of Duet for One, a book that is close to my heart and that has grown and thickened with time. Another high has been trying to render music on the page, which will always be a failing proposition, but brings me great joy!

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

Get your tush in the chair and ignore all writing advice.

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

I don’t know if it counts as a surprise, but if you would have told me in 2004 that this book was going to be published in twenty years, I would have been surprised on all fronts—that it was getting published and that it would take so long!

How do you approach revision?

For me, revision is the heart of writing. Everything happens there. I revise a lot as I am in process. I do multiple entire-book revisions where I review character arcs, nuance, interior life, plot, dialogue, and structure structure structure. My last revision is the one where I put every word under a microscope to ensure it has a purpose. Otherwise, that word has to go!

Interview with Suzanne Cleary

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reprinted with permission from www.workinprogressinprogress.com


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

I usually write a narrative poem that, along the way, dives into single moments and/or explores associations that arise as I write. I like poems that think-on-the-page, and find those especially fun to write.

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

I most enjoyed writing “For the Poet Who Writes to Me While Standing in Line at CVS, Waiting for His Mother’s Prescription” because the subject welcomed a wide range of material and emotion. It’s about those early months of the COVID quarantine, when I compulsively surfed the Internet for both information and distraction, which is how I got to reference both the royal family and snack food. It’s also one of the poems I most enjoy having written because it’s found a wide readership, especially in England and Ireland.   

I most struggled with writing “At the Feet of Michelangelo’s David.” The ending originally included lots of facts about the statue’s long trek to the museum, and lots (and lots) of speculation on my part as to what that might have looked like to passersby. Eventually, I realized I needed to look again at the statue itself in order to find the poem’s final lines.  

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

First, the low: For four years I submitted The Odds manuscriptto all the best publishers and competitions, where sometimes it was a finalist or otherwise near-miss. I found this mostly encouraging, until the day that my dream publisher told me that The Odds had lost publication to one other book, essentially because my poems “sound too much alike.” This observation felt damning, and too accurate for comfort. So I gave upon The Odds. I turned my attention to a new-and-selected manuscript I’d begun a few years earlier; maybe that manuscript, instead, might be my fifth book. When, slowly and grudgingly, I returned to The Odds, I reordered the poems to highlight variation of subject, length, and form. I added poems I originally thought hadn’t fit. When Jan Beatty selected the revised The Odds as winner of the 2024 Laura Boss Narrative Poetry Award, I’d won the jackpot! Not only did a fabulous and accomplished poet select my work, but I had “grown as a poet.” Ultimately, the struggle was good for me and for my book. As a bonus, that new-and-selected manuscript is nearly complete, which also feels good.

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

“Follow the poem, don’t lead.” I’m all about discovering as you write, about welcoming unforeseen ideas, associations, images, sounds. If I begin a poem knowing where the poem will end, the poem hardly feels worth writing; it feels restricted to the conscious mind, closed to the subconscious. Discoveries add resonance and depth to the poem, and—really important for me—add fun to the writing process.

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

Every poem includes something that I did not foresee, but, overall, I didn’t expect that the pandemic, either overtly or covertly, would appear so often in this book. I knew that I’d write about the passing of time, since I often do, but with The Odds I found myself feeling as if I were a historian, responsible for recording the quarantine years.

How did you find the title of your book?

I like a short book title because it’s easy for readers to remember. The Odds is my fifth full-length poetry collection and the odds were against this happening. The odds were against my living this long. Not coincidentally, I am drawn to writing about odd things, things that are unlikely subjects for poems. Also, I love the iamb, love it.

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

A figure in one of the poems eats a granola bar. Salted cashews also appear. As for recipes, sorry. I’m better at recommending restaurants.

*****

Interview with Marianne Jay Erhardt

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reprinted with permission from www.workinprogressinprogress.com


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

Lucky Bodies is a collection of essays on motherhood, imagination, and care. The essays range from the personal to the political and include subjects such as Aesop’s Fables, 90s television, mythology, family lore, fairy tales, religion, and Busby Berekly chorus girls. These essays take inventory of what we demand and withhold from mothers. Together, they imagine how we might make and inhabit stories that cultivate an ethic of care.

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

“Blueberry Hill” was the first essay I wrote for this book. I was reading Richard McClosky’s Blueberries for Sal with my son — 5 or so at the time — and he asked me why the mother in the book didn’t have a name. We then turned to other storybooks on his shelf and saw that those mothers, too, were nameless. I wrote “Blueberry Hill” as a letter to Sal’s mother. It was the first time I’d written creative nonfiction in years. And I felt a whole world of possibilities open up…how I might explore personal questions through some of the stories that have made me.

I struggled with writing “Relentless Healing.” This essay has been many things, including a deep dive into a 1990’s TV show (Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman). I struggled with allowing it to be as odd and focused as it is. The essay itself is interested in what is worth remembering / saving / writing about. In one episode I discuss, the town gets ready for its Founder’s Day celebration and prepares a time capsule. There is a debate about what to include. A bottle of whiskey? A newspaper? Hair clippings from the barber shop? The characters argue. Are these things artifacts or symptoms? As I wrote this section, I realized that this is a question that lives in me every time I sit down to write. Why this? Why this? At present, I think what’s important is the attention, and not the object or subject of that attention. Put anything in the time capsule. It will tell the story.

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

I pitched this book to a number of agents, some of whom loved it but said they couldn’t sell an essay collection. I submitted to different presses and contests and was a finalist for a number of prizes. Along the way, I published many of the essays individually. Last year, I made peace with the fact that this book might never be published as a book, and I was happy enough that a number of the essays had found a home. Soon after, I learned that I won the Iron Horse Prize!

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

At a Tin House Winter Workshop lecture a couple of years ago, Paul Tran said something that I now think of every time I sit down to write: “Write the thing that will set you free and then give it a body.”

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

I was surprised at how winning the Iron Horse Prize brought me a clearer vision of the book. I knew what I needed to revise (and I revised a lot!) More importantly, I knew when the book was done. I was shocked to find myself at the end of it!

How did you find the title of your book?

The word “luck” shows up more than 25 times in the book. At one point in the essay “Luck Now,” there is a 20-year gap in time between a formative teenage experience and my marriage. I wake up next to my husband “many lucky bodies later.” The bodies here are mostly mine — the versions of me that have had good fortune, or narrow misses, or bad experiences that could have been much worse, and also the things I have worked for and earned but have been dismissed as mere “luck.” The bodies are also the essays themselves. Lucky to be written, published, gathered in a book. (Maybe they don’t feel lucky; I will never know.) For a while, the book was called Lucky Bodies Later but eventually I settled on Lucky Bodies.

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

In the essay “Relentless Healing,” we spend some time in a 1996 television commercial for Kellogg’s Rice Krispy Treats. If you were to make them as they appear in the ad, simply use the standard recipe. Once they are cut and cooled, stay in your kitchen reading and eating them alone. Call out to your family, “These things take time!” When you have had your fill, smudge your face with flour. Sprinkle yourself with water from your kids’ fishtank. Make it look like these treats were a lot of work. Carry the plate into the next room, where you family waits, perpetually hungry.

Interview with Nicole Graev Lipson

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reprinted with permission from www.workinprogressinprogress.com


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 preciselywhat 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.

Interview with Brandel France de Bravo

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repreinted with permission from www.workinprogressinprogress.com

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

Locomotive Cathedral is a collection of poems and short essays that explore resilience in the face of climate change and a global pandemic, race, and the concept of a self, all the while celebrating breath as “baptism on repeat.” Whether inspired by 12th century Buddhist mind training slogans or the one-footed crow, René, who visits me daily, the poems grapple with the tension between the speaker’s resistance to change and her acceptance of it as transformation.

Which poem/s did you most enjoy writing? Why?

Looking for prompts in a 12th century Buddhist text comprised of 59 “slogans” or aphorisms was a challenge and source of joy. These slogans which aim to help us cultivate mindfulness and compassion, and diminish “self-grasping,” can be wise, funny, and without commentary from scholars, rather puzzling. Nevertheless, I really enjoyed using them as a starting line for poems, not knowing where the finish might be. I’ve linked to the audio of one of them, published in print-only in Conduit magazine: “Slogan 38, Don’t Seek Others’ Pain as the Limbs of Your Own Happiness.” The slogan, which has a slightly surreal title, is simply cautioning against schadenfreude. I decided to seize on the title as an opportunity to talk about the ways in which we/I take pleasure in others’ difficulty or failings, while taking the limbs of the title literally. “Just / look at my backstroke! I’m a water wheel / catching your fall, grinding you into bread.” This poem is one of several in Locomotive Cathedral in which the “I” of the speaker is at a remove from Brandel-the-author (or is it?). It’s a persona poem but the person speaking is unknown to the reader or has never been previously introduced.

And which poem/s gave you the most trouble, and why?

Locomotive Cathedral contains a number of poems where the “I” of the speaker and the writer are the same, poems replete with autobiography. In these poems, I had to decide what level of honesty and detail was necessary to elevate the writing above storytelling, journaling, sentimentality, or confession which serves to unburden the writer but may be of little benefit to the reader.

How did you find the title of your book?  

With difficulty! I submitted the book to contests, including the Backwaters Press contest (an imprint of the University of Nebraska Press), where I was awarded “honorable mention” and publication, under various titles. Early on, my manuscript’s title was Take and Give, which alludes to a Tibetan Buddhist practice (tonglen) of breathing in someone’s suffering and using the exhale to send out the antidote to that suffering. Later on, I started submitting the manuscript as either Locomotive Cathedral, or Regard Yourself as a Verb. The latter was the title my manuscript bore when judge Hilda Raz selected it in the Backwaters contest. Raz and/or the readers mentioned in their comments that they didn’t think the title was the best fit for the collection. The University of Nebraska Press was happy to have me swap out Regard Yourself as a Verb for Locomotive Cathedral, which they felt was going to be easier to develop cover art for.

The title Locomotive Cathedral comes from an essay in the collection called “Now You Don’t See It, Now You Do,” which is loosely about my distrust of narrative and linearity:

Take a tragedy, a system, a movement, a moment and give it an ending. Give it a terminus in history. Build a station around it. Let it be a locomotive cathedral of steel and glass. Let it be a monument to meaning with marble statuary, a fountain, and geraniums.

My friend, the wonderful poet Jennifer Martelli, is the person who suggested Locomotive Cathedral as a title, and I immediately realized that this combination of words in many ways captures the tension the book seeks to mine: between the very human desire for stasis and eternity as symbolized by the “cathedral” (and in some ways, by poetry), and the perpetual motion of transformation. The “locomotive” of the title stands in for the wondrous churn of change and exchange that defines companionship, marriage, and ceding our place on earth. Locomotive Cathedral opens with a quote from the founder of modern chemistry, Antoine Lavoiser that says: “Nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed.” The book closes with a poem about my one-footed crow, the last line of which is: “Not dying, but molting.”

Interview with Suzanne Hudson

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reprinted with permission from www.workinprogressinprogress.com

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

It’s a compilation, an abridged body of work, mostly short fiction—plus a few novel excerpts and a couple of essays. Subject matter ranges from the absurdly comical to the dark and despairing, with hope woven throughout. The publisher moved fast to get it out ahead of the February 2025 Truman Capote prize.

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

“The Fall of the Nixon Administration” is the story I had the most fun writing, because the characters are so outrageous, eccentric and self-deluded. One in particular has the filthiest mouth and says over-the-top nasty, perverted things, purely for shock value. It’s liberating to write what you’d not dare to actually say out loud. Or would I? That story was so much bawdy fun that it grew into a comic novel (of the same title).  Note: it’s about a crazy dysfunctional family, not literally about Nixon, but set in 1974.

The most trouble? Well, since I dedicated the title story to my late brother, Wilson, who died of acute myeloid leukemia soon after working on beach cleanup after the Deep Water Horizon oil disaster, I needed the character based on him, Gary, to be drawn with care. I wouldn’t say it was “trouble” but I tried to be very mindful about it, and that was emotionally hard for me.

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

Because I was informed about being the recipient of the Capote prize in November of 2024, and the award was to be presented to me at the end of February of 2025, the window for production was ridiculously small, requiring something like a miracle to get ‘er done. Since all of the work was previously published, editing wasn’t an issue (with a few exceptions), but design and all of the complexities related to that was . . . a challenge. The award itself was the high throughout the process. Those editorial exceptions—stories written back in the 1970s—were the lows, as looking at older work can be—was—mortifying and had to be carved up some—um, a lot. My Lord, the adverbs!

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

I’ve gotta go with that tired old saw, “write what you know.” And to steal from my husband, Joe Formichella, “If you can quit writing, do so.” A true writer can’t NOT write.

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

How bad some of those old stories were! I hadn’t looked at them in ages, was in my 20s when I wrote them. I was surprised that I was glad I stepped away from writing for around 25 years (until 1999), because I was in dire need of life experience in order to have something to say.

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

I never hesitate to let readers know that my stuff ain’t for everybody. It’s pitch dark, with cockroaches skittering around the underbelly, mostly about folks living in the margins. It deals with domestic violence, depression, addiction, molestation, racism, all that mess that festers under the scab of southern culture. But I have fun, too! And I hope the funny comes across, even in the form of LOL.

*****

Interview with Kasia Jaronczyk

Blog, ,

reprinted with permission from www.workinprogressinprogress.com

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

On April 30, 1982, two women and their families hijack a Polish passenger plane flying from Breslau to Warsaw in a bold attempt to escape Martial Law in Communist Poland and find safety in West Berlin. Inspired by real events, Voices in the Air is told from the point of view of four women hijackers: a cotton spinner, whose husband wants to avoid a long prison sentence, a schoolteacher with a sick daughter, a pregnant fourteen-year-old who has visions of the Virgin Mary, an ambitious young filmmaker, and a stewardess in love with the married pilot. Will they find happiness beyond the Iron Curtain or was the hijacking not worth the risk?

Which character did you most enjoy creating? Why?

I had the most fun creating the character of Ania, the flight attendant. I immediately loved her irreverent, provocative voice, especially in her interactions with her inhibited and rural cousin, but underneath that bravado was a woman desperately in love with a married man and willing to do anything to be with him. After the hijacking I felt great sympathy for her stubborn belief, in spite of everyone, that her daughter will one day be able to respond to her and communicate.

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

I struggled with writing about Julia (the filmmaker) the most. I knew that she would be a witness to the hijacking, and that years later she would interview the women involved, but I didn’t know what her story would be. I felt that I already had all the perspectives I needed in the other female characters, until I realized that Julia would have a daughter Zuza who was, in a way, “hijacked” by her grandmother who acted like she was her mother. Julia would have to decide between Zuza and her chance to stay in the West. Julia’s story also required the most research, as the movie industry in Communist Poland was an involved process, complicated by the many levels of censorship involved. The themes of ambiguous morality,  censorship and self-censorship became very important in the novel.

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

Before I wrote Voices in the Air I had published a short story collection Lemons (Mansfield Press, 2017), edited an anthology of Polish-Canadian short stories, Polish(ed): Poland Rooted in Canadian Fiction (Guernica Editions, 2017), and wrote another novel, which remains unpublished. I spent a long time querying that first novel, and after receiving no offers, I gave up on it. In the meantime, I wrote Voices in the Air, and again, I had a few full requests from agents, but ultimately it was rejected. I was growing very frustrated and depressed because nobody seemed to want my novels. I switched gears and queried small presses in Canada and some in the US, which one can do without an agent, and with which I’ve had good luck before. I eventually received two offers of publication and accepted one. Palimpsest Press publishes great poetry and stylistically innovative novels, and Aimee Parent Dunn is an amazing editor. A big positive of publishing with a small press is that the author has more influence on the book design, cover and interior, which I appreciate very much.

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

Write first, edit later – the first draft is a bad draft. This lets you actually finish your work without letting the inner critic sabotage the process.

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

Sometimes during writing your mind spontaneously comes up with an unexpected and yet perfect solution to a problem, or a connection, or something that happens that you know is just right. It is a magical moment and feels amazing. The creative process is hard work; you are consciously inventing characters or a plot, choosing between different possibilities, following different paths that might lead nowhere. And then, all of a sudden, you receive this surprising revelation like a gift from the writing gods.

How did you find the title of your book?

Titles can be so difficult – they need to indicate what the book is about, the tone of the work, the genre, but at the same time they can’t be too obvious, too obscure, or misleading. The choice becomes even more complicated when the novel in question is written about a different time and culture and the title needs to be more explanatory that it would have been if it were published in the same country and language. Certain phrases and words can have different connotations and be less obvious to a different audience.

I had a running list of titles, including Escape to the West; Flight over the Iron Curtain; Escape to Western Paradise; Hijacked to the West, but they all seemed too obvious and too general, plus they implied an action/adventure/thriller genre, which might attract readers who would be disappointed to find out it is a literary novel told from a female perspective.

I then came up with Women Hijackers, (which actually would have worked better in Polish, as a single word Hijackers in the feminine form), and finally, The Wives of Hijackers, which seemed an intriguing, sellable title, but perhaps a too gaudy. Air Partisans was too mysterious.

It was my writer friends who suggested Voices in the Air. I feel like this title indicates a literary novel, it may be too subtle, but it encompasses the female voices, the plot, the themes of the novel, as well as its unconventional structure which includes documentary film-style interviews with the hijackers. It also evokes a feeling of loss, an echo, and regret, which reflect the mood of the novel.

*****

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