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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 Michelle Herman

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reprinted with permission from workinprogressinprogress.com

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.)

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

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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?

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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Interview with Eugene Datta

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by Susan Tekulve

The stories in Eugene Datta’s remarkable debut collection, The Color of Noon, are visually striking. With a painter’s eye for detail and a poet’s sensibilities, Datta summons all the senses to create the atmosphere in which his characters exist. In the story, “Rain,” the protagonist sees “scarves of rain wrapping and unwrapping themselves around a streetlamp.” In another story, “Movie Star,” Datta evokes an entire neighborhood market, where “gossip hummed like flies on the piles of mango and papaya.” In the title story, “sunlight on the window ledge is the color of noon.” Synesthetic details abound in these ten stories set in Calcutta, where characters seek relief from unrelenting noon heat in monsoon rains and darkness.

These and other images accumulate in the collection, unifying stories about characters who often live on the fringes of the city. Free of cultural norms and religious traditions, their souls are exiled and conflicted to varying degrees, their humanity exposed so the reader may see more clearly their light and dark urges. In “Hammer and Sickle,” a young female schoolteacher arranges a romantic rendezvous with an elderly Communist insurrectionist in an abandoned mental asylum. In “Movie Star,” a god-like film idol returns home to take over his father’s furniture store, becoming lusterless yet more humane as time passes. In the breathtakingly beautiful and moving story, “A Minute’s Silence,” an ailing filmmaker scripts his own dying so his son won’t be bogged down with the practical details that follow a loved one’s death. Whether they are attempting a great kindness, or suffering the effects of crime, alienation, or betrayal, Eugene Datta’s complex characters, like his images, are quietly developed. These stories seem understated at first, but upon second reading they simmer and burst with color, light, taste, and sound. 

ST: One of the more striking aspects of your writing is your command of atmospheric details. Do your stories typically arise out of place, or do they evolve out of characters and events?

ED: I like looking at things closely. The physical details of a place, for instance. Shapes, colors, the sense of space, the play of light and shadow, and so on. And I try to mentally absorb whatever I can from whatever is available—sound, smell, mood. But I’m also horribly inept and inconsistent, which means that I cannot pick up all the available information equally well. A lot of what I’m exposed to remains out of my attentional focus. And I don’t take notes. So, my mental pictures of particular places or situations largely depend on a handful of the most prominent details, which I try to describe as faithfully as I can when I write about those places/situations, or things similar to them. Now, do my stories arise out of places? Or my memory of them? Maybe they do, who knows! What I’m a bit more certain about, though, is that, when I find a character to write about, or am gripped by an image, a set of images, or an idea, I try to place them in settings concocted from my memory, or imagination, of particular places.     

ST: I noticed you created the cover art for this book.  In what ways does your work as a visual artist influence your stories? Is there any “cross pollination” as you move between the visual arts and the literary arts? 

ED: I take interest in the way things appear, the way they present themselves to the eye. Not because I expect to find meaning there (we know that appearance doesn’t divulge essence, don’t we?), but because of the pleasure of sight, the simple yet richly sensual quality of it. Both as an image maker (artist/photographer) and a writer, part of what I try to do is describe the appearance of things, or, to be more precise, the way I receive the appearance and respond to it, and do it with as much fidelity as I’m capable of. I’m sure some cross pollination between the art forms I dabble in happens on this level, or on a much deeper one, which I cannot even pretend to be aware of. That said, I think of my fiction as being impressionistic in style, and I’m a big fan of impressionistic art.         

ST: Certain images recur and conflict with each other throughout this collection. The characters actively suffer at noon, during the heat of the day.   They find a great amount of relief from rain, and even the monsoons serve as a kind of balm or source of renewal. One of the characters in “Rain” remarks, “An hour of rain and already he’s a new man.” Is there any cultural significance, (specific to India), in the images woven through the collection? 

ED: The images represent particular ways of being—particular ways in which lives are lived within certain sections of society in a certain urban setting. I don’t think they’re representative, except in a very broad sense, even of Calcutta, where all the stories are set. On the other hand, their heterogeneity and the ways in which they often showcase particular pieces of culture, make them unmistakably Indian, or even Calcutta-specific. The image of goddess Kali in ‘Rain’, for instance, and the reverence shown to it by the teashop owner and the men the protagonist is sharing the table with, is one such detail. There’s also this loud-mouthed communist party supporter in the same scene. This, I’d say, is quite specific to Calcutta. Which, of course, is not to suggest that a scene like this couldn’t occur in Bombay or Delhi. It’s just that, it would be more “typical” of Calcutta than of any other Indian city.

Speaking of specificity of this kind, in ‘A Minute’s Silence’, the image “A koel sang in the darkness. Himadri remembered how his wife loved hearing the bird at night. Bonolota, he muttered, his eyes welling up with tears. Only darkness now….” carries a very subtle, very oblique reference to a poem titled ‘Banalata Sen’ by Jibanananda Das, one of Bengal’s greatest modern poets. Roughly translated, the final line of the poem, one of the best love poems I’ve read in any language, would read: “Only darkness remains, and Banalata Sen to sit face to face with.” (I haven’t yet come across an English translation of the poem that does justice to the Bengali original.) Unlike the poet, Himadri doesn’t have his Bonolota (although spelled differently, it’s the same name in Bengali) and is left only with darkness. The reference is almost invisible. And it’s not important at all in the larger scheme of the story. It’s like a single brush stroke in a painting with the faintest suggestion of light. It’s there just to add a subtle layer of poignancy to the image for those who notice it. And not noticing it, of course, won’t take anything away from the mood of the image. Here’s another example that’s also somewhat relevant: Toward the end of ‘Hammer and Sickle’, the insurgent says to his lover, the protagonist, “Whoever discovers the who of me…,” quoting Pablo Neruda. It’s not at all uncharacteristic of a hard-core Naxal like him to quote a foreign (Latin American or Russian) thinker or poet. Again, it doesn’t matter if someone gets it or not, but it’s a detail specific to Calcutta and its sociopolitical life in the 60s and 70s. These characters and their individual worlds are vastly different from those we find in ‘New Life’, for instance, or in ‘Movie Star’, or ‘The Color of Noon’, although all these lives and worlds are contained within a single urban universe.        

ST: How does the repetition of images (heat, rain, crows, lush gardens filled with bougainvillea and mango trees, crumbling/derelict cityscapes) help you to advance your stories, or even help you to advance the entire story collection? 

ED: The images recur because all the stories are set in one city. Although the stories themselves are very different (they’re set in different times, and are about people who’re different from one another), the recurring images run through them as a unifying thread. Also, from story to story, they consolidate (at least I hope they do) the sense of place in the reader’s mind. I didn’t, of course, think about any of this when I wrote them, which I did over several years.     

ST:  In your stories, traditional Indian mythology and religions seem to be missing from the lives of your central characters. Instead of worshipping the “old gods,” one of your characters worships an American pop star. In another story, a community of boys worship a fallen film idol.  When these new gods fail to meet the expectations of your characters, your characters appear to suffer a kind of identity crisis and extreme isolation.  Is this spiritual crisis specific to modern India, or do you believe this crisis transcends the borders of India? 

ED: I suppose it’s because I’ve always been interested in the fringes. Realities on the peripheries of dominant cultures appeal to me in a way their mainstream counterparts don’t. I’m drawn to lives in which different modes of existence blend into one another in unpredictable ways. Cultures in which the contours of behavior are not defined too rigidly, like those of objects in an impressionistic painting, if you will. Where the grip of convention is loose enough to allow a relatively free and open expression of humanity, one that’s not circumscribed by dogma or the dictates of particular traditions. As for traditional mythologies and religions, well, writers far more able than I have addressed them and used their stories more effectively than I ever could. Besides, I’m interested in other kinds of stories.

ST:  I have to admit, I knew very little about the Communist Revolution in India before reading your book. A cynical old “ex-Naxal” who considers himself a failed revolutionary appears in “Epitaph.” A “scrawny and bearded” old Communist insurrectionist hides out in an abandoned mental asylum in “Hammer and Sickle.” What questions are these stories posing about the nature of “extremism” in India? 

ED: The Naxal movement in West Bengal, in the late 60s and 70s, was spearheaded by a group of educated young men and women. They were well-read, highly motivated, and hated the bourgeoisie. Their violent insurrection was put down with equal violence. After capitulation, many of the surviving Naxals left the country and went to universities in North America. I believe the movement is alive in various parts of the country, and perhaps also in West Bengal, but I’m not sure exactly how its current iterations map onto that original movement. I’m also not sure if the book’s references to an insurgency of more than half a century ago can necessarily say anything about extremist movements in India in general. But then I’m not an expert. A historian would be better placed to answer this question. It seems to me, though, that the original Naxals were very different, given their secular education and ideals, from their counterparts elsewhere in the country both then and now.    

ST:  You were writing and publishing poetry before you published this short fiction collection.  Do you have any new projects planned in either genre?

ED: I’ve written a couple of small poems since ‘The Color of Noon’ came out. And I’m tinkering with two longer pieces of fiction. Who knows how long it’ll take me to finish them.

*****

Eugene Datta is the author of the poetry collection Water & Wave (Redhawk, 2024). He has worked as a newspaper journalist, a book reviewer, and an editor, and has had his fiction and poetry appear in publications such as Common Ground Review, The Dalhousie Review, Main Street Rag, Mantis, The Bombay Literary Magazine, Hamilton Stone Review, The Bangalore Review, and elsewhere. A recipient of the Stiftung Laurenz-Haus fellowship, he has held residencies at Ledig House International Writers’ Colony, and Fundación Valparaíso. A native of Calcutta, he lives with his wife and two children in Aachen, Germany. The Color of Noon is his first collection of stories.  

Susan Tekulve’s newest book Bodies of Light is her first full-length poetry collection. She is the author of Second Shift: Essays (Del Sol Press) and In the Garden of Stone (Hub City Press), winner of the South Carolina Novel Prize and a Gold IPPY Award. She’s also published two short story collections: Savage Pilgrims (Serving House Books) and My Mother’s War Stories (Winnow Press). Her photo essay, “White Blossoms,” appeared in Issue 12 of the KYSO Flash Anthology. Her nonfiction, fiction, and poetry has appeared in journals such as Denver Quarterly, The Georgia Review, The Louisville Review, Puerto del Sol, New Letters, and Shenandoah. Her web chapbook, Wash Day, appears in the Web Del Sol International Chapbook Series, and her story collection, My Mother’s War Stories, received the 2004 Winnow Press fiction prize. She has received scholarships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She teaches in the BFA and MFA writing programs at Converse University.

Interview with Paula Whyman

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reprinted with permission from Work-in-Progress, www.workinprogressinprogress.com

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

Bad Naturalist is a memoir about my attempts to restore native meadows on a mountain in the foothills of the Blue Ridge, about the obstacles I encountered, the (many) mistakes I made, the failures—and a few successes—and the discoveries I made along the way.

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

Hahaha, courage? Maybe it was foolishness! For me, writing a book-length memoir was something I hadn’t done before, and I was a bit of a reluctant memoirist in that I didn’t feel comfortable focusing on myself. The only way for me to do that was with humor, which is how I like to write anyway. I needed to feel free to make fun of myself. So if there is a “boundary” that I crossed, it’s that apparently it’s somewhat unusual for there to be humor in nature writing. And I wanted to bring nature, um, down to earth…for people like me.

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

Well, for one thing, selling my book on proposal was an incredible high point and so different from the process I was used to, since my first book was fiction. I’ll also say that there has been a lot of interest in this book, which I really appreciate! I think the low point was when I was trying to figure out how to write the book, as if there was some special rule of approach, a key to writing memoir–and not exactly a traditional memoir, but one that tells a story not just about me, but about the natural world–a key that I didn’t possess because I hadn’t done it before. (There is no key, and every book is different. Heavy sigh.) But I guess it worked it out in the end?

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

Write about what you’re curious about — that interest and passion will come through in the writing, and your enthusiasm is contagious. Don’t worry about writing what you “know”—but get to know it, so that your reader can get to know it, too.

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

That I got it done! I was doing the work and the research on the mountain at the same time that I was writing about it. Both the project and the writing involved a lot of uncertainty, a lot of waiting, a lot of trial and error. I never knew what was going to happen on the mountain or if it would happen when I needed it to happen, so I hardly ever knew whether I’d be able to write about the aspect I was hoping to write about, particularly in time for my deadline. The exciting part for me was often the surprise of seeing what did happen—what grew in a place, what new interconnections I found. I took those surprises in the field and brought them to my writing desk, where I teased out further connections when I sat down to write. I was also intent on finding ways to describe plants and insects and birds that I hope are entertaining and accessible, to describe elements of the natural world so that an interested novice like me would be able to envision and connect with them, and I was often surprised by the ideas that occurred to me, like comparing a flower to a weird swim cap my grandmother used to wear. Where did that even come from?

Who is your ideal reader?

People who are curious and interested in reading about encounters with the natural world that are written with a sense of humor; armchair travelers who would enjoy reading about an adventurous endeavor that doesn’t always go right! I think the book will prove inspiring for those who are drawn to take on an ambitious project in an area that’s totally new to them; for those interested in trying something completely new in mid-life; and for readers who like the idea of reading about someone else’s foibles and failures, watching someone else mess up in what is still a hopeful story.