Tag Archives: #writinglife

Interview with Julie Marie Wade

October 28, 2024Blog#CNF, #interview, #writinglifeLeslie Pietrzyk

Reprinted with permission from www.workinprogressinprogress.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

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

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

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

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

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

How did you find the title of your book?

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

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

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

*****

READ MORE ABOUT THIS AUTHOR: www.juliemariewade.com

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

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

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

Interview with Jody Hobbs Hesler

September 17, 2024All Journal Content, Blog, Fiction#authorinterview, #Fiction, #novel, #writinglifeLeslie Pietrzyk

Without You Here by Jody Hobbs Hesler

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

When Noreen is eight years old, her beloved aunt Nonie dies from suicide. This loss, compounded by the family’s fears that Noreen will follow her aunt’s troubled path, reverberates through her life, planting doubts about her own judgment and landing her in the novel’s present day. The same age now as her aunt was when she died, Noreen is a young mother stuck in an increasingly precarious marriage whose imminent crisis will force her to choose between allowing history to repeat itself or setting a new course. (More details below!)

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

Both Noreen and her aunt Nonie act as point-of-view characters. Of the two, Nonie arrived in my mind more fully formed. She’s a deeply complicated person who struggles with self-worth and mental illness, but I enjoyed every moment of bringing her to the page. I loved her whimsy, her close-to-the-bone vulnerability, and her big, beautiful heart.

Noreen’s character demanded more from me. The sweep of the novel’s timeline encompasses a much broader swath of Noreen’s life than Nonie’s, following her from eight to twenty-seven years old. Rendering her character consistently, but with believable growth across decades, was tricky. Sometimes I resorted to writing letters to her in my journal, posing questions about her personality and motivations. Asking the questions implied answers could exist, so the rhetorical exercise nearly always yielded them.

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

By the time the world started opening up again after pandemic lockdown, I had two books ready to shop around—my story collection What Makes You Think You’re Supposed to Feel Better and Without You Here. I’m a careful vs. high-volume submitter, so I curated my way through lists of agents before turning to small presses and curating my way through them, over months and months. Without You Here came awfully close to acceptance at a different publisher in spring of 2021. That rejection after a particularly close call, punched me in my hopes. I felt like I’d already queried the universe, so where was I meant to turn now?

In a wacky turn of events, Cornerstone Press accepted my first book, the story collection What Makes You Think You’re Supposed to Feel Better, in September of 2021, then that December, Flexible Press accepted Without You Here. Going from zero books to two within three months after achingly long years of near misses, new projects, rewrites, and busts, knocked me sideways—in the best possible way. For a long while, it felt like a few hamsters were galloping on their wheels in my head, stopping short every now and then to say to each other, “Two books? Two?” before hopping on again. And both presses have been truly lovely to work with.

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

I have a couple. In a writing conference workshop, someone asked Tim O’Brien about how to avoid sentimentality, and he said, “Don’t worry about sentiment. Worry about fraudulence.” Which I love, because a lot of writers favor action over poignancy or skew in the opposite direction by overtelling emotional reactions. So don’t avoid feeling, embrace it. Show its ugly neediness or extravagant beauty with precision and honesty.

Another favorite comes from Flannery O’Connor’s Mystery and Manners: “It’s always wrong of course to say that you can’t do this or you can’t do that in fiction. You can do anything you can get away with, but nobody has ever gotten away with much.” Which is something I tell students and fellow writers when they’re trying something wild and new. Yes, it could work—Don’t let anyone tell you something’s impossible just because it hasn’t been done—but don’t expect it to be easy.

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

The final (hard-won) draft of this book follows a nonlinear structure. I knew from early on that maintaining the pressure of a past event over the course of twenty years of Noreen’s life would require something different structurally, but I had no idea what. Jane Alison’s craft book Meander, Spiral, Explode, which explores a host of nontraditional plot shapes, assured me that an asynchronous timeline could work, and my adult children helped input chapter descriptions into a spreadsheet then organized them into a potentially functional sequence. I wasn’t sure until I’d finally fit all the pieces together that this spiraling timeline could achieve what I’d wanted it to; realizing that it did was a happy surprise.

Along the way there were plenty of other surprises. Nonie and Noreen are bigger risk takers than I am, so I had to create misadventures for them that I would never have joined. I was always surprised, and relieved, when those episodes rang true. It was also interesting and surprising when snippets of my own life experience showed up in a scene here or there, disguised completely as belonging to the characters in the book.

How did you find the title of your book?

For the longest time the title was Little Angel, which is Nonie’s nickname for her niece, and that title worked for me because it showed their fondness for each other and the depth of their affection despite the obstacles in their story. But it also accidentally made me think of those Hallmark Precious Moments angel figurines, which, pardon to anyone who likes those, but they strike me as cutesy and saccharine. This isn’t a cute story, so I didn’t want anyone making the same association.

A late-stage revision generated a scene where Nonie says to Noreen, “Without you here, I’d think this was someone else’s family,” and that line resonated right away. The whole novel is about a broken connection, about the absence that Nonie leaves behind. Almost as soon as I wrote the line, I knew I’d found the title.

****

Interview with novelist & poet Andrew K. Clark

September 9, 2024Blog#authorinterview, #interview, #novel, #writinglifeLisa Hase-Jackson

Interview by Christine Schott

Andrew K. Clark is a self-described Appalachian Gothic novelist and poet. His book of poetry, Jesus in the Trailer (Main Street Rag Press) and his debut novel, Where Dark Things Grow (Cowboy Jamboree Press) both draw rich inspiration from the world of Appalachia, past and present. I had the opportunity to explore place, inspiration, and more with Andrew in the lead-up to his book launch on September 10, 2024.

Tell us a little about what Appalachia means to you. What do you want people to see of Appalachia through your work?

To me, Appalachia is certainly our beautiful geography which makes us famous, but it’s also about the uniqueness of our people. Appalachia is diverse racially, culturally, and in thought. If I could wave a magic wand, I would use it to let all the old caricatures die. In my work, I hope readers see what they’ve come to expect from great Appalachian literature (sense of place, family bonds, survivalism, dialect tradition, etc.) combined with the fantastical elements of magical realism and horror stories.

Your poetry collection, Jesus in the Trailer, is populated by people we feel we might have met before: struggling people, hard-edged people, generous people. Your novel, Where Dark Things Grow, draws on folklore, horror, and the preternatural. Do you see fundamental connections between these two works?

I think both books are exploring the same themes at their core. The religious traditions & superstitions of the narrative voices in Jesus in the Trailer are present, and perhaps more fleshed out, in Where Dark Things Grow. Family dysfunction and struggle are at the heart of both, along with a love story along the way. Also, my prose leans poetic, at least according to early reviews, so I think fans of one would be natural fans of the other.

What drew you to poetry, and what has since tempted you into the world of fiction? Do you see your future self as moving between these two worlds frequently?

When I was in high school, a friend gave me a collection of Langston Hughes poems. That flipped a switch for me; prior to reading Hughes I had thought of poetry as Shakespeare, and while I’ve grown to love Shakespeare, I didn’t immediately see it as accessible for someone like me. Hughes wrote in his natural vernacular and showed me I could do the same as a Southern Appalachian poet. I think the draw to fiction is a product of that same realization when I discovered southern writers, and the connections I later made to writers using fantastical elements like Murakami and Marquez. At my core, I love stories, and I love language. I cannot imagine not writing both.

Where did you first encounter the folklore you draw on for Where Dark Things Grow? Did you adhere closely to real folklore, or did you make significant changes to suit your novel?

Once I knew I wanted to include fantastical elements in the story, I decided early on to use only folklore I could trace to my family heritage. The idea for wulvers came from Scottish folklore, but I twisted them into something new in the story, giving them some of the elements of the dire wolves from Game of Thrones books. Mr. Wake, one of the novel’s villains is Norwegian, which I can trace to my own heritage. The religious traditions explored in the book are mostly from my own personal experience growing up in a very conservative strain of Christianity. Some characters in the book wear wooden booger masks from Western North Carolina Cherokee tradition, but they’re white men co-opting this tradition; classic cultural appropriation.

In marketing, we talk about “comparable titles.” The best way I’ve heard comps described is as books that belong on the same shelf as yours. What books would you love to see your novel share the shelf with?

Where Dark Things Grow belongs on horror bookshelves alongside books like The Hollow Kind and The Boatkeeper’s Daughter both by Andy Davidson, and The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones. It also belongs on the southern gothic lit bookshelf beside books like The Gods of Howl Mountain by Taylor Brown, Serena by Ron Rash, and Winter’s Bone by Daniel Woodrell.

What was the publication process like for you? You’ve gone the route of publishing with small presses without an agent. What are some of the advantages and disadvantages of that approach?

One thing I am proud of with Where Dark Things Grow – out 9/10/24(Cowboy Jamboree Press) and its sequel Where Dark Things Rise – coming fall of 2025(Quill & Crow Publishing House) is that they bend genre. They contain elements of horror, magical realism, historical fiction, and southern gothic. But this means that the work doesn’t fit neatly into a traditional marketing box understood by the agent querying process. Indie presses are generally bolder and more welcoming of books that defy such easy categorization. So, the positive of traditional indie press publishing, although still quite competitive, is being able to tell a story the way I want as an author. I also have a say in elements such as my cover designs. The negatives would be distribution (your book isn’t automatically in a large number of bookstores) and that I am basically my own marketing department alongside a publicist I hired.

What’s your next project? Do you always have a new project up your sleeve when you finish something, or do you need a creative break between endeavors?

I have started on a third novel and a second poetry collection, both of which are quite different. I don’t think I need creative breaks; I don’t think there’s any such thing for writers. Even when we’re not writing, we’re writing. But I do crave breaks from the marketing involved with book launches and promo; if for no other reason than to get back into the right headspace to create something new.

What do you wish people would ask you about your writing?

I wish more readers would connect or comment on what I am saying about class in my work.

For more information on Andrew and his work, visit the following pages:

Andrew’s website: https://www.andrewkclark.com/
Order Where Dark Things Grow: https://www.malaprops.com/book/9798859532308
Events: https://www.andrewkclark.com/news

ABOUT

Andrew K. Clark is a writer from Western North Carolina where his people settled before the Revolutionary War. His poetry collection, Jesus in the Trailer was published by Main Street Rag Press and shortlisted for the Able Muse Book Award. His debut novel, Where Dark Things Grow, is forthcoming from Cowboy Jamboree Press in September of 2024. A loose sequel, Where Dark Things Rise will be published by Quill and Crow Publishing House in the fall of 2025. His work has appeared in The American Journal of Poetry, UCLA’s Out of Anonymity, Appalachian Review, Rappahannock Review, The Wrath Bearing Tree, and many other journals. He received his MFA from Converse College. Connect with him at andrewkclark.com.

Christine Schott, South 85 Fiction Editor, teaches literature and creative writing at Erskine College. She is Pushcart-nominated author whose work has appeared in the Gettysburg Review, Dappled Things, Casino Literary Magazine, and Wanderlust. She holds a PhD in medieval literature from the University of Virginia and an MFA in creative writing from Converse University.

Interview with Iheoma Nwachukwu

September 3, 2024Blog, Fiction#interview, #shortstory, #writinglifeLisa Hase-Jackson

reprinted with permission from Work In Progress (www.workinprogressinprogress.com)

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

Japa & Other Stories is about Nigerian immigrants yearning for a self in America, and sometimes in other parts of the world. One character bilocates in the heat of their yearning, another folds himself into a box on a journey to the fulfillment of his deepest desire. Others embark on a treacherous trek across the Sahara Desert trying to find home in foreign cities.

Which character did you most enjoy creating? Why?

Ahamefula (in “Japa Boys & Japa Girls”). A character who shows up in two stories, and in one of the stories he appears in different locations at the same time. He is deeply mutilated and frustrating, constantly making bad, humorous decisions. From the POV of a reader, a fantastic companion on the page.

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

Rasaki. The protagonist who travels to Russia in “You Illegals” to watch the World Cup. Throwing a Nigerian character into a landscape I had never visited presented obvious problems of believability. Trying to figure out how he might act in his interactions with Russian culture, and the Russian people was difficult to accomplish. Eventually I read hundreds of blogs written by Nigerians living in Russia, and watched Vlogs by Nigerian immigrants in Russia to become comfortable enough to render this character with the kind of easy intimacy I look for in characters when I read fiction.

Which story did you most enjoy writing?

To be honest, I enjoyed writing all the stories, though I might be slightly partial to “Japa Girls” in which a character bilocates.

Why?

I like working out the supernatural in fiction. It’s such an important fabric of my understanding of the world, and also something which I do not fully understand—so it’s always giving. I believe every human being is part-spirit; whether you believe it or not, you’re what you are. The uncanny is a kind of wildness that attacks our sense of order, though we find it infinitely stimulating.

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

Two stories gave me the most trouble. The frame story, “To You Americans,” and “Spain’s Last Colonial Outposts” where I switch perspectives—third person/ first person plural. Frame stories are by their very nature like matryoshka dolls. A story inside a story. Rhythm inside rhythm. The outside story and the inside one have to be expanding at just the right pace so that, in the end, the story doesn’t tilt. That’s usually difficult to do.

Switching narrators in a story can be confusing for the reader. So again, the rhythm has to be weighed right. The switches happening in a way that feels necessary, that makes the reader believe they’ve received a burst of energy and promise.

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

In the three years before I won the Flannery O’Connor, my then-agent tried to sell my collection to several publishers with little success. I entered a few book contests, too. At some point it occurred to me that I needed to rearrange the stories in the collection and write new ones. I had a couple of stories that had been published in stellar journals but didn’t really belong in the book. It took tremendous courage to cut them out. I sought out a unity in the collection. It took about six months to arrange the stories in what I thought was the right order. Then I prayed for success.

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

Without conflict fiction is just a boring rendition of details. Which is another way of saying, your character must yearn for something. Every human being wants something. And to seek is to suffer.

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

The incredible amount of research I had to do for each story. For “Urban Gorilla” I had about a hundred pages of research. Images included. I’m a very visual writer.

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

This is serious fiction that also makes you laugh. I appreciate humor in fiction. One of my wrting professors, Elizabeth McCracken used to say, “Don’t be afraid to be funny.”

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

I drank a mix of hibiscus tea, plus ginger and garlic while writing this book. It improved my eyesight considerably.

*****

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

ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR OWN TBR STACK: https://ugapress.org/book/9780820367279/japa-and-other-stories/

READ A STORY FROM THIS BOOK, “Hosanna Japa Town”: https://oxfordamerican.org/authors/iheoma-nwachukwu

Interview with David Ebenbach

August 19, 2024Blog#authorinterview, #Fiction, #writinglifeLeslie Pietrzyk

reprinted with permission from Work in Progress

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

A loner teen accidentally unlocks a social life with his sense of humor—but can he unlock meaningful happiness that way, too, or will he first have to face and understand himself?

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

The book is told from the point of view of Jacob—that loner teen from the elevator pitch—and I really enjoyed spending time with him. He’s based (very loosely) on a teenaged me (and the book is set back in the late 80s, when I was a teenager), and so it was like hanging out with a version of my younger self, getting to observe all of the hopeful foolishness and chaotic earnestness—but from a semi-safe distance this time around.

His friends were harder to write, because of the particular nuance I was trying to capture: that these characters could be perfectly great people, and yet still struggle to supply whatever it was that Jacob ultimately needed. In that way, folks can be disappointing without actually being at fault.

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

Well, the lowest low was when my agent told me that the book wasn’t to his taste and didn’t feel like he was the right person to submit it to presses. Yeah—that was a low point. He said it nicely, though—he’s still my agent—and he told me it was okay if I wanted to take it out to presses myself. He’s not a possessive guy. And so I did take it out myself, and luckily found people who connected with the book more than my agent did.

In particular, Regal House Publishing got excited. So one big high was them sending the contract, and me signing it. After that, there were the usual rounds of editing and proofreading and finalizing a cover and so on, all of which were smooth. And then, finally—I started working on this book back in 2016—Regal House sent me a physical copy of the book. That’s a very high point right there. As Salman Rushdie writes in his excellent new memoir, Knife, “the best moment of the whole process of book publication is this one, the moment when you hold your printed book in your hand for the first time, and you feel its reality, its life.”

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

Don’t write what other people want you to write; write what you have to write.

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

This is such an interesting question, and a hard one for me to answer. In a certain sense, everything surprises me when I write a book—I never know how it’s going to play out before I get to the page. Or at least I never know that I know. Because, in another sense, nothing about the process surprises me. In fact, I typically write not toward surprise but instead toward whatever is most emotionally difficult for me to get into. The hard stuff that’s already there and that maybe I’m somewhat aware of, the way that you’re aware of shadows in the room, but that I haven’t been willing to look at directly. And so, a lot of the time my writing process is more about uncovering than about discovering. Maybe the surprise, each time, is that I’m able to go there—and come back out unharmed.

How did you find the title of your book?

Coming up with Possible Happiness, the title of this book, was a process. Oy. For a long time I called it Fern Rock, after the Philadelphia Broad Street Subway stop—but that made it sound like the novel was happening in some rural paradise instead of in one of the grittiest cities in America. So I lost faith in that option and just called the book “that high school novel” for a long time. It remained “that high school novel” through failed experiments with titles like Where Do the Children Go (based on a song from the time), Subway-Surface (based on public transportation), and We’re Getting There (the actual, I’m-not-making-it-up slogan of SEPTA, Philly’s public transportation organization, for many years). None of it really suited this particular high school novel.

And then I thought about the scene where protagonist Jacob goes into a kind of occult shop on South Street where all of the purported potions have anti-lawsuit hedges in their names like “so-called” or “alleged,” and he sees something called Possible Happiness Syrup. I thought: that’s what my guy needs. He needs a possible happiness. He needs to stop fighting for some generic kind of happiness that works for everyone else or some magical kind of happiness that only works in the movies. He needs to turn his effort toward getting a real happiness, one that’s possible for him.

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

Well, the main character is a teenager, and not so great in the kitchen, so he’s not the kind of person who produces recipes. When he’s home alone, his single mother working yet another double-shift, he just heats up some frozen mac’n’cheese. So maybe that could make for a good book club treat? Though, if you want to be true to the time period (late 80s), you’ll have to find the Stouffer’s frozen mac that comes in a foil tray, and you’ll have to heat it up in a conventional oven. It takes a while, but it’s worth it.

*****

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

ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR OWN TBR STACK: https://regal-house-publishing.mybigcommerce.com/possible-happiness/

South 85 Journal

An Online Literary Journal

Tag Archives: #writinglife

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