You talk about how you like empathy because it’s “the only way to be intimate and expansive at once.” Can you talk about what you mean by that?

It’s interesting because it allows you to go both broad and deep at the same time. What I mean by that is that it’s both personal and exemplary. For example, the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions in South Africa are a good example of this. They were intimate; the empathy expressed in the TRCs were about one-to-one exchanges where people were trying to get to an understanding of how one person could have committed a gross injustice against another and come to maybe some kind of forgiveness or at least understanding about that. Yet because they were televised, the idea was that others could gain some kind of understanding from it too. In that way you get a broader grasp of how you also can participate in that empathy, so it allows you go both deep and broad at once.

One of the women I went and studied with, Dr. Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, talks about the way you can get secondary gain from actually watching peace happen between two people. So even if you personally didn’t get resolution from somebody who did harm to you, if you watch someone have empathy given to them you can secondarily experience that kind of resolution internally.

Why is empathy such a prevalent concept right now?

One of the things I found in my research was that it goes through cycles. The word empathy is just a hundred years old. It comes from the German einfühlung, which means “feeling into.” It was originally an artistic aesthetic concept. At the time it came out it spread into all kinds of fields— Freud used it in psychology and the notion of empathy became really popular at the end of the nineteenth century. Then it swung out of favor with Nietzsche and his idea of the superhuman, we became all about the individual. Now we’re swinging back in. We’ve seen these pendulum swings away from the collective connective ideologies towards the individual and then back toward the more connective, empathic ways of thinking. So I think its partly cyclical.

I also think it was because of the mirror neuron discovery, which has been largely refuted, in the nineties. In the nineties a neuroscientist named Marco Iacoboni, in Italy discovered these neurons that basically fire in macaques, the monkeys. They’re usually action neurons, so they fire when you execute an action. What they discovered is they would fire when the macaques would watch somebody doing an actions, so they said, “Well this is the basis of empathy, because you actually are imagining or enacting an action without actually doing it.” Then it became very controversial, and people said, “All we know is that these action neurons are firing when you’re not performing an action. It doesn’t mean that it’s actually empathy and we’ve never seen them in humans.”

Regardless, the cat was out of the bag and everyone said, “Wow, now we have a neurological basis for empathy, and that means empathy exists, empathy matters, and empathy is really important.” Suddenly there was this big huge surge into everything empathy: research into empathy, discussions about empathy. So there was a big cultural zeitgeist around empathy.

You talk about how some view empathy as a skill that can be developed and others view it as a moral inclination. Can you talk about what the difference is in those two schools of thought?

I noticed this in schools in particular. There’s been a real push for schools to teach empathy and build it into their curriculum. It’s something that I’m very wary of actually, especially because corporations have been pushing for schools to teach empathy and whenever there’s a corporate push I wonder why. I’m naturally suspicious. The push is to create empathic marketers and branders. There’s a philosophy that it is skill-based, that you can learn it like a skill, and in that way empathy is acquisitional.

Can you describe what is meant by an empathetic marketer?

Corporations have been writing about, talking about, and teaching empathy their business schools. When they know our likes and dislikes and can target products to us individually, they call this empathy. I argue that this is not just the bastardization of a term, but that there’s more going on. I say that when we begin to feel empathized with in our online experience, empathy has shifted to mean something else. So in other words, companies have, for a long time now, shifted their model away from the mass commercial, where they try to target to millions of people in one commercial, towards the one-to-one exchange where they know who you are, what your buying habits are, and what your demographics are. They can then try to target individual products to you, and they call this empathy.

If we’re swimming in that kind of soup, we may begin to feel that’s empathy too. When corporations push empathy in the schools and say, “This is what students need to learn in order to work in our companies,” then it is a skill to learn. It is a skill to learn how to understand people’s buying habits and call that empathy.

So I argue that we need to not numeratize and grade empathy as a skillset, because I think that’s kind of risky. I think we need to think about empathy as a moral, and really value it for its inherent value, which is doing good for good’s sake. We need to model empathy rather than teach it as a set of skills that can be graded and numeratized.

You examine how empathy operates in a wide variety of communities, from the court system in Red Hook to the truth and reconciliation processes in South Africa. What factored into which case studies you shared with your readers?

I wanted to give people a range of things that went from the very individual and intimate to the broader ideas of empathy, where we bring empathy into places like justice. Especially with the idea of can we bring empathy into justice, because it is a big question. When Sotomayor was being brought into the Supreme Court, there was a big question of whether empathy should even have a place in the courtroom, so it’s been a part of the national dialogue. So I wanted to bring in systems wherein we have questions of empathy and then the more intimate ones as well.

What role does self-empathy play in all of this?

That was something I really struggled with at the onset of the book because I initially thought self-empathy is just another link in the long chain of American selfishness, you know? (laughs) I had an inborn reaction to the idea of self-empathy. I felt squeamish about it. Then I started working on the book and went through a terrible crisis and realized the only way I’m going to heal is to be kind to myself. I couldn’t just operate with my same old tools, which were to work and drive and push forward. I had to shift what I was doing and actually be gentle and patient and empathic to what I was going through. It was a really stark lesson that I had never learned before: “Oh my gosh, self-empathy is part of this big toolbox that we need to access.” It was a real lesson.

At the end of the book, you talk about how your two favorite definitions of empathy are that empathy is an interruption of power and empathy is mutual vulnerability. Can you talk about why you prefer these definitions?

I really like the idea of empathy being an interruption of power because I think it’s so different from the way we traditionally think about it. Empathy still has tinges of sympathy in the way we approach it and the way we feel about it. It feels like we’re looking almost down on somebody and maybe a little bit sorry for them. When we think of it as an interruption of power it disrupts social structure and can be wielded in really useful ways. I learned that definition when I was in South Africa. I was there when Eugene De Kock, who was the head of Vlakplaas, the South African prison, was released from prison. He’s knows as Prime Evil there. He’s a very, very, very bad person. The idea that a lot of people were talking about was that this was an interruption of power, because if he’s just in prison, we’re still ceding to him the same amount of power that he’s always had. If we have empathy for his process and have empathy for the fact that he’s expressed remorse, then it’s deflating some of his power. It says the rest of us are actually culpable as well, rather than saying that he’s the one bad guy. I thought that was a really interesting expression of what empathy can do.

The idea of mutual vulnerability is also really interesting. There’s a theorist named Nell Noddings who says that the whole notion of projecting yourself into another person’s experience is a particularly Western, masculine notion of empathy. She defines empathy as receptivity rather than doing this constant projection, “How would you feel? How would I feel if I were in your shoes?” That’s a really interesting idea that actually what empathy is is a kind of listening, rather than projecting. I like that idea too of just being mutually vulnerable, of mutually listening to each other. It takes away that need to thrust an identity or a subjectivity into another person.

Librarians serve a diverse spectrum of the population. How can they best apply empathy in their roles?

One of the things that I learned is that in a way empathy is perspective taking. You’re doing this “how would this feel for me to feel what you’re experiencing and “how does this feel for you,” and both are really difficult. So what I found was that while you have to take those imaginative leaps into genuinely trying to understand what the other person might be going through, you’re also really, really listening hard and, like Nell Nodding said, being really receptive. So I think the kind of empathy that’s the most useful, especially if you’re dealing with people who are very different than you, is to be as curious as possible, keep yourself from projecting, and be as receptive as possible. So you’re jumping between states, an imaginative state and a receptive state. It removes some of the heightened emotion, which also removes judgment.

The post Cris Beam on Empathy’s Ability to be Both Personal and Exemplary first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

You come to writing from the world of filmmaking. Did you bring any of the skills you learned in telling a story cinematically to how you told the story of Orr and his family?

Writing screenplays has definitely informed my prose—I am much more interested in having characters do things than in telling people what they are like, which you have to do in cinema. But the question of voice—who is speaking and to whom, and what are they not saying, etc.—all of these are more interesting questions in a novel, and afford a writer more space to play with (and rope to hang himself).

When we first meet Orr, it’s in 2012 Belfast and he’s about to embark on an affair that pits his faith against his desire. The setting is so specific—is there something about Belfast where this story could only have taken place there during that particular time?

There is undoubtedly a strong, problematic evangelical religious tradition in Northern Ireland. There are many men who—if not like Orr exactly—nonetheless engage their faith with the kind of visceral, unwavering commitment. And Belfast right now inhabits an in between space—the troubles of the recent past abandoned but the future as yet very much open. I have no doubt that similar affairs must be embarked on in lots of places—but my own interest in and commitment to Belfast (and my history here) made it a natural setting for me.

The setting of the second half of the novel takes place roughly thirty years in the future in New York, where we follow the life of Orr and Anna’s son, Sam. Even though this part is set in the 2040s, it has a certain out-of-time quality, with none of the typical signifiers to show us how the world has changed. What appealed to you about writing about the future in this almost timeless way?

This idea came during the process; I hadn’t intended to do this from the start. It’s partly an exploration of what theologians call teleology—the idea that history is moving in a direction, following a line. “The arc of the universe bends towards justice” said Martin Luther King Jr, which is a lovely sentiment but ultimately bullshit. There is no inevitability—one thing follows another, and then another, and then another. I think whatever meaning we want must be made by ourselves—created—rather than inherited. The playing with the future, without creating a ‘futuristic’ novel—is a small formal approach to reminding us that the question is a live one.

Anna is a Beckett scholar, and his words impact many of the characters throughout the novel. How has Beckett been influential to you as a writer?

It seems to me people tend to fall into one of three approaches to life and meaning: repressed (there is a meaning and I must find it—God, nationalism, whatever); tragic (there is no meaning and that’s fucking awful); or comic (there is no meaning—haha, let’s go make some). I learned a lot from Beckett about the last two, but especially the latter—the necessity of finding joy, or even just humour, in darkness. The novel feels to me less about finding meaning than making it, or perhaps finding that you need to make it.

One of the many intriguing aspects of the novel is discovering the identity of the narrator. Without giving anything away, can you talk about how you arrived at telling the story through this person’s point of view? What were you able to explore through a first person narrator that you couldn’t accomplish through an omniscient one?

I’m naturally sceptical of omniscient creators—I’m unfortunately too modern to not be—but I’m also sceptical of writers wanting to impress us with how they know this, constantly reminding us of it. So I needed to find a voice that was sufficiently limited, but also wide enough, compelling enough, truthful enough to tell the story convincingly. And of course, the narrator’s limitations, as the novel progresses, become more important, more revealing.

At the end of the book, one of the character’s comments on his inability to “step fully into [his] life,” which seems like a struggle many of the characters in the book face. What draws you to these characters who, for whatever reason, can’t get out of their own way?

That’s a great way of putting it. I’ve never met anyone who absolutely avoids getting in their own way—if there’s a definition of the human animal as opposed to other animals, it must be that we are the self wrecking creatures, but also the creatures who can laugh at this, explore this. And of course the two must be connected. I’m endlessly fascinated by our capacity to frustrate our own desire, and to hand over authority to people or ideas that will ultimately demean us. And that spatial metaphor—imagine ‘stepping into your own life’, implies a space which is at our disposal, which is available to us, but which we are somehow incapable of occupying. And both the space, and the ways we close it down—or permit or even force others to close it down—this is the relentless human drama.

And finally, what role has the library played in your life?

When I was a kid I would go to the library every week and stock up on books—often, in the early days, Tintin and Asterix comics, then the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew. The books have changed—for the most part—but the appetite for reading I developed then has never disappeared. Reading is still a vital, vibrant part of my everyday. I don’t know who I’d be without it.

The post Phil Harrison on Finding the Joy in the Darkness of his New Novel first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

The book starts with Mary Oliver’s poem, The Journey. Obviously you go through a huge journey of your own through the memoir, but why was it important for you to kick off your story with that poem?

That poem was so important to me in so many ways. I had long loved the poem and right as I was in the middle of finishing and selling my third novel, Visible City, the person who is now my editor, Lauren Wien, asked me to make some changes. We were going back and forth and I ended up telling her what was going on in my life, that I was perched at this place where it felt like I was about to jump off a cliff. I kept waiting to hear if she was going to make an offer on Visible City, and one day in my inbox, instead of an offer, I had this poem that she had sent me. I just felt like this is an editor who understood so fully the moment I was in and knew the right poem for it, who knew, yes, this describes it.

When you change your life there are no instruction manuals, no one who can show you a map, no one who can tell you how to do something. I felt like that poetry was a place where I could find some sense of guidance, that I could hold on to this poem as I was jumping and these words could catch me, that they could understand that you sometimes step off that ordered version of how it’s supposed to be.

One thing that was so moving in your memoir was when the other Orthodox women start using you as a resource to share experiences in their own marriage, and you talk about how you have to forge your own path, because the trail disappears behind you along the way.

I feel like we turn to each other to say, “How do you do this?” just to feel like someone else is doing it. I think naming it is very empowering and helps you realize you’re not the only one who feels a certain way. Even when you see other people make changes and do things, I think you have to do it on your own. There’s always the feeling whenever I’m about to do something
physically scary when I think, I just have to go. I think even when there are supportive people around you, there’s that moment of doing it by yourself.

One of the experiences I’ve had in starting to write about this is the number of people who have emailed me sharing their own story of leave-taking of one kind or another. There is that sense of commonality and connection when you leave, that you know you’ve set off on your own.

What has that experience of communicating with readers been like? In the book you talk about having to defend your writing about how you portray the Orthodox faith when your first books came out.

For me it was really like trial by fire. My first novel, The Ladies Auxiliary, was the first thing I had ever written and it was thrilling that it was going to be published. Months before the book came out I started hearing—mostly from my family, who were all in Memphis—that people had heard that I had written a book and that it was nice or it was not nice, it was good or bad. Those were the operating questions. It was very hard for me because I had always been raised to be sweet and good and please people and not to speak my mind and not speak too forcefully and not to speak too loudly. It was my first moment of realizing if you wanted to create freely or if you wanted to say what you think, there is reaction. I think it took me a long time to understand that that was one of the prices to pay for being a writer.

That has followed me. I think my second novel as well, there was that sense of “is she negative or positive?” Those were the words used to judge the writing, not “what is the book saying?” Of course it’s so much more complicated than that. I feel like fiction usually doesn’t want to operate in that grid—is it either nice or not nice? I felt like that grid was being applied to me as a writer in the orthodox world.

In writing this book about orthodoxy and my leaving it, I’m still aware of reaction. I’m doing my best not to be, mostly by not reading comments. (laughs) I do feel a sense of connection with lots of readers. The memoir began for me after an essay I wrote in The New York Times about my Orthodox divorce ceremony, the get ceremony. It was the first time I was publicly putting out there that I was no longer part of that world. And I had just hundreds of emails, overwhelmingly nice and supportive, mostly people just sharing their stories. People saying, I am from a world so far removed from yours but I feel the same way.

Recently a piece of the book ran as a “Modern Love” column in The New York Times and I had the same experience. I was flooded with emails from people across a religious spectrum. I got emails from people within the Orthodox communities who loved and understood the piece. I had an email from a Mormon man who told me he was getting divorced. He gave the essay to his parents because he thought it would help them understand the changes he was going through. I got a Facebook message from a woman in a Southern Baptist community who was getting divorced who felt like the responses to her shattered her faith because she was seen as someone breaking the rules.

Those moments remind me of why I am a writer. They remind me that when you put your story in the world, you make yourself vulnerable. In novels, at least there’s a place to hide. In memoirs, it’s just you out there on the page. I guess it creates the possibility of connecting with people who might live in a very different world than I do or in a very different tradition or in a very different place, but they find those connecting points in the story. It’s what moves me most as a writer right now.

So after writing novels your entire career, what was it like writing a memoir?

At first I couldn’t even say I was writing a memoir. I was like, I’m writing an essay that’s very very long. (laughs) I felt like I would break out in hives every time I said the word memoir. Even now I think of myself as a novelist. I love the freedom of writing fiction, the sense of creating a new world, the feeling that In your different characters you can think about so many different things and travel different places.

With fiction, the hard part was always, “What happened? Who are these people? What did they do?” With memoir, it was a different question. I knew what happened. I knew the people. I knew my protagonist all too well. (laughs) But I didn’t know what was at the heart of this story. I had to turn that lens I was used to turning on characters onto myself. It got emotionally harder to be willing to go there and find myself.

I also learned a lot from reading. I decided before I started writing that I was going to read memoir. And so I spent the first year working on the book just constantly reading memoir and taking notes and always asking myself the question, “What can I learn from this book?”

I learned a tremendous amount about structure and craft. Being so immersed in reading memoir, I felt a sense of kinship with the writer. I felt like all these books were chronicling some sort of change or transformation. It made me feel less alone. It made me feel like there are so many people who go through these questions or journeys or changes or struggles. I felt very attached to what I was reading.

And what were those books that you were reading?

I loved Rachel Cusk’s memoir Aftermath. I love Rachel Cusk in general, she writes like no one else. I love Annie Shapiro’s Devotion, which is gentle, wise, and has this expansiveness of spirit. I read a lot of memoirs about leaving religious worlds. I love a book called All Who Go Do Not Return by Shulem Deen, an ultra-Orthodox Jewish writer. Carlene Bauer wrote a memoir called Not That Kind of Girl about leaving an evangelical Christian community. I love Karen Armstrong, who wrote two memoirs about leaving a convent. I loved Drinking: A Love Story, Glass Castle, and Wild. I love Lou Areneck’s memoir, Cabin, about building a cabin in the woods with his brother. Also Howard Axelrod’s The Point of Vanishing about spending a year secluded in a country in a cabin. I would just read from one memoir to the next. Now I’m slowly returning to fiction. I feel like I haven’t read a novel in so long. I’ve missed a lot. (laughs)

The book reads like a novel, where we bounce around in time and there’s a lot of suspense in terms of how things will turn out. What was it like approaching your life through a novelist’s eyes?

At one point I realized the same things I knew as a novelist I needed to make use of in my memoir. I didn’t want it to feel episodic. In novel writing, the part that really engages me the most is the question of structure. How do we build this novel? I draw these pictures for myself of arcs all over the place—it feels like I’m building a building. In a memoir I’m saying the same thing, I’m building a story.

Another thing I’d ask is, “What is the best way to tell this story in a novel?” I’d ask that question in a memoir also. So I knew I couldn’t tell it chronologically, it didn’t feel interesting enough. But the timeline was the piece that drove me crazy. I had the present, the far past, and the near past. I’d write scenes on notecards and spread them across the living room floor and tell my kids, “Don’t you dare walk in this room right now.” I’d have the cards all laid out to have the central arc, plus the flashback arc cutting into the central arc. That part was definitely the most challenging technically. It was the part that would keep me up at night. I felt like I was a builder. How am I going to splice this board into this other board and craft it together?

Throughout the book, you reference different authors—like Emily Dickinson, Sharon Olds, and Cynthia Ozick—in relationship to certain periods you were going through. How has literature helped you understand your life?

For me being a reader has always been central. Growing up we were a family of readers. We were one of those families where everyone would drift away from the dinner table because everyone was reading. Reading books was a way for me to leave the small world I lived in. I always felt there were two realities at once—the place I was and the place my mind could go. I think because I so often felt constricted where I was that the ability to travel in my mind was all-encompassing.

I think the other way fiction was really important to me was that I felt like I grew up in a world where things might be thought but weren’t said. There was always this feeling that there was an under layer. There was always this sense that you were being taught one thing and there was this attempt to package a kind of contentment—no questions here, we were all happy, and we all believed. But every once in a while you could catch sight of the fact there was some kind of underworld. For me one of the pleasures of reading is you get access to that inner world. In reading and novels, there’s of course course people leading more complicated lives than on the surface. Reading novels was the first place I had confirmation that yes, the world is much more complicated and people are much more complex and messy than these outer presentations.

What role has the library played in your life?

Books were always crucial as a child. We would always go to the library in Memphis. I live in Newton now, and the library here feels like a respite. I spend a lot of time writing at the library. It’s just a place to go to when I’m not quite sure what to do with myself or I need a quiet place or I need to get out.

My nine-year-old daughter is a very avid reader. The idea that we can go to the library and she can get all the books she wants is this amazing concept that this world is here for you, just take it. I always have that sense of something waiting to be discovered. The library in Newton is one of those few places where if you get there five minutes to nine, there’s a line of people at the door waiting to get inside. It’s just a given, it’s like the grocery store and the library. It’s one of those main things that’s always at the center of our lives.

The post You Have To Do It On Your Own: An Interview with Tova Mirvis first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

On Saturday October 14, 2017, he appeared at Anderson’s Bookshop in Naperville, Illinois to discuss his new book and sign copies. The conversation was led by Baker’s colleague Giuliana Rancic, E! red carpet host.

Baker signing copies of his book. Photo Courtesy of Raymond Garcia

Around a dozen people attended the event which made the event intimate and allowed for deep discussion with the audience. Earlier in the week PL Online caught up with Baker to talk about his journey and his career in Hollywood. Baker spoke to Raymond Garcia via phone on October 12^th, 2017.

In the book, you explore various religious and spiritual practices including psychics, mediums, a class from the Church of Scientology. Was it hard to be open to trying all these new things?

I think being a journalist kind of gives you license and almost an excuse to try things that you otherwise might be too afraid to do. I went into journalism to have an adventure. I wanted to learn about life and other people and just have curiosity and use the world as this opportunity to learn and grow. Journalism has always been a great adventure so I think this (book) is the most significant, most important adventure and quest that I have ever gone on in my journalism career.

For me, I had just reached a point where being closed off to different practices or things that I might be uncomfortable to try, wasn’t really working for me. I was feeling spiritually malnourished.  I wanted to nourish myself in a way and that meant dropping my fears and dropping my ego and just diving in and giving things a shot with an open mind and an open heart, and that’s when beautiful transformative things happen. Beautiful transformative change doesn’t happen in your life by being afraid to go outside of your comfort zone it happens when you push yourself and go out on to the edge and you challenge yourself and your assumptions and your fears and your preconceived notions of what a religion is, that’s when you can really change and evolve.

What were the challenging parts about writing this book and going on this journey?

First of all when you are doing autobiographical writing, particularly in today’s day and age, you have to be willing to be really honest. You have to be willing to as I say, “Crack open your head and let everyone see the crazy inside.” Like My first memoir “Man Made” the first draft was a disaster, it was superficial and my editor would keep writing in the margins, “Go deeper, go deeper,” and I needed someone to give me license to say, “Yeah go to that uncomfortable place,” so I really learned that was important.

In any good story you need to show conflict because conflict is what drives narrative, it defines character. From a literary perspective, I had to really reveal the personal conflict inside of me and I think that’s always a challenge and I’m lucky that I’m in a place in my life and my career where I’m not too concerned with what people think about me.  I just want to tell an honest story and a real one. I think that comes with difficulty and I think that’s the biggest challenge when writing a book like this.

Has working in Hollywood help you become more open, especially in today’s day and age where many stars are more raw and open than ever before?

I think that Oprah in the late 80s really started to push and promote and encourage what we are seeing now, which is the confessional media culture where people go on and confess deep things about themselves and share. We see it in reality shows, we’re seeing it in literature, and we’re seeing it in celebrity journalism. So I blame Oprah for that matter. If you don’t like it you can blame her if you like it you can credit her.

My thing is I don’t want to be a hypocrite, I don’t want to sit here and say, “Oh celebrities are so fake, they just want you to know certain things about them and they are so manipulative.” If I’m going to be that person I have to walk the talk and I want to be accessible and relatable and real to my own audience and I think it’s important to be that way. I think it’s important to be like that in life, to be like that in your personal life and in your professional life. Be real always. I signed a book recently to a reader and I just wrote, “Be real always.” And I had never written that but I really think it summed up one of the things I learned from this book which is be real to yourself, to your spirit, to others, just try to be as real as possible. I think being authentic is important. We certainly live in a celebrity pop culture where “authenticity” is really the buzzword so if you’re trying to sell a product it’s got to be authentic and organic. We’re in the middle of that, and I think overall it’s a good thing as long as its done constructively with a purpose. As a writer and journalist, I also aspire to be authentic and not only is it personally healthy, its commercially where the audience is right now.

Toward the end of the book, you were reflecting about whether you can continue your work while being “loving, peaceful, and mindfully aware.” How has the journey changed the way you work as a reporter in Hollywood?

I think the sum total of all my experiences of having highs and lows, traumas and triumphs, of writing a confessional, contributes to my perspective and the perspective that I have is that I have more sensitivity. Even a guy like Harvey Weinstein, who I think pretty much everyone can agree was exhibiting monstrous behavior, I have learned, that even for someone like that, to have compassion and I think that’s something really important. It’s hard to articulate, because what I find is if I start exhibiting compassion for someone like that in what I do, I notice that the mass audiences will be like, “Oh he deserves nothing.” There’s so much vitriol. If we react to a monster in a monstrous way are we better? Or are we just on their level? Are we just exhibiting a similar pattern which is not being compassionate or loving toward people? As you read the book you’ll see that I become very attached to Buddhist principles. The number one thing is to act non-violently toward yourself and toward others. I think its hard in what I do because I have to take a position and have an opinion and a voice, I can’t be all wishy-washy because that’s not what the audience is looking for from me. So can I do that in a way that is nonviolent? It’s hard, it’s a minefield.

The context and the format of where I am expressing  myself is a very heightened, opinionated one so it’s difficult, it’s a challenging place to be. You know should I just run away to my cabin and just close off from society, and just be nonviolent with nature? Yeah I can do that, I can live the monk life there’s something to be said for that. I think what I’d rather do is engage with the culture and with people and with issues and that’s my calling I think is to share, I think that’s my dharma. That’s my purpose, it’s not everyone’s. In society, I think we all have to do our best.

After the self-reflection at the Lake Shrine Temple did you feel your journey was complete or do you feel like you’re still on it?

When I agreed to work on this project with Convergent Books, they really put me at ease and my editor said, “Don’t worry about having to come to some grand conclusion and reach the destination of your spiritual journey, just bring us along for the ride and tell us where you’re at right now, and if it ends with you becoming an atheist then fine follow your heart. If it ends with you smoking peyote on a mountain top with some celebrity, great. But just give us where you’re at at that moment.”

This book is really a snapshot of where I was at that time working on it and I’ve evolved and continue to work on myself. I was just meditating on the way in on the train, everyday poses different challenges but I think that that conversation that I am having with myself with God, whatever you want to call it, is meant to be vague because I think it’s all one in the same. I feel as though that conversation by the lake is really a cumulation of me turning over a lot of stones, kicking up a lot of dust, and it was all starting to settle. I was trying to figure out how to organize everything and that came from working on it and addressing it, and mediating, and contemplating, there was a real contemplative moment that I shared. I think that what I am dealing with, is what a lot of people deal with which is doubt. The Ken Commandments is a book about spiritual doubt. How can I believe this when I kind of believe that too? And I think that what I have come away with is more of a unifying theory, almost polytheistic. I am really reluctant to put a label on it because it is something that is ever-changing and evolving.  I think I have a lot more sensitivity and appreciation for all religions and spiritual practices. I’m not saying they are all great or for me.  Yoga, mediation, Islamic prayer, Christianity, bible study, whatever it is we are trying to communicate with that spirit that unifies and connects us all and that’s what I’m learning. I’m trying to tap into it, in between talking about Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga, Britney Spears, and Kim Kardashian. It’s a juggle, it’s a dance, it’s a challenge but its life and I’m super grateful for every bit of it.

The trip you took with your son to Iowa was a beautiful moment in the book. You visited the baseball field in “Field of Dreams.”

Yeah that was a really beautiful thing, it wasn’t really planned. It was a father/son bonding trip and we happened to watch “Field of Dreams” together and I was like “It’s really close, let’s go.” We had this really magical moment and the fact that I could share with my kids this journey, I just want my kids to look and say, “Dad is just real.” There’s a lot that they take away from seeing me because at some point they’re going to have spiritual questions and things are going to come up and I want them to have a good role model, someone who is open and seeking. I think we should all be seekers, on some level. I think when we stop seeking, we stop learning, when we stop learning, we stop growing, and when we stop growing, we really stop living.

After that trip you seemed much more at peace compared to the plane ride at the beginning of the book where you were anxious and having a panic attack. It came full circle.

I hope that people who read the book, realize that no matter where you are right now, you might feel spiritually bankrupt, you might feel psychologically and emotionally traumatized, you might have confusion; when you really put your heart out there in an open and honest way and start to engage in self-care on a spiritual level, you are capable of great things and great healing can take place. This book is a healing journey really, it’s like healing myself through exploration, spiritual exploration. The healing continues and I think we’re all trying to heal and we want to heal.

One of the big things that I learned is that I’m prone, maybe like a lot of people, to becoming overly attached and attempting to be controlling of things that are uncontrollable and it creates anxiety. And ultimately that’s death, we can’t control it, its happening. Coming to peace with your mortality and your death, I think for me is the key to really celebrating and enjoying life itself. I don’t see it as a morbid pursuit, I think when we deny it is happening and kind of run away from it. I think a lot of drugs, addictions, and other behaviors come up because we’re trying to escape the inevitable fleeting nature of our physical lives.

I feel as though I needed to get to a place where I had to treat my spirit. Why do I have so much anxiety? Why am I feeling depressed? I’m so uncomfortable with each passing moment. I’m feeling panicky because I can’t catch up to it. We all feel that way, we over-burden ourselves, fill our to-do lists. We are always in a rush to get from one place to another instead of just being present right now and enjoying the beauty. Its so hard to do but when you can capture it, and get into practice of it, it’s actually easy. I’m the number one guy who will be the ultimate hypocrite sometimes like, “Oh man I didn’t mediate yesterday damn, I didn’t have time.” I know my day would have gone a lot better if I just took the time to be present mindful, reflective, and reconnect with myself. I would love to see more people be that way and I think we’d all be better off.

One thing that has transformed me about my job is that I now will look at stories I am covering from a spiritual perspective. I look at the Harvey Weinstein thing from a spiritual perspective and think, wherever you see depravity, diabolical, and/or predatorial behavior, you’re typically going to see some one who is spiritually bereft, you’re going to see a void in a person — where they don’t realize how interconnected we all are and that harming others is harming ourselves, harming the planet is harming ourselves. And when we do connect we all become more peaceful, nonviolent toward ourselves and others and I see a lot of that in the world.

I feel as though a lot of the stereotypes of Hollywood are there because they’re true, of superficiality, narcissism, exploitation, and a lot of the ugly side that we see but one thing that is really heartening to me is that in my book, in writing this book and researching it, there’s a lot of people out there trying to change that and trying to change it on an individual level. I’m seeing it happen and if my book gives light to that then I think that’s a great thing because sometimes you can come into to work at E! and you’re talking about celebrities and it can sometimes seem really dark because you’re dealing with the dark side a lot.

What’s been the reaction to the book?

I had so many people say, “Oh my God this is like me! I feel the same way, I just want to understand my spiritual self and I feel like I don’t know enough — I need to explore more.” So I hope I can be inspiring in that way to other people.  The best way to inspire others is to pursue things in a pure way and I think people ultimately want to be good and they want to be better people and I think that it takes the individual to make that choice. The celebrity reaction has been really positive.

I believe we’re in a time where people want their beliefs reinforced. My book is counterintuitive. When you think of spirituality you don’t think Hollywood. It’s important to challenge people’s assumptions and provide an alternative view because there’s a narrative out there that Hollywood is void of spirituality and while I found that there is some of that, a lot of it isn’t — let me show you what I found.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

The post Be Real Always: A Conversation with Ken Baker first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

The post Authors Bounce Back first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

The stories in Big Lonesome all concern the West in some aspect, and I wanted to start off by asking what drew you to write about that area of the country?

I went to grad school at New Mexico Statue University, which is in Las Cruces, way at the bottom of the state. I was there for three years and then I moved to Pennsylvania to be with the woman who’s now my wife. I really missed the Southwest when I left and it started showing up in my work. I felt this urgency to get my experiences that I’d had in the Southwest on the page and figure out what they meant to me by doing that.

But my interest in the West started before that. I grew up with my mom always playing these Golden Era Western serials with Roy Rogers and Gene Autry. When I got a little older, I started watching the more strange, genre-bending Westerns of the 60s and 70s—the Spaghetti westerns and the Sam Peckinpah films that were just as much about the Viet Nam War as they were about the West. Everything’s really sweaty and violent and strange. I fell in love with that.

And in some other sense, it’s all connected to my love of mythology. Myth was my first love. It’s what I always go back to reading when I need to recharge myself. So when I left the West, all of those things began to converge—my sense of the mythological west, my desire to somehow on the page approach American mythologies. And all these cowboys started showing up in my stories. It took me a couple of years before I realized I was trying to write a collection that was about that.

What is it about reading mythology that recharges you?

I think what I love most about mythology is how it’s a narrative that’s in the shape of a story but it moves like a poem. The myths that I love to read, the sentences are simultaneously incredibly assertive and concrete but also very mysterious and abstract. There’s this confidence in myth that’s so magnetic to me, confidence in this mysterious world. As a kid I read tons of Greek mythology, where I think a lot of people start. More recently I’ve read African mythology, Native American Mythology, Norse mythology, and then just about anything else that comes my way.

You’ve talked in the past how this collection of short stories is akin to a concept album. Can you talk about what you meant by that?

This is something that I heard from Keven McIlvoy, who I studied with at New Mexico State University, and it’s just stuck with me ever since. I feel that there’s this continuum of story collections, where on one side there’s the concept album and on the other side there’s the greatest hits collection. The greatest hits collection is where the writer puts the best stories they’ve written at that time in their life in the collection. And there are going to be thematic resonances and through the revision process the writer will try to bring those up. But on the concept album side, generally it’s something that you have in mind earlier on. That you’re consciously trying to write stories that belong together and resisting each other, that have resonance and dissonance. I love both kinds of story collections, but my very favorite story collections to read are on the concept album side. So that’s what I found myself trying to write.

Your book is divided into three sections: Old West, New West, and Post West. Were those categories you discovered when you finished writing the stories or did you ever find yourself writing to fulfill a specific category?

When I first started writing the collection I was just trying to cover as many aspects of the myths of the West as I could—the way that the West exists in our imagination because of cinema, the myth of the cowboy hero, this masculine myth. So I wanted to write about that in that mythological zone. So the stories that take place in The Old West are exploring the West in that mythological zone, stories like “Five Episodes of White Hat Black Hat” and “Cowboy Goodstuff’s Four True Loves.” So I wanted to explore that myth in that mode, in that zone.

I also wanted to explore how that myth lingers today and how it affects us today. So I feel that there’s a connection between “Horseman Cowboy,” which is very much about that dangerous masculinity, and a story like “Dead Dogs,” which takes place in Rogers Park, Chicago, and there’s a character who’s in some ways choked by his conception of what masculinity is supposed to be. So I kept trying to approach the West in all these different ways.

When I finished a draft, I was working with my editors. We tried to organize the book. They had some really good suggestions about story order. I changed it a lot of times, then those categories became clear to me afterwards. So I guess I was trying to do it as many ways as I could early on, and then I sorted out the mess with the help of my editors later.

Since you were introduced to the West through cinema, what was it like seeing the actual west in grad school?

I still miss it, man. It was really wonderful. I had these huge feelings in this big space. It was somehow way more than what it is in cinema. It just covers so much more. I think when I went there the myths of cinema were busted by the experience of actually being there. It’s like people who move to Chicago thinking Chicago’s going to be one way and then they realize that the city’s a much huger thing than its myth and encompasses so many different kinds of lives.

And then also I just lived in one tiny town in New Mexico, which is one slice of what is considered the West. Although I did live in Houston for one year. And even that’s totally different. Houston is basically Florida. Humid. There was a banana tree in the courtyard of the apartment complex where I lived. So you’d see the banana trees of the Wild West (laughs).

Knowing your background as a professor and as someone who’s lived in the area, it’s tempting to think that you’re writing about actual life experiences. Did you base your stories on things that actually happened in your life?

I would say about half of the stories in the book are in some way based on some experience that I had. But I’m a very big proponent of fictionalizing away from a place that you know, so beginning with some impulse or something that you’ve seen and then just going way way away from that. It’s strange but I’m able to write about the initial experience more truly by fictionalizing myself away from it.

The stories have a very lyrical quality and I was wondering what influence music has on your writing?

I’ve always loved music, but I don’t listen to it when I write because I fall into the song instead of what I’m doing. But it’s had a secondary influence. I recently wrote a piece for Largehearted Boy where I made a playlist for my book. I included artists who I think have an overlap in aesthetic sensibilities. And some of those people have influenced me—Modest Mouth, Neko Case, Tom Waites, Caliphone, Andrew Bird—writers who are either writing about the West or they’re writing about loneliness.

And finally, what role has the public library played in your life?

An enormous one. I grew up in Western Springs with the Thomas Ford Memorial Library. I was always there as a kid, checking books out. In junior high I worked there as a page and led things in the kid’s program. Just the way that a public library creates a space that makes it okay to love books—it’s this doorway to wonder. You know that you can go in there and read books and talk to book people and everything will be okay.

The post Joe Scapellato On Fictionalizing Away From A Place That You Know first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

The book is told in a series of overlapping chapters, where Andrea will often revisit an event she has already described to the reader and share new information that casts it in a different light or reinforces its impact on her. Did you write this book linearly or did the structure of the book come when you were assembling the disparate pieces?

I didn’t write it in a linear fashion at first. I came up with this list of topics that I wanted to talk about, and stories started forming around them. Initially I was just letting myself write them all as short stories and then altering them as it became more of a novel, and I could see how there was a bigger picture to it. And they were never really in a linear order. I think that’s because when we think about the most important things in our lives, they wouldn’t necessarily be in a chronological order. So it felt kind of true to the way life works to do them that way.

The book takes place in 2016. What was it like writing a character who existed in the exact same moment you were living in?

To me, it felt very invigorating. Even though she’s not necessarily responding to real life news stories, there’s just a lot of themes that people were talking about—in particular during the election—that have made their way into the book. Even if it’s not an entire plotline, there’s just little mentions here and there. There’s conversations about race and there’s conversations about economic inequalities and there’s conversations about rape culture that filter their way in. And I was just really responding to the world around me in a very natural way. These things felt urgent, and I felt glad that I was able to write and turn things around quickly enough that people would be able to read it. I finished it last summer, so it’s a pretty quick turnaround time.

Since your last book Saint Mazie took place in the 1920s. Was there something refreshing about being unburdened by historical research?

I certainly had to do some research for the book, but not a lot. The research that I had to do for Mazie at the very beginning was just so I could know what every room that she’s in looks like, and what the streets looked like, and things like that. So there was an extra layer and then fact-checking it at the end to make sure I got it right as well. Whereas with this I really knew the landscape, and even some of the stuff that happens earlier in her life, because there are some stories that are set in the past obviously. I didn’t feel like I was inventing too much. I didn’t feel like I had to go and watch two hours of YouTube videos.

A lot of the book is Andrea’s struggle with her relationship with her art, and how her artistic pursuits fit into her life. As someone who has written so prolifically throughout her career, what was it like writing about an artist who seems so creatively stuck?

I have a friend who read this book who said, “It’s sort of like your worst nightmare (laughs).” I just was trying to figure out what would make her happy or unhappy. I don’t know, because I’ve never not been able to not make things. Even when I wasn’t actively pursuing a career as a writer, I was still making zines and everything came out of me in a really organic fashion. And it was always the thing that saved me.

But I’ve worked in environments with people where I was the freelancer, and that was the thing I was doing on the side and the writing was really what I was doing for a living. And I’ve met people who’ve been like, “You’re a real writer,” even though we were doing the same thing—we were freelance copywriting or something like that. And they had at some point turned that [artistic] part of themselves off for very adult reasons—like they got married or they had kids or they had a mortgage, those really traditional grownup reasons, which are discussed in the book. I think it was a way of me understanding how you could stop being that person. I couldn’t do it. There’ve been moments when I’ve been like, “I should really try to get some more financial security,” but I really like doing this a lot

Andrea has a very distinctive voice, she can be simultaneously breezy while also being very frank. Since you’ve published so many essays about your own life, I was wondering if your experience writing personal essays had any effect on developing Andrea’s voice?

Well, it was meant to be memoir-istic. I read a lot of memoirs when I was writing the book.

Do you remember which ones?

When I began the book I was reading M Train, the Patti Smith book, and I’m also a really big fan of Just Kids.

And Patti Smith makes an appearance in the book, where Andrea goes to see her on New Year’s Day at St. Mark’s Church.

That’s such a New York thing. I’ve never done that, but it’s always the thing that people are doing on New Years Day. I’m always too lazy to go, but it always seems like the thing that cool people do. I’m going to make it one of these days.

I also read Eileen Myles’ Chelsea Girls. At the very beginning of the book I was reading Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts and I was like, “I don’t want to read this right now, not when I’m writing a book about someone who doesn’t want to have babies.” But then at the end I picked it up again. I saw it in a different way, and it all came together for me. So all of those memoirs, they all have their charms and they all read very differently. I took a little bit from each one of them.

As for writing essays, I don’t write a lot of essays anymore. I have in the past and I’ve basically run out of things to say about myself. I’ve kind of mined everything. There’s not much left, or maybe not much left that I’m willing to talk about. But Andrea’s very open. I think it would be the only way this book would work. I couldn’t write this book with a closed-off character—what would be the point of that?

Reading the book, it’s such a gutpunch when she drops pieces of information that make you re-evaluate what you thought you knew about her.

The other thing I was trying to think about was the way people read now, the way people consume information. It’s different now, just because there’s more information, there’s more things to read, and people are basically just scanning now. So I thought, I better just tell that story right up front.

Andrea’s very forthright about how she doesn’t want to have babies and is ambivalent about being in a monogamous relationship. What was it like to write a character who was so at ease with living with herself?

I mean, she’s totally neurotic, too, though (laughs). She’s very troubled in her own way. There’s lots about her life that she feels uncomfortable about, but those are the things that she knows from the get-go are not appealing to her and basically haven’t ever been appealing to her. So I wanted to see what that character looked like.

She’s not a role model necessarily as a human being, but that part of her is sort of a model. I wanted to see that character exist, to see somebody who was, as you say, “at ease.” I just felt like I never see that. I always see people—not necessarily even in real life but certainly in movies and television and books—the female characters can be as gutsy and independent as they want but people are always trying to slide them a romantic happy ending. I thought, “Well what if that wasn’t even on the table? What does that look like?” That felt important to me.

Even all the guys that she’s interacting with, it’s not like there’s one you’re rooting for.

No, but I like them all, in their own way. But there’s not one for her, no.

And finally, what role did the public library play in your life?

I went to Indian Trails Library when I was growing up and my mom used to take me there and I loved it. I would stay there for hours and hours and it was really important to me. I could just lose entire afternoons at my public library. I read really really fast, as most writers do when they’re children, and just consumed everything and I was glad to have what seemed like an unending supply of books at the library. I’ve had the opportunity to read at Indian Trails several times. But its always wonderful to go and read in my home town go and spend some time there. It’s a wonderful library.

The post Jami Attenberg On Writing Her Worst Nightmare In “All Grown Up” first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

Public Libraries Online: Throughout the book, Pen seeks to define herself on her own terms, and consistently runs up against problems with how other people perceive her. What were the challenges of tackling such a profound issue while still staying true to the book’s very funny tone?

M-E Girard: I find that the act of witnessing someone else’s hardships and pain through hearing their story will sometimes give the outsider this sense of devastation that’s exaggerated. Someone might read Pen’s story and think, This poor thing—this is awful—how can life be this way for a teenager? It’s so unfair! Like, yeah, it’s pretty unfair and awful what Pen has to deal with—and the point of the story is to make the reader aware of it—but to her, it’s just life. She knows it sucks, and she’s tired of it, but she’s been doing her thing despite it all. She’s resilient, and she’s adapted, so there was no question that throughout all the handling of unique difficulties, she was just going to be some regular kid with her own qualities, flaws, and interests. So I never had any conscious thought about balancing the heavy issues and the funny, lighthearted moments because I just felt like I was writing Pen’s life, the way she experiences it, and Pen is naïve, and funny, and a bit insensitive, and playful—so that stuff was just going to be there in the words.

PLO: Pen and her girlfriend Blake are gamers and both use video games as a means of self-expression. How did you decide to make gaming such a significant component of the novel?

MG: My girlfriend and I are pretty big gamers, so I was definitely going to pull on my knowledge and experience of gaming for something! But besides that, gaming fit so well for this story and for Pen’s characterization—she’s just a little geek-culture dude in general. Gaming—well, a lot of geek culture stuff, really—is something we’ve traditionally seen as belonging to boys, so that was a great way to strengthen the gender norms theme of the story—and also a great way to put more gamer girls out there in the world! Gaming figures in almost all the relationships Pen has: the idea of the different gaming styles between Pen and Blake (how they mirror their ways of handling life in general), the way her brother has her back in co-op mode, the competitive nature of gaming with Colby—there’s so much. It’s like, once I opened the door to gaming, it was everywhere.

PLO: Pen struggles with the concepts of respect and loyalty throughout the novel, especially with her male friends and her Portuguese family. How did these concepts come into play during the creation of the story?

MG: These things came out through revision. At first, I was just concerned with telling this story about how difficult these boxes and rules are to deal with when you don’t quite fit and others are expecting you to bend and conform. Then, as I revised, more specific things—things that were really particular to this character—came out. It’s kind of the same way I handled gaming. Once I sat back and examined what I had, I was able to pick out the important seeds that had been planted into the story without my full awareness. Then I could really water the crap out of them and watch them spread across the whole narrative. So respect and loyalty became much more important during revision, when they suddenly guided the way scenes played out. Revision is so where it’s at, in terms of writing!

PLO: On your blog, you write about the many rounds of revisions that Girl Mans Up underwent before its publication. What was helpful to you about such an extensive revision process?

MG: Speaking of revision! The first couple drafts were me getting to know the characters, trying to say certain things but not executing it very well. I’m a new writer, and I did a lot of learning with Girl Mans Up. Like I talked about in the previous question, revision allowed me to find the little things I had inserted in there, bring them out, and thread them through the narrative. I’m hoping I’ve done enough learning so that the next book won’t require quite so many rounds—ha!

PLO: Besides writing novels, you also work as a pediatric nurse. Has your medical career had any influence on your writing career or writing style?

MG: When I turned 27, I had this moment when I was like, Wait—am I going to do nothing but be a nurse for the rest of my life? I’m grateful to have the nursing career I have, but I’ve always had a creative side, and I’d never really done anything with it. The nature of my job—one-on-one night-shift community care—meant that I had some time at work to read or write (depending on how stable my clients were), so that was one of the reasons I decided to try getting serious about writing. The company I work for is also very supportive of my writing endeavors, and they’ve been incredibly accommodating with my schedule which allowed me to attend writing events, retreats, and, more recently, plan a variety of book tour events. So in that way, my medical career has completely influenced my writing career by making it possible!

PLO: You’ve twice participated in the Lambda Literary’s Writer’s Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices. What have those experiences been like for you?

MG: I don’t think Girl Mans Up would be what it is—and where it is—today without the Lambda retreat. I applied seeking exactly what the retreat was established for: to fill a void in the development of LGBTQ writers. Until Lambda 2013, I’d had trouble getting specific feedback and critique of my work because I didn’t know any queer writers who could critique what I was doing. I had a narrow view of the world, and of queerness—I mean, I had no awareness of privilege and oppression! I also met Malinda Lo at the 2013 retreat (she was my workshop facilitator) and having her input was such an amazing opportunity. The retreat delivered on what it offered: having my manuscript workshopped, attending presentations, meeting other queer writers. But it paid off long after the week was over. It sent me home with awareness, and words and concepts to research. I did so much learning the six months after returning from the retreat, and I ended up revising Girl Mans Up into the version that hooked my editor. There was so much to gain from attending the retreat, and I am so glad I took a chance and applied.

The post M-E Girard On Gaming, Rewriting, And Creating Her Multifaceted Main Character first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

Public Libraries Online: You’ve talked about how you wanted The Wangs Vs the World to be “an immigrant novel that’s a rebellion against the traditional idea of the immigrant novel.” Can you talk about what you meant by that?

Jade Chang: When you are growing up in America reading different kinds of books, whenever there are stories that are by or about immigrants or people of color it’s usually one sort of story—a story of pain in some way. It’s either a “How can we fit in? We’re outsiders in this country. We must assimilate,” or it’s the far larger pain of slavery or being a refugee.

Obviously I’ve read and loved many of these books but I also think that there are so many different ways to be an immigrant and a person of color in America. We’re really only getting one of these ways when we read these stories. One of the main things is I wanted to write a story that centered this voice and this experience.

PLO: I want to talk about the kids, who are all are driven by their creative pursuits. Saina is an acclaimed conceptual artist, who, when we meet her, is recovering from a pretty savage reception to her last piece. Can you talk about how you came up with her different pieces?

JC: In a lot of ways this book was a sort of wish fulfillment for me in that I got to explore all of these different worlds that I’m really interested in. There’s definitely a part of me that would have enjoyed being a conceptual artist. In terms of how I came up with those different pieces, I really was just trying to think of work that would be actually compelling and also interesting to describe.

In putting this book together I was very interested in different systems of valuation and how we ascribe value to things, and that was partly why I was interested in writing about finance and art side by side. We think of finance as being this very objective system, but in fact it’s quite subjective. The value of commodities—the value of money—change based on perceptions all the time. A company’s stock prices rise and fall based on perception, the perception of how well a company is doing, which isn’t always weighted in truth.

In the art world the value of a piece also changes depending on the stories that the artists tell about themselves or the stories that the marketplace tell about the artist. On one level I was interested in art that dealt with that. In the case of the first artwork that we hear described, where Saina goes to Art Basel Miami and makes a pretty spectacular and controversial decision, I was trying to think of what the best worst thing for the artist to do.

PLO: I imagine it’s hard with any of their artistic pursuits to make them believable and still maintain the book’s comedic tone.

JC: There’s so much in the book that’s really over the top, and yet I also wanted it to be grounded to have that basis of believability.

PLO: Andrew wants to be a stand-up comedian, and we see his act develop over the novel. What went into creating his act?

JC: That was definitely the thing I had the most fun researching. I watched so much stand-up comedy. I watched about every stand-up special on Netflix, I watched tons of stand-up on YouTube, and I also went to a lot of shows. I went through a period where I was going to comedy shows by myself because I would make a last minute decision to go. It’s always fascinating being in an audience by yourself where someone’s trying to make you laugh because in a way laughter is so communal. Like when you go to a show you laugh because your friend laughs, you’re laughing together. So I got to think about what moves an audience by going to these shows on my own. I also took some improv classes which was really fun.

There’s a part of me that has always wanted to be a stand-up comic, who has always thought that It would be such a brilliant thing to do. But I don’t think I have enough of a desire to bare my soul, so it was easier to write a character baring his soul instead.

PLO: Grace is a fashion blogger and has an acutely developed aesthetic. What went into creating her sense of style?

JC: That’s just a lot of personal interest. I love clothes. I’m very interested in fashion in general. I didn’t really go that much into it in the book but the world of style bloggers is a really interesting one. There are people who have made really amazing careers out of it. I wanted Grace to be excited about something that she could reasonably do as a high school senior and also something that would feel like a new world to her father.

PLO: In the book, the Wangs make their way from Los Angeles to upstate New York. It seems that the route you have them take is very specific. Did you want to see these characters in certain parts of the country?

JC: I think there are cities that just feel distinctly themselves. New Orleans is a city that is an entity unto itself. It’s almost hard to tell what country it’s in, but because of that it’s such a distinctly American city. I knew that I wanted them to go there and that necessitates a Southern route. My sister went to grad school in Alabama and I wanted to see the Wang family in the South.

PLO: The town in Alabama that they visit doesn’t seem to be an aspect of the South that is portrayed in pop culture, where it’s almost this hipster enclave.

JC: That’s definitely happening all over the South. I remember when I went to that town, Opelika, I was like, “I did not know that this was happening here, I did not know there were towns like this.” As soon as I went there, I knew that I wanted to set something there.

PLO: At certain points in the novel we get the story narrated from the point of view of the car, which was such a fun aspect of the book. Why was it important for you to let the car tell her side of the story?

JC: I like when there’s something a little unexpected. When you’re on a road trip the car is your friend, and you become so intimately connected to the car. It’s such an integral part of any road trip that It only seemed fair to give the car a voice too.

PLO: I heard you speak on Pop Rocket about your writing process, and how you would have writing sessions with Margaret Wappler, who was working on her novel at the same time. How did that set-up work for you?

JC: It was so helpful. It just takes a long time to write a book—it doesn’t take everyone a long time but it takes me a long time—so it’s really helpful to have a compatriot who you’re in that battle with. Neither of us wanted to trade our writing back and forth—we talked a lot about the ideas in the book but we didn’t read each other’s manuscripts until they were fairly close to completion. We definitely worked in similar ways which I think is also really helpful.

I don’t know if this is true of Margaret but it is true of me, but I developed an almost Pavlovian response to her. When I was sitting across from her I would want to write things. Obviously not if we were just hanging out, but if we were somewhere with our laptops sitting across from one another, it just immediately took me to a place where I was like, “I’m going to work on this chapter now.”

This interview has been edited and condensed.

The post Jade Chang On “The Wangs Vs. The World” first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

Public Libraries Online: How did you first get inspired to write about the relationship between this Wall Street executive and his chauffeur?

Imbolo Mbue: At the end of 2009, I was working for a media company and I lost my job. I had been unemployed for about a year and a half when I went for a walk one day. I was in front of the Time Warner building in mid-town Manhattan and I noticed the chauffeurs waiting next to black cars. And I also noticed the executives. They come out of the building wearing suits, they get into the cars, and the chauffeurs drive them away. So I was very intrigued by what that relationship would be like between a chauffeur and the executive he worked for.

The chauffeurs looked like African immigrants, like me. I was very curious about two men from very different worlds—the dynamics between them, the ways in which their families might intersect, and the ways in which the recession might affect them. So I started writing a story about a Wall Street Executive and his chauffeur and the way the recession affected their lives.

PLO: What was it like writing the novel in the midst of the recession?

IM: Well, I started writing in 2011, and at that point the recession was officially over. (laughs) It was still very fresh because I remembered the anxieties I had that I might lose my job and then how it felt to actually lose my job. And there was a lot of talk in the media about how people were dealing with the recession. There were stories about people staying married because they didn’t want to get divorced because it would be too expensive to take care of two homes, people looking for new jobs, the high rates of unemployment. That was all still very fresh in my mind.

And also [fresh in my mind was] the collapse of Lehman Brothers. I had read a lot of news stories about Lehman Brothers and what went on behind the scenes. Could it have been prevented? Could the people at Lehman Brothers have had better foresight and been able to avoid this collapse?

PLO: Besides reading the insider account of the financial crash, what other research did you do for the novel?

IM: My main research, as far as what happened at Lehman Brothers, was I read the document that was entered by a court appointed examiner. As far as the Cameroonian characters, they are from my town. I’m from the town of Limbe in Cameroon, so I know that town. I grew up there. And I used to live in the same neighborhood in Harlem [that they do in the novel], so I know that part.

But I didn’t have to deal with what they deal with [regarding citizenship]. I’m a citizen right now and I came here at a younger age. But I had met many immigrants over the course of my time in America and we talked about what it’s like to be an immigrant in America. We talked about the price we have to pay and what it’s like to be far away from home. At the time I wasn’t thinking, “Oh, this is research,” because these conversations happened years before I started writing the novel. But when I started writing the novel all of those conversations came back. I used them as inspiration to write about the lives of these immigrants.

PLO: You’ve said in a past interview that the idea of the American Dream needs to be redefined. What did you mean by that?

IM: I think there’s a big element of the price that you have to pay for that dream. For me and the characters in this novel, we came to America and thought, “Oh, this promised land. We’re going to have this wonderful life.” The image we have of America back home is nice cars, nice houses, and good looking people. But there is a very high price to pay. The poverty in America is very brutal. People say, “Oh you didn’t grow up with a lot of comfort [in Cameroon].” But I think it’s still easy to have a good life with very little in the community in which I grew up, whereas in America when you’re poor, you have to work longer hours.

And then there is the price you pay to hold on to that dream, which is a challenge for the Edwards family because by all accounts they are living the American Dream. And the novel shows how much they are struggling to hold on to their dream.

PLO: I wanted to talk about the Edwards family. The characters of Clark and Cindy turn out to be much more layered than we first think they are when we meet them. How did they evolve over the writing of the novel?

IM: When I first met them, I think I judged them a little too harshly, which I think is common for many people. When you think of a Wall Street executive you don’t think, “Let me have empathy for this rich man” or “let me have empathy for this woman who on the surface is very materialistic and a bit entitled.” The truth is writing this novel forced me to become empathetic. I had to work on my empathy to say, “This not just a Wall Street executive. This is not just a rich woman.” They are people. They are people who have dreams, who have concerns, and they have virtues also. We want to think they are bad people, but I wanted to explore the wonderful things that they have. Even when I explored the not so wonderful things about them, I wanted to consider them as humans who have dreams and who are trying to hold onto their dreams, who make good choices and bad choices to hold on to their dream life.

PLO: And it seems like you extend the same empathy to Jende and Nene in terms of the good and bad choices they make

IM: People are flawed. I believe I am flawed. We see Jende and Nene going in directions where we think, “Why would you do that?” But the truth is that sometimes when you believe in your dream so strongly you start compromising yourself. Nene especially believes so strongly in the American Dream that she is willing to do anything she can because she wants her children to have the wonderful life that she never had. Which is at the root of the American Dream—we do a lot of work so our children can have this dream life. All four of the main characters, that is what they have to deal with.

PLO: You studied business administration at Rutgers and got a MED in Psychology in Columbia. How did you come to writing?

IM: I never studied writing, I never took any writing class. When I was in school in 2002 I read Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison. I was just so in awe of how wonderful the book was that I started writing. I don’t know what I was thinking. I was so inspired by that book that I wanted to write just to experience the joys of writing. I wrote for nine years before I started writing this novel. Even after I had written Behold The Dreamers I didn’t think very much of publication. It wasn’t until I had a first draft that I thought, “Ooh, I should get an agent.” Then I got an agent, I got many rejections, and I kept on getting better and better.

From when I started writing to when this novel came out is actually a fourteen year journey. Because part of not having studied writing is that I had to teach myself a lot. I had to sit down and master a lot of things because writing is a craft. I had to master the craft of dialogue, plot, pacing and all that. There are a few books I read, like Stephen King’s On Writing. But just having been a lifelong reader and being surrounded by great books was mostly how I learned to write.

PLO: What were some of the books that inspired you?

IM: Toni Morrison’s The Song of Solomon. Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections is a book I love very much. Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible. I’m also a big fan of Jhumpa Lahiri, Junot Diaz, Gary Shteyngart. They write about immigrants also. Roberto Bolano, Isabelle Allende, Ha Jin, Kazuo Ishiguro. I know my writing is nothing like those writers. It’s just a matter of reading excellent work and being in awe of what excellence looks like.

PLO: What’s it like to have admired all those writers and then for your first book to be praised by authors like Jaqueline Woodson and Jonathan Franzen?

IM: It’s a great honor. I loved Brown Girl Dreaming and I loved The Corrections. But when you’re sitting in your little corner writing, you don’t think anyone’s going to care about what you write. You write because you love the story and you want to write it. And then one day when it comes out and somebody actually cares, it’s a privilege.

PLO: You talk about writing for the joy of writing, which extends to your characters. Clark has this unexpected love of poetry and Jende uses the journal that Cindy makes him keep almost as a creative writing exercise.

IM: For Clark, it’s a matter of stress relief. For Jende even though what he was writing wasn’t something he would have chosen to write, it was still an opportunity to write, something he doesn’t get to do normally. For me I think that was how I started writing. I had been reading for so many years, but I never thought about the people behind the books or what it’s like to write. I still think of myself as a reader who writes because I came to writing because I loved books so much. It was such a joy to read and I wanted to experience more of the joy of the written word in another way.

PLO: What role has the library played in your life?

IM: The library has been a humongous light in my life. My journey as a writer actually began in a public library. It was in the Falls Church Public Library where I borrowed Song of Solomon and that specifically made me start writing. That was how my writing journey started. When I first came to America I was very homesick and I spent a lot of time in the public library in Chicago, which was where I first lived. When I moved to New York City to go to graduate school, I didn’t have a computer. I spent a lot of time in the public library. I used computers there to look for a job.

Even now I still go to the public library just because the libraries are so special to me. I didn’t grow up around public libraries. I was born in a little village where there wasn’t a public library. So being able to be in these places that just had all these books and being inspired by them was a big part of my life. Every town that I’ve lived in I’ve always had a library card.  A lot of the books I’ve read were borrowed from public libraries. Back when I couldn’t afford a book I knew I could go to the library to find it. In many ways my writing journey was shaped by public libraries.

PLO: I have to imagine that public librarians will love the book from the beginning because the first page shows the main character using library services to write his resume.

IM: That is just another thing I would do, I would use their services. You move to a new town, you don’t know your way, but there’s the library! I will still never forget the first time I walked into a library, and that is how I became a writer. That was pretty much how my story started.

The post Imbolo Mbue on Being A Reader Who Writes and Redefining the American Dream first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

Public Libraries Online: You’ve discussed in past interviews that you’re a huge fan of 19th century literature. Can you tell us how this novel was inspired by David Copperfield?

Kate Saunders: I am a lifelong Dickens-nerd, and David Copperfield is probably my favourite novel in the world. Without giving too much away, the goings-on at Wishtide were inspired by certain characters in that masterpiece—and certain arguments I had with the author. I wanted to climb right inside the novel and mess about with the controls.

PLO: The book takes place in 1850. Did you discover any constraints in creating a mystery in a historical time setting?

KS: In 1850, all sorts of new-fangled things were about to happen (telegrams), but hadn’t yet got off the ground—England still had one foot firmly planted in the past.

PLO: Laetitia Rodd is such a fascinating and endearing detective. When we meet her, she’s living in “reduced circumstances” as the result of her husband’s death, and she’s still grieving his loss. At the same time, her dry sense of humor informs her outlook and prevents her from any kind of self-pity. How did you land on her as the protagonist of your series?

KS: Laetitia Rodd’s fictional voice was inspired by the great female diarists and letter-writers of the 19th century—Jane Carlyle, Elizabeth Gaskell, Louisa Alcott—but it also sounds very much like my mother, Betty Saunders. Her mild manner covered a mind like a steel trap.

PLO: One thing that sets this book apart from other books that introduce a series is that it’s not an origin story—Laetitia is introduced as an established detective who has already worked several cases. What was behind your choice to show Laetitia already up and running as a detective?

KS: I wanted to jump straight into the story, and that’s why we meet Mrs. Rodd when her career is already well established.

PLO: As a reader, it’s so much fun seeing how Laetitia works within and around the very strict gender roles of her society. What kind of research did you do to understand how an archdeacon’s widow would go about her daily life during that time?

KS: I’ve been obsessed with 19th century fiction for the best part of forty years, and found that I remembered all kinds of wonderful details about daily life.

PLO: The book moves along so swiftly. A whole novel’s worth of plot is contained in the first hundred pages and Laetitia’s case takes several unexpected turns. Did you outline this novel or were there discoveries you made along the way?

KS: The basic shape of my plot was there from the start, but I had to find a lot of it as I went along. You have to be open to future developments.

PLO: What are some of your favorite mysteries?

KS: Margery Allingham’s Tiger in the Smoke is one of my all-time favourites—the ghostly atmosphere  of postwar London is unforgettable.

PLO: Can you tell us what’s next for Laetitia Rodd?

KS: Mrs. Rodd’s next case, The Wandering Scholar takes her to the beautiful countryside around Oxford.

The post A Mind Like a Steel Trap: A Conversation With Kate Saunders first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

Public Libraries Online: At the center of Here Comes the Sun is Margot, who’s keenly perceptive about the power structures around her and driven by protecting her sister. How did you arrive at her as the protagonist of your story?

Nicole Dennis-Benn: At first I was apprehensive about Margot. But once I gave in, she took over the whole story. Margot’s character teaches me as a writer to let go and give control to the characters; that I should trust them, because they will lead me to different places, sometimes dark; but nonetheless, changes my perspective on the world.

PLO: The three main characters all struggle with weighty topics like classism and complexionism. What were the challenges of writing so honestly about these subjects?

NDB: What I enjoy about the writing process is the purging. It’s liberating knowing that I am giving voices to those, particularly working class women, who are often overlooked, marginalized. The only challenge, perhaps, is opening the sutures of unhealed wounds.

It’s painful, but will never heal properly if we continue to pretend it’s not there. Sort of like racism in America.

PLO: Margo’s fifteen year-old sister, Thandi, yearns to be an artist and at one point is advised by her art teacher that her drawings should give him “a better understanding”of her and that she should “go deeper [and] reveal more of” herself. Is writing a similar self-revealing act for you?

NDB: Yes, it is. That’s why I value it so much. I usually end up writing my way through a dark tunnel, discovering myself in the process. There are times when I surprise myself with information I never knew I stored since childhood. I guess that’s what it means, in the literal sense, to be a human sponge as an artist. We absorb so much—knowing and unknowingly—then wring ourselves dry in our works. It’s a cyclical process.

PLO: All of the characters are drawn with so much empathy, so that even when we don’t like their actions, we understand what motivates them. How did you avoid turning the so-called “villains” of the novel into caricature?

NDB: I love all my characters. One of the most important elements of craft, which is hardly spoken about (or taught), is loving the people on the page as writers. We have to love them in order to tap into their humanity, their complexities. If we judge them the way society might judge them, then how are we enlightening the conversation as writers? How are we challenging others to look at the world and people differently?

PLO: The New York Times praised your book as “deceptively well-constructed, with slow and painful reveals right through the end.” What was your writing process like in order to get such a tightly paced plot? Did you outline the novel or were there discoveries you made along the way?

NDB: Both. I made outlines. I did about two drafts of outlines. I have a very analytical mind, so I made diagrams with arrows. That’s where my public health research scientist training comes in—I guess—making visuals portraying direct and indirect impact. However, there were times when the characters took me in a completely different direction and I had to go with the flow. I realized later on that the plot resembled the concept I had in my head all along. I knew the story I wanted to tell. I knew the characters that I wanted to tell it. So all I needed to do was trust that my subconscious would take control in times of doubt.

PLO: You have a background as a research scientist. Has your scientific training had any impact on your writing style or approach to writing?

NDB: Certainly! With my public health training I never look at the world without weighing or assessing how knowledge and awareness can contribute to the greater good, change people’s attitude. I have more freedom as a writer to show certain things without being didactic. Though I write fiction, my stories must take place in the “real world”. Even if I don’t intend on writing the “real world”, it seeps in because I am a product of it; an active participant in it. I do case studies everyday by virtue of living and listening to people.

PLO: The novel dives into the lives of working-class Jamaicans who work at luxury resorts, people who are most likely invisible to the tourists.  What has the reaction been from Jamaican readers to your novel, especially since it exposes such a hidden part of Jamaican culture?

NDB: They love it. I’m learning that through my characters I’ve allowed Jamaicans to see themselves reflected on the page; I’ve allowed them to hear the things they couldn’t bring themselves to say out loud. I’m truly honored by this since Here Comes the Sun is a love letter to Jamaica.

PLO: What authors have been influential to you?

NDB: There are many, but off the top of my head I can think of Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall, Zora Neale Hurston, and Edwidge Danticat. They give me permission to write the stories I want to write with complex characters, particularly complex female characters. Also, Zora Neale Hurston preserved dialect for the sake of authenticity in her work—something that comes up when reading my work. I use Jamaican patois in dialogue because the people I write about would not be speaking Standard English unobserved. Hurston gave me the courage to do that.

The post Writing My Way Through a Dark Tunnel: A Conversation with Nicole Dennis-Benn first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

Public Libraries Online: You’ve referred to this book as “the absolute true story of my heart.” What did you mean by that?

Kate DiCamillo: This book has certain autobiographical elements.  It is set in Central Florida in the mid-seventies, and I grew up in Central Florida in the mid-seventies.  My father left the family when I was a kid and Raymie’s father has left the family.  So there are those truths.  The story itself is fictional.  But it tells the emotional truth: of loss and friendship and faith and hope.  And that is the true story of my heart.

PLO: You’ve written characters in the similar age range as the girls in Raymie Nightingale, but this is the first time you’ve written explicitly about the friendships among pre-teen girls. What was it like to explore the dynamics of these relationships?

KD: I have been so fortunate (as a kid and as an adult) to have deep, abiding friendships that have sustained me.  It was wonderful to capture that on the page, to pay tribute to those friendships.

PLO: While Raymie Nightingale is heartwarming and very funny, it deals frankly with topics like abandonment, domestic violence, death, and foster care. What was the challenge of balancing the story’s darker topics with its light tone?

KD: I didn’t think too much about that balance . . . maybe because that balance is part of how I see the world.  Like Raymie, I see the darkness, but I’m also deeply, passionately hopeful.  And I think things are funny.

PLO: This novel  evokes what it was like to grow up in the 1970s–the girls enjoy a largely unmonitored existence, they take baton-twirling classes, and they get transported around town in a wood-paneled station wagon that would probably fail modern emissions tests. What attracted you to set a story in this time period?

KD: I think that I went back to the time when I was a kid without making a conscious decision.  Raymie is so much like I was as a kid, that I just instinctually went back to *when* I was a kid.

PLO: As part of your role as National Summer Reading Champion for the Collaborative Summer Library Program, you put together a list of “Kate DiCamillo’s Recommended Reads for Summer 2016.” For you, what kind of book provides the ideal summer reading experience?

KD: Oh, I love books that you can get lost in, books that foster hope, and books that help me to see the world better.

PLO: What are your memories of summer reading programs?

KD: I went to the summer reading program at Cooper Memorial Public Library in Clermont, Florida every summer.  I couldn’t believe that I was going to get prizes for doing exactly what I wanted to be doing which was reading.

PLO: Librarians play key roles in your books, both with Miss Franny Block in Because of Winn Dixie and Edward Option in Raymie Nigthingale. What has your relationship with libraries and librarians been like through your life?

KD: Librarians throughout my life have consistently seen me for who I am: a passionate reader.  I feel seen in libraries.  And I feel safe.  It is a wondrous thing.

The post “The True Story of My Heart”– Kate DiCamillo Talks friendship, summer reading, and “Raymie Nightingale” first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

Public Libraries Online: Madeline’s a voracious reader, and the books that she loves, particularly The Little Prince, play an important role in the story.  What were the books that were meaningful to you growing up?

Nicola Yoon: The Little Prince was one my favorites growing up. The story is deceptively simple, but so filled with layers of meaning. As Maddy says in Everything, Everything, the meaning changes each time I read it. Other favorites of mine include The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger, and Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams.

PLO: Apart from Maddy’s physical health, the characters deal with some other serious issues, like domestic violence and mental illness. How did you strike the balance of presenting those issues authentically while still telling a story about teenagers falling in love?

NY: This was definitely challenging, but the thing is both good and bad things are always happening in your life. And sometimes love finds us at inconvenient times. I also really believe that love is the only thing that can pull us through the challenging times.

PLO: The reader gets to see excerpts from Maddy’s journals, Maddy’s spoiler-filled book reviews, email exchanges, and IM conversations. How did you decide to incorporate these snippets into the book to tell Maddy’s story?

NY: Because Maddy has been confined to her house for eighteen years, it made sense to me that she would have an unusual way of relating to the world. Books are her best friends. Through them she can see all the worlds that she physically isn’t able to visit. Her book reviews are a natural offshoot of her love of books. The emails and IMs came about because Maddy is most comfortable communicating online. She’s had very limited face to face contact, so mediated contact is what she knows best.

PLO: We also see Maddy’s sketches periodically in the book, and the drawings were illustrated by your husband, David Yoon. How did you work with him to create Maddy’s artistic side?

NY: I wrote Everything, Everything from 4-6 a.m. over the course of two and a half years. I swear that many strange things occur to you at 4 a.m. In the book, Maddy is obsessed with the Hawaiian state fish—the humuhumunukunukuapua’a.  One morning at 4 a.m., I decided that she would draw this fish. I’m a terrible artist but my husband is a fantastic one. I went to my bedroom and woke my husband up (at 4 a.m.) and asked him to draw the fish for me. He is a truly wonderful person because he didn’t complain at all. He just got up, gave me a kiss, made himself some coffee, and drew my the beautiful version of the fish that’s in the book today. After that whenever I had an idea for an illustration, I would draw my very terrible version and then he would turn it into something beautiful.

PLO: You have been an active part of the “We Need Diverse Books” campaign. What can librarians do to support this campaign?

NY: Librarians are such heroes and can do so much! You can help by recommending diverse books and cultivating lifelong readers. On the WNDB website there’s a Resources link with lots of useful links. One of my favorites is the Summer Reading Series. Here you’ll find suggested pairings of popular books with less-well-known, diverse titles. For example, Percy Jackson and the Olympians series is paired with SuperMutant Magic Academy. You can even print these pairings to use as shelf talkers in your library!

PLO: Do you see yourself always writing for a YA audience?

NY: I love writing for a YA audience. It really is such a privilege. I love that young adults are thinking about big meaning of life type questions. I think we all should be. Having said that, I won’t rule out writing for adult audiences. It just depends on where an idea takes me.

PLO: Would you ever write another book about Maddy or any of the other characters?

NY: There’s a character in Everything, Everything named Zachariah. He’s only in the book for a couple of pages, but I love him! He describes himself as the African-American Freddy Mercury and I’d love to write a story about him someday.

The post Many Strange Things Occur to You at 4 a.m. — A Conversation With Nicola Yoon first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

Public Libraries: How did you start writing and illustrating children’s books?

Duncan Tonatiuh: Well, it wasn’t something I necessarily planned. I always liked writing and drawing. When I was a kid. I made my own comic books, I was into Japanese anime, and I would make up my own characters. So it was always something I liked. And I’ve always liked books; since I was a kid I’ve liked reading a lot. In high school and college I took a lot of different art classes and I went to a design school. I studied illustration and writing, but I always thought more of doing stuff for adults or for a gallery.

For my senior thesis, I decided to make this short comic book about a friend of mine named Sergio, who was an undocumented worker. He’s Mixtec, which is an indigenous group from the south of Mexico. I created a project about him and that’s how I came up with my art style, by looking at Mixtec artwork. There’s all this great Mixtec codex from the fifteenth century, so I decided to do a modern day codex of Sergio.

One day a professor at Parsons came to critique our work, a woman named Julia Gorton. She had illustrated some books for Abrams and was good friends with this man named Howard Reeves, who’s an editor there. She asked me if she could show him my work and I said, “Sure, please!” I gave her some copies of my art. Howard liked them and said, “If we receive a manuscript that suits your style, we’d like to do a picture book with you.” I told him I liked writing too and he said, “Well if you write something send it to me.” He told me a few very basic things about picture books and some time later, I wrote my first manuscript.

I had an idea for my first book about two cousins—one who lives in a rural community in Mexico and one who lives in an urban center in the U.S. I wrote it and sent it to him. My first draft rhymed—and I’m really bad at rhyming—but he was really nice about it. He said, “I really like this concept, I want to publish this book, but no rhyming, please.”

I reworked the manuscript and that eventually became my first book. Since then I’ve done five books with Abrams. I have a sixth one coming out and they’ve all been edited by Howard.

I feel so lucky that writing is something I get to do, that the door opened to that whole world. I just really enjoy it. I get to talk about subjects that interest me and I think it’s a very creative field.

PL: Your books have tackled complex issues, like immigration and segregation, what are the challenges of communicating those issues into a children’s book?

DT: With Separate is Never Equal—which is about the civil rights case that desegregated schools in California, Mendez v. Westminster—the main challenge was to have enough information there. I think it was important to have dates, to have certain names, to have certain concepts like a trial. Things that might be a tiny bit complicated, that might not be exciting so to speak to a very young reader. But I thought it was important to have enough of those without making it too overwhelming—just finding the right balance of what to explain enough, what needed to be explained more, what to include, what not to include.

With that book, kids have been super-responsive, I think because it’s set in a school environment. Also because kids are very into what’s right and what’s wrong. I think they immediately connect to the story and don’t get discouraged by the fact that it has dates and names and things like that.

PL: You also capture the feelings she experienced. You interviewed Sylvia Mendez, correct?

DT: I definitely think making Sylvia the protagonist makes it more relatable to kids. I had a chance to meet her and hear her speak and do several informal interviews with her. It was great to hear her talk about that time, and that allowed me to try to capture some of the emotions and thoughts she had as a young girl.

PL: Posada is a fascinating artist because many people might be aware of his work and his style without necessarily knowing who is. How did you first learn about Posada?

I grew up in Mexico so I saw his images around all the time. There are thousands and thousands of reproductions of his work during the Day of the Dead, they’re just part of the pop culture. Posada is an unsung hero where people, like you said, have oftentimes seen his work and images but don’t know that much about his life. I just wanted to learn more about him.

A few years ago the hundredth anniversary of his death was celebrated. There were a couple of good books written about him in Mexico and there were some exhibits about him, so that also helped me find more information and more material. I visited the library at the University of Texas in Austin, which has an incredible collection of Latin American books, and they had a lot of information about him.

I didn’t know that much about him. I wanted to learn more. In the book I decided to include questions, because there were a lot of things I couldn’t quite find out because he wasn’t famous during his lifetime.

If you look up Diego Rivera or Pablo Picasso, a lot of people were writing about them while they were alive. There’s a lot of information about the paintings and art they were doing at a specific times of their lives. With Posada, he was unknown during his lifetime. People knew his images but he wasn’t famous by any means. So that’s why I decided to include a lot of questions, to try to give some context to things that I imagine may have happened.

PL: I really liked the questions, because it seems like you’re giving the reader the tools to think critically about art.

DT: I think the wonderful thing about Posada’s work—especially his calaveras—is that they’re so timeless. There are just a lot of interpretations one can make about them. A hundred years later we can look at his artwork and it’s still so relevant, even though it was done in a different time period.

PL: You’ve talked before about how you’ve been influenced by Ancient Mexican art, particularly the Mixtec codex. How did you first discover the Mixtec codex?

DT: I grew up in Mexico so often the cover of a textbook in elementary school will be a piece of Pre-Columbian art. Or in San Miguel where I grew up there’s a craft market where sometimes you’ll find crafts that have a Pre-Columbian vibe, but that wasn’t what interested me as a kid or what got me interested in art. It was years later after I had lived in the U.S. and was interested in different types of art that I came back to that.

When it really clicked is when I did that project about my friend Sergio. There’s a large Mixtec community in New York and I just thought it was so interesting that he speaks his indigenous Mixtec dialect with his cousins and friends. I was blown away by that. Here he was, thousands and thousands of miles away from his native village, but still retaining some of his traditions and language in this totally foreign city. So I decided to do a project about that. One of the first things I did was look up Mixtec artwork at the library at Parsons. I saw these great reproductions of codex from the fifteenth century that are some of the few codex that were not destroyed during the Spanish conquest

I decided to draw in that style. I do my characters in profile, their ears look very stylized, a little bit like the number three. I started to adopt the same aesthetic. I tried to make it a little more relevant to kids and to people nowadays by using digital collage, where I use different textures and photographic elements. So hopefully it’s an interesting combination where it looks kind of ancient but also kind of contemporary

PL: One of the cool parts of Calaveras is you go through the mechanics of Posada’s process, where you explain how etching, lithography, and engraving work. Why was it important for you to include how Posada created his drawings in this book?

DT: It was an interest of mine. I had taken a few introductory courses in college, so I was a little bit familiar with those processes. It’s just so different from painting, the fact that he had to draw his images backward. I thought it would be interesting to kids nowadays, where we’re just so used to printing things on a printer. But a hundred years ago, things had to be done totally differently so you could have multiple copies of the same image.

I think that’s one thing that’s very important about Posada’s work is that his art was popular and for the masses. It was produced lots and lots of times. In order to do that he had to use these techniques. If he had done a painting, there’d just be one painting, but since he did lithographs and etchings and engravings, there were these copies. I think that’s very much a part of the artwork he created and the purpose it served.

PL: Who are the children’s books illustrators you admire?

DT: There’s a lot of great people out there. I definitely like Ezra Jack Keats. I got to do a project related to his work for the Akron Art Museum. I feel a lot of connection to his work because he also did collage and was very interested in multicultural works.

Some of the art that inspires me is definitely pre-Columbian art. I like naïve art and outsider art—art made by people who aren’t necessarily trained artists. There’s something very raw and expressive and imaginative about it. It was definitely an interest of mine before I started drawing in this Pre-Columbian style, and it definitely drew me more towards that because it allowed me to experiment and play even if it’s not realistic, per se.

As a kid, I was very much into anime and manga and comic books. My cousin and I collected Spider-Man and X-Men and I had a big collection of those kinds of books. Those were definitely my very first influences in trying to draw and make images.

PL: You mentioned that you’re working on something coming up in the fall. Can you talk about what’s next?

I have two books coming out in the fall. One I wrote and illustrated called The Princess and The Warrior: A Tale of Two Volcanoes. It’s a myth set in Pre-Columbian times about the origin of these two volcanoes, Iztaccíhuatl and Popocatépetl, that are just outside Mexico City. The story of their origin has a lot of similarity to Sleeping Beauty and Romeo and Juliet. It was a very fun project to do.

The other book I did was written by a woman named Susan Wood and is called Esquivel: Space Age Sound Artist. It will be published by Charlesbridge and it’s a biography of the Mexican composer Esquivel, who’s considered the inventor of lounge music. It was a fun project because the illustrations are very groovy and swanky, and I did a lot of hand-drawn lettering for it. So the two books that I have coming out will look very different and are about very different subjects, so they were fun projects.

The post Ancient and Contemporary: A Conversation with Duncan Tonatiuh first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

Public Libraries Online: This is your first novel, after your acclaimed collection of short stories, The Last Animal. What was it like being able to tell a story on a larger scale?

Abby Geni: I think at heart I’ve always been a novelist. Most writers have a default mode – poetry, flash fiction, short stories. For me, it’s books. Even in The Last Animal, my stories tended to be quite long. I was actually on a panel of short stories at Printers Row Lit Fest a few years ago, and I was the “long story” author in the group. When someone asked me why I had written such long stories, I found myself saying, “They were the shortest ones I could write!”

So in answer to your question, it’s wonderful to be able to tell a story on a larger scale. It felt like coming home to me.

PLO: The book is an immersive look at the lives of biologists and photographers, examining how their jobs shape their perspective on their world. What was your research process like to provide such a detailed perspective on these professions?

AG: Research has always been a huge part of my writing. It’s how I get to know my characters. Miranda, the narrator of The Lightkeepers, is a nature photographer, so I interviewed photographers and read up on the discipline. In doing so, I learned about Miranda’s mind and heart and history. The same was true for the biologists in the book. There are six on the islands (at least at the start, before bad things start happening), and each specializes in a different animal—birds, seals, sharks. I read about the study of biology in general, the training and work, and I also read about each animal in particular so I would know the mind of each biologist. What kind of person makes it their life’s mission to study elephant seals? What kind of person devotes years to learning about birds?

As far as the research itself, I looked absolutely everywhere for interesting material. I read The Devil’s Teeth by Susan Casey, a memoir about her time on the Farallon Islands, and I read books by Jacques Cousteau and Craig Childs and David Quammen, and I read websites and blogs. I compiled my favorite data into files that I would look over each day before beginning my writing. I had a month-by-month breakdown of the year in animal life on the Farallon Islands, complete with pictures of the animals you might find there in each season and information about their behavior—who’s breeding, who’s migrating, who’s feeding—and I looked at that every day too. I would sit down at my computer each morning and think, Here I go, back to the islands…

PLO: The Lightkeepers has been embraced by mystery fans, having recently been named the February selection for The Mysterious Bookshop’s New Mystery Club. Have there been any influential mysteries in your reading and writing life?

AG: I am a mystery junkie. An irritating quirk of my writer personality is that I find it difficult to read in the same genre I’m writing. Since I write literary fiction, I don’t read a lot of literary fiction. Even though I love novels and short stories, I don’t like the feeling of another writer’s voice and characters and plot bumping around in my head and colliding with my own. So I read nonfiction and science fiction and graphic novels. And my favorite genre in the world is mysteries. I’ve read everything by Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle, Georgette Heyer, and Dorothy Sayers. I just started on Margery Allingham, and I have some Ngaio Marsh on my list. When I’ve worked my way through the entire canon of the Golden Age of Mysteries, I will be lost.

PLO: While it’s become a cliche to say that the location is a character in the book, the Farallon Islands are truly a separate character, providing the book with a malevolent sense of place. How did you find out about the islands? Were you able to visit the Wildlife Refuge during your writing process at all?

AG: I’m so glad to hear you say that! I felt that way myself as I was writing—there’s Miranda, the biologists, and the islands, all with their own will and agency and motivations. I wasn’t able to visit the Farallon Islands, since they’re a) incredibly dangerous and b) not open to the public. The only people who can travel there are scientists who are given permission to take up residence and study the marine life.

But I honestly didn’t mind writing about somewhere I’ve never been. In fact, I prefer to write about places that exist somewhere between reality and my imagination. I do a ton of research and get as much information as I can, and then I dream up the rest. In doing the work of creating the place in my mind, I find that the setting goes through a transmutation and becomes more alive, more intense. I don’t think I could have written about the islands as vividly as I did if I actually had been there.

In a few weeks I’m going to travel to San Francisco for a reading, and I’ll be able to lay eyes on the Farallon Islands for the first time, albeit at a great distance. I’m excited to see them in real life, but it’s going to be strange, too. Now that the book has been published, it’s not mine anymore. It belongs to the readers, who will experience and interpret and engage with it in their own way. I have to accept that the islands aren’t mine anymore either.

PLO: An octopus plays a memorable role in the book, and an octopus handler is the subject of your short story, “Captivity.” What about the octopus makes it such a compelling subject for you?

AG: I love writing about nature in general, and animals in particular. But there’s something special about an octopus. They’re so alien, so unexpected, so bizarre. In “Captivity,” but I wasn’t able to dive into the subject the way I wanted to, since I only had thirty pages or so. I did a lot of research for that story that never made it into the piece, but finally appeared in The Lightkeepers. I might be done with octopuses as a subject now. I might have to find a new spirit animal.

PLO: What are you working on next?

AG: A new novel! When I was at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Elizabeth McCracken advised us all to “protect the dream of the book”—to refrain from sharing our writing or even talking about it until we were ready. So I’ll just say there’s a new book, and I’m protecting the dream of it, but I love it very much already, and I’m very excited to be starting on a whole new adventure.

The post Back to the Islands: A Conversation With Abby Geni first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

PUBLIC LIBRARIES ONLINE: How did your background writing short stories shape how you approached a novel?

DAVE REIDY: I decided after about the third draft that I was going to introduce multiple voices to the book. I then started to think about each of the chapters—especially the early chapters of the book—as short stories. I knew as the book went on that not every chapter would be able to stand on its own, but I did want each chapter to have a beginning, middle, and an end.

PL: One of the really fun aspects of the book is the way we see the world through so many different characters’ eyes. What influenced your choice to tell the story through multiple perspectives?

DR: The first several drafts were all from Simon’s point of view. It was near the end of the third draft that I found myself wanting to write a chapter from [Simon’s ex-girlfriend] Brittany’s point of view. And I thought, what if I just broke this open? So part of what drove it was the challenge to see if I could create these multiple voices and drive them far enough apart so they could stand alone and be separate from one another in a clear way. So part of that [decision] was relishing the challenge from a writer’s perspective. But I also thought that Simon as a character would benefit in the readers’ eyes by seeing him through people [with whom] they might more easily identify—seeing him through the eyes of Catherine, through the eyes of his own mother, his father, his brother, Brittany, and the characters from his professional life. I thought that Simon would come into three dimensions and we would get an interesting mosaic-like picture of him where each of these chapters gives you another facet of him.

PL: I found that getting into the other characters’ heads helped humanize many of the so-called villains of the story, like Simon’s father or Brittany.

DR: I think that’s one of the things some of the reviewers have noticed. You’re just getting one narrator’s perspective on an event and when you get the other narrator’s perspective, you can see that event in all its complexity and complication. To me, that’s one of the most delicious things about fiction, where your preconceived notions about a situation are challenged in a way that makes you think about it differently. If fiction has some value beyond entertainment it would be that; if we can bring the knowledge that the way we see a situation at first may not be entirely fair to all the parties involved, that can be a valuable and humanizing thing.

PL: Going back to what you were saying about breaking the story open and telling it from multiple viewpoints, how did you make the choice of which characters’ heads to get into and which ones to stay out of?

DR: The version of the manuscript that was accepted for publication had at least one, perhaps two, additional characters whose heads we got into. [Simon’s brother] Connor’s girlfriend Erika had a chapter that I ended up cutting because I asked myself, “If this chapter were to leave the book, what information would need to be captured and how easily could it be captured somewhere else?” And the answer for me seemed pretty simple, which seemed a good argument for removing the chapter. But I did enjoy writing her and understood her better for having done so. Hopefully some of the life that was created in that chapter actually carries through the Simon and Connor chapters that involves her.

But basically I just followed my interest. The whole book came alive for me from a writing perspective with writing Simon’s mother. That humanized Simon for me and I had already spent years writing about him. I just followed my interest and kept that picture in mind of the fully dimensional Simon that I wanted. Then I held myself to the standard that each of these characters could take the stage and own their story in a way where Simon could be secondary.

PL: When you were writing from these other characters’ perspectives, were there discoveries you made about Simon?

DR: Yes, there really were. Just seeing him through their eyes did for me, the writer, exactly what I hoped it would do for the reader. It made him more dimensional, more human, more likeable, and more sympathetic perhaps. I was able to bring that energy and feeling for Simon into the six chapters that he has on his own.

PL: The world of voiceover artists is a foreign one to so many readers. How did you discover it and realize it was the appropriate setting to tell Simon’s story?

DR: My work often deals with communication difficulties, with people struggling to connect, struggling to make themselves heard or make themselves understood. So dealing with a character who has a very real speech impediment and an anatomically imposed silence really appealed to me. How would that character connect if he could not make himself heard and he was subject to that which people said about him?

As for voiceover specifically, my first job coming out of college was with a small advertising design firm. I had a chance to write some radio spots, co-direct, and direct voice-over sessions. I really came to admire the craftsmanship and even the artistry that the very best voiceover artists brought to their work—the fact that their voices were beautiful instruments and then also how they could use their microphones to really transform their voices and create something interesting and human.

PL: Switching topics, Catherine’s section of the book was intriguing to me because at that point we had traveled from a working class town in downstate Illinois to a penthouse on Lake Michigan. Was that important to you, to show such a broad scope of the financial spectrum?

DR: To me, Catherine’s story was one of being caught between two very distant poles. In terms of her income, she is somewhere in the middle, but she has access to all these very wealthy people by virtue of her talent and her business. When she gets involved at St. Asella’s in the wake of her divorce, she becomes this lifeline to society for so many neglected people for whom St. Asella’s is their only point of communal connection. I wanted to explore what it’s like to feel that tension and to see that there’s actually something human and interesting in both places. Without making a value judgment about it, not everyone is going to be equally well suited in either world. Some people are going to decide to leave one behind. I think that’s a choice that people have to make, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be where one was a right choice and one was a wrong choice. It’s just, “What are people actually suited for?” I think the hard part is in the choosing..

PL: Finally, what role have libraries played in your life?

I grew up in Downers Grove, Illinois. Libraries were a real staple in my life from the time I was a little kid. Every summer I did the summer reading program with the list of all the books I wanted to read, and I’d get to go back to the library to check out a bunch of books. It was my opportunity in the pre-Internet days to explore things I was interested in. I was reading books about the Freedom Riders in Mississippi as a junior high school student, and probably reading some things—in terms of the violence those people went through—in greater detail than I should have had access to at that time. But I got a chance to explore those stories and topics that interested me and give myself a little bit of an education outside of school.

In addition, I don’t quite know how to quantify it, but some of this novel was written in libraries. They are places where I’ve gone to work. When I first wanted to be a writer, the summer I was turning twenty, when it was time to sit down and try to write something I went to the library first. So the library is a very meaningful space for me both physically and metaphorically. So I’ve taken kind of a particular joy that—at least in the forms of Library Journal and Booklist—that libraries have embraced this novel, because I think I’m a product of libraries.

The post A Product of Libraries: An Interview With Dave Reidy first appeared on Public Libraries Online.