Q&A with Lydia Reeder

 

Photo by Andrew Newberg

 

Lydia Reeder is the author of the new book The Cure for Women: Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi and the Challenge to Victorian Medicine That Changed Women's Lives Forever. She also has written the book Dust Bowl Girls. She lives in Denver, Colorado.

 

Q: What inspired you to write The Cure for Women, and how was the book’s title chosen?

 

A: My great-grandmother was a rural midwife in Missouri during the early 20th century. She provided vital reproductive and healing care for her neighbors and their children in addition to running a farm and caring for her own 12 children. Her life inspired me.

 

I began to research women in healthcare during the mid-19th century, and was blown away by the courage and utter brilliance of the first women doctors. They built the first women-run institutions (hospitals and medical schools) in America.

 

While researching this book, I came up with the title after encountering the terms "woman problem" and "woman question."

 

The Industrial Revolution had rapidly brought about significant cultural changes, including the rise of suffrage and women emerging from the home to work in factories, attend college, and pursue a career.

 

The active participation of women in the professional community, which had previously been dominated by men, was a tremendous cultural shock.

 

The men in charge began to wonder how they would manage the rise of these assertive women. I noticed that one group, the male physicians, was particularly resentful of the success of women doctors.

 

When the elite male physicians initiated a campaign to portray women as biologically unfit for anything beyond motherhood—claiming that their menstrual cycles had a destabilizing effect—it was aimed at eliminating competition and suppressing the suffrage movement.

 

This campaign to keep woman out of the public arena was their solution – or “cure” -- for what they referred to as the woman problem.

 

However, the title also has another meaning for me. As I write toward the end of my book, "While pursuing the study and practice of medicine, Jacobi and her mentors ... confronted head-on society's need to keep women bound to the idea that they were inherently sick. Along the way, they found self-actualization for doing good work." They gained the freedom, or self-cure, to participate in a life well-lived.

Q: How did you research the book, and what did you learn that especially surprised you?

 

A: I began by immersing myself in everything I could find about the first women doctors: Harriot Hunt, Elizabeth Blackwell, Ann Preston, Marie Zakrzewski, and Mary Putnam Jacobi. I was fascinated by their stories. I took notes, brainstormed using mind maps, created lists, and jotted down ideas on numerous sticky notes.

 

Throughout my research, I encountered many surprising revelations, but one "aha" moment significantly influenced how I wrote the book.

 

My first book, Dust Bowl Girls: The Inspiring Story of the Team That Barnstormed Its Way to Basketball Glory, focuses on a team of spirited young women basketball stars from the 1930s.

 

While researching The Cure for Women, I suddenly realized that the first women doctors needed to support each other unconditionally, like teammates. They were committed to help each other gain medical education, with the ultimate goal of serving the needs of sick women and children and training qualified young women to become doctors.

 

They had each other's backs, made important connections, and secured necessary funding. These women were American pioneers.

 

Q: The writer Olivia Campbell said, “Reeder artfully brings to life the fascinating story of Mary Putnam Jacobi, a visionary physician and ardent feminist whose ambition and perseverance amid ceaseless sexism are truly inspiring. Not only did Jacobi use scientific research to unequivocally refute the sexist claims of male doctors about female inferiority, but she also helped transform medicine into a science-based pursuit.” What do you think of that description, and what do you see as Jacobi's legacy today?

 

A: I was so honored to receive Olivia Campbell’s wonderful recommendation for my book. Her book, Women in White Coats, was an inspiration for me. Her comment about Jacobi is spot-on.

 

In 1868, Jacobi was the first woman accepted into the medical school at the Sorbonne in Paris, the best medical school in the world at the time. While there, she studied under the premier research scientists in the world, worked at their laboratories, and helped write their scientific papers. She reported the latest scientific discoveries to the Medical Record, an American journal.

 

After she graduated in 1871, she returned to America, bringing science with her. According to the Lancet, when Jacobi “returned to the US, she argued that laboratory science should be the foundation for modern medical practice. She championed experimentation and the use of statistics.”

 

She brought science to American medicine. She mentored young women physicians, taught them how to organize, network, and fight for justice. Jacobi was a suffragist, activist, and powerful proponent of women’s rights. Her life was the best argument for women in medicine.

 

Q: Given the current focus on women's health, what do you hope readers take away from the book?

 

A: I want readers to be inspired by the woman who overcame enormous barriers to become a pioneer in women's medicine. Jacobi challenged centuries of unfounded beliefs about women's physiology.

 

Before her study on menstruation, Victorian physicians believed—without any evidence—that women experienced monthly heats or ruts, similar to female dogs. They thought menstruation was a monthly rupture, akin to being stabbed or injured, leaving a woman's body in a constant state of infirmity. A woman’s brain was magically connected to her uterus, which shrunk if she overused her brain.

 

Jacobi’s research found that women weren’t stunted by their health. Quite the opposite; menstruation was like any other normal bodily function, digestion or hair growth. Jacobi’s study led to the beginning of a paradigm change for women: that they have a right to be educated and choose their own destinies.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

Q&A with Shanora Williams

 

Photo by Ericka Leigh Photography

 

 

Shanora Williams is the author of the new novel Beautiful Broken Love. Her many other novels include Until the Last Breath. She lives near Charlotte, North Carolina.

 

Q: How did you create your character Davina, the protagonist of Beautiful Broken Love?

 

A: A lot of Davina’s characteristics I’d pulled from myself. It astounded me how much I resonated with her, honestly. Her strong will, her drive to keep going despite her heavy circumstances. Even down to her being the oldest sister who took care of everyone else more than herself growing up.

 

I didn’t expect her to turn out the way she did, but I loved her even more for it because I could relate to her struggles and brokenness.

 

Q: How was the novel’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?

 

A: Funny enough, the title was originally Shouldn’t Be You. But after a while I was like hmm…no. That sounds way too negative and like she won’t end up with her happily ever after.

 

I didn’t want a title that sounded too quirky either. It needed to sound powerful and beautiful and messy because that is exactly what the main character’s love was to me. It was complicated, and Davina and Deke’s connection went much deeper than they anticipated.

 

After playing around with a few words, I decided to go with Beautiful Broken Love.

Q: Did you know how the novel would end before you started writing it, or did you make many changes along the way?

 

A: I did know how it would end. I knew they would both find their happiness, but I did change the last chapter before the epilogue to make it a full circle moment for both characters.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I’m currently working on a book connected to Beautiful Broken Love. :)

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: Just that I hope whoever reads the book enjoys it! I’m excited (and very nervous) to share this heart-wrenching story with the world.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

Q&A with Kay Smith-Blum

 

 

 

 

Kay Smith-Blum is the author of the new novel Tangles. It focuses on the Hanford nuclear site in Washington state. A former business owner, Smith-Blum lives in Seattle.

 

Q: How did you create your character Luke, the protagonist of Tangles?

 

A: A real-life activist who was ridiculed much of his adult life for saying “something’s not right here” – Tom Bailie – inspired much of Luke. Giving Luke a career in science allowed me to divvy out scientific info in a “non-teachy” way – at least I hope I did!

 

Q: How did you research the book, and what did you learn that especially surprised you?

 

A: Eight months of research, including reviews of classified materials that were released in the late ‘80s, reading a dozen nonfiction books published on Hanford between 1992 and 2012, and having conversations with over 20 experts in the nuclear and history of science fields created the basis for the novel.

 

Q: How was the book’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?

 

A: The “dreamed” tangled mass of hair begat the title and ultimately the theme of the story: the intricate web of government and corporate deception in the name of war which lasted long after the Cold War ended.

 

Personal “tangles” – the complicated relationships of the characters and all their various frustrations are the “through thread” of the tale. I’ll spare you the web cliché. 

Q: What do you hope readers take away from the novel?

 

A: Many things but probably the two most important are 1) the debunking of tropes of the mid-20th century. Women were still quite restricted in the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s and I hope to educate – in a non-teachy way – young women today about how recent our freedoms are.

 

And 2) the origins of the radioactive waste that now comprises the largest environmental disaster site in the Western world. Hanford is three Superfund sites and the waste tanks are leaking relatively close to the Columbia River, but more worrisome is the lack of actual knowledge of what each tank contains and how combustible they might be as hydrogen builds up inside.

 

There is NO effective process yet defined to deal with nuclear waste, which is why the state of Oregon passed a law barring any nuclear plants being built without a waste disposal plan (and that doesn’t exist).

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: Two things: I’m reworking my second manuscript about the civil rights movement “landing next door” to an iconic female jurist in a restricted neighborhood in Dallas, Texas, and a new tale based on my mother’s time as a teacher – with five lifelong friends in rural Texas – that involve their personal stories and graft and corruption around water rights and the state highway system. Stay tuned!

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: Yes! Thanks for asking – I’m thrilled to announce that all preorder royalties (books ordered prior to December 3) benefited the Heart of America NW (hanfordcleanup.org). This important watchdog advocacy organization is holding the US Department of Energy accountable. Hanford is every American’s problem.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

Dec. 3

 

 

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
Dec. 3, 1895: Anna Freud born.

Q&A with Roberta Silman

 

 

 

Roberta Silman is the author of the new story collection Heart-work. Her other books include the novel Summer Lightning. She lives in Massachusetts.

 

Q: Over how long a period did you write the stories in Heart-work?

 

A: In order to answer your question properly, I need to give you a little background. I got married four days after graduating from Cornell in 1956 and after my husband served six months in the Army we came back to New York and I got a job as a secretary to the assistant publisher of The Saturday Review magazine in 1957. 

 

In a few months I was promoted to assistant to the science dditor and began writing pieces on my own. But although I learned a lot at that job, I soon realized that I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life in journalism; no, I wanted to write fiction. 

 

So when my first child was born in 1961, I left The Saturday Review and made a plan: while bringing up our little girl I would try my hand at fiction. Two more children came along in 1966 and 1968 and life got extremely busy. But by then I had written several stories and sent them out and was beginning to get handwritten rejections.

 

Then, when a friend called in the spring of 1972 to tell me she was going back to school to get her master’s in social work, I was overcome by an unfamiliar feeling of jealousy. I remember sitting down with my husband that very night and asking him what I was going to do with the rest of my life. 

 

Although we were only in our 30s, he was very wise. He had started his own structural engineering consulting business in 1966 and knew a lot more about the world than I did. Moreover, besides the editors who were rejecting my stories he was also my only reader. 

 

So when he said, “Maybe it’s time to send your work to someone else,” it sounded sensible. Then he reminded me that we had both read recently that Sarah Lawrence, which was only 20 minutes from where we lived in Westchester, had just started a graduate program in writing. “Send them a few stories and see what happens,” was his advice. So I did.

 

I was accepted for the fall of 1972 and my teacher would be Grace Paley, who was one of the first teachers in that program.  We met once a week for three hours and talked about my work and her work and writers we both loved. 

 

Her deal was that we would work on my stories and not try to sell anything until the end of that first year. She was a wonderful teacher and became a good friend. At the end of that first year, she said it was time to send some stories out to magazines. The New Yorker bought one — “A Bad Baby” — and published it in July of 1973. 

 

I continued to go Sarah Lawrence and got my MFA in 1975 and sold some more stories. By the time I graduated, I had enough stories to approach a publisher. 

 

The Atlantic Monthly Press/Little Brown published Blood Relations, which was essentially my naster’s thesis, in 1977. It won Honorable Mention for the PEN Hemingway Prize in 1978 and also Honorable Mention for the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize that year.

 

But publishers like novels better than short stories. So I embarked on my first novel, Boundaries, which was published in 1979. And there have been five more novels since then. 

 

However, I have always loved short stories and while I was working on the novels and bringing up the children, I would get an idea for a story and take time off from whatever novel I was working on to complete it. That is the wonderful thing about stories — you can see the end. 

 

And after they were completed I would send them off to the magazines during a time when there were a lot more magazines buying stories than there are now. 

 

Heart-work is a compilation of a lot of those stories, written since the late 1970s until the last one, “Bed and Breakfast” which I wrote during the Covid pandemic. 

Q: How was the collection’s title — also the title of one of the stories in the book — chosen, and what does it signify for you?

 

A: Both Blood Relations and Heart-work have threads of my autobiography. About half of the stories in each collection are based on my birth family and the family Bob and I had after we married in 1956. 

 

The story “Heart-work” is based on my experience when my father was dying in 1982. He was around 80 — we never knew quite when he was born in Eastern Europe — and very sick at Columbia Presbyterian with cancer that had spread to the brain. 

 

I would visit him almost every day and often read to him from his favorite newspapers — The New York Times and The Jerusalem Post. One day I was reading from the Times Book Review when I came across a quotation from Rilke:

 

                   work of seeing is done, now 

                       go and do heart-work

                       on all the images imprisoned within you; for you

                       overpowered them: but even now you don’t know them.

 

I read it to him and he smiled, but I wasn’t really sure he had heard it. I learned in the coming days that he had not only heard it, but had thought about it and sometimes confused it with “hard work.” 

 

That got me thinking, and after his death, as I was wrestling with how to write about this person I had loved so much, I realized that heart-work is what we do every day of our lives — to connect to those we love, to comfort them and help them maneuver through life as best we all can. 

 

And that even though our lives are filled with moments of insight — “the images imprisoned within” in Rilke’s words — we have to work to understand those moments as our lives unfold and we try to live the best life that we can. 

 

Heart-work seemed to fit in with the motto by which I have lived: I first read it in Saul Bellow’s Herzog and was delighted when Anne Sexton used it for the title of her first book of poems, Live or Die. It is: “Live or die, but don’t poison everything.” 

 

Implied in that is the command to live with generosity of spirit and kindness and optimism. Which we certainly need at this moment in our country’s history.

 

Q: The Publishers Weekly review of the book said, “Silman navigates the core of being human, with an authentic, captivating message — to hold out for love in the end.” What do you think of that assessment?

 

A: I think it hits the mark. And here’s an interesting thing: After I read that in PW recently, I went back to that Rilke poem called “Turning Point” which contains the lines about heart-work. 

 

The few lines before those are:

 

        For there is a boundary to looking.

        And the world that is looked at so deeply

        wants to flourish in love.

 

That also hits the mark. Believing in love as the connector among human beings is a form of optimism which I have been lucky enough to have as a bastion of my life. 

 

The last sentence in my last novel, Summer Lightning, which we talked about in 2022, is: “For people live on after they die, and love is more than a madness: It is the protection against all that awaits us, our only defense against the hurts and truths of this uncertain, clamorous world.” 

 

So, yes, I think that to love and be loved is the richest experience one can have.

 

Q: As someone who writes both novels and stories, do you have a preference?

 

A: No. But when sitting down to write my novels I always remembered what Grace Paley said when we would talk about the difference between novels and stories. And remember that she wrote only stories. But she gave me some really wonderful advice when she said, “Think of a novel as a series of stories, then, hopefully, it won’t be so hard.” 

 

For me my novels have been a series of scenes, or stories, and I think there are stories that take much longer and need stories within stories to tell the whole narrative. 

 

A lot of my favorite authors — Cather, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Bellow, Katharine Anne Porter, Shirley Anne Grau, William Trevor, Nabokov — all wrote stories and novels. So did Tolstoy.

 

And some of my favorite writers — like Raymond Carver and Delmore Schwartz and Grace — only wrote stories. The last two also wrote poems. 

 

I think they all have value and remember loving short stories especially when I was a young mother and feeling triumphant when I could read a story or two before dropping off to much-needed sleep. And I love the online publications that are now publishing stories. 

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: When I was at Cornell I audited the courses Nabokov taught on world literature and Russian literature. My adviser wouldn’t let me take them for credit because Nabokov didn’t have a Ph.D. (This was before Lolita.) 

 

And although I am not a fan of Lolita, I love a lot of Nabokov’s work, especially Speak, Memory. I also love the poems of Akhmatova and Mandelstam, which have meant more and more to me as I grow older. 

 

So I am working on a novel which is about those poets as they intersected with Nabokov’s father, V.D. Nabokov. He was a great statesman and journalist who wanted Russia to be a democracy in the early part of the 20th century. 

 

My novel begins at the 300th celebration of the Romanov Dynasty in 1913 and ends in the early 1920s; its protagonist is a young journalist named Sybil Levin who is working for the International Herald Tribune in St. Petersburg. It is called The Russian Lesson.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: I thank you for the opportunity to reach out to readers and want to remind everyone reading this that although the doomsayers are forever predicting the end of books, they continue to hold their own, with the help of people like you. Happily they are here to stay — as they always have been.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Roberta Silman.

Q&A with Adam Howorth

 

 

 

Adam Howorth is the author of the new novel Fallen Feathers. He is the former communications director for Apple, and he lives in London.

 

Q: What inspired you to write Fallen Feathers, and how did you create your character Elizabeth?

 

A: Where I live inspired the story. It’s a very magical and historical area that provided the perfect backdrop for Elizabeth’s adventures. There's a beautiful stretch of river, stately homes, woods, church, and the site of an ancient priory, which provided many of the key locations you find in Fallen Feathers.

 

The character of Elizabeth represents the child in all of us and yet she also shows an insight and wisdom beyond her years, which was important because to those searching for her, she is no ordinary child.  

 

Q: How did you come up with the world in which the story is set?

 

A: I went for a walk one evening. The moon was showing through the trees and its light was reflecting off the river. I could make out a large house beyond the far bank and thought about some of the many lives and stories that had played out in this place over the centuries.

 

I imagined looking out one night at all of this and wondering what would happen if you saw something out of the ordinary that led you into a magical world. Elizabeth’s age makes her curious and trusting and susceptible to the darker forces that gravitate towards her. 

Q: Geordie Greig of The Independent said of the book, “Original and arresting. There is an element of late [Kazuo] Ishiguro.” What do you think of that comparison?

 

A: I was obviously extremely flattered and ashamed to say I hadn’t read him until Geordie said that! Now I have, Ishiguro is most definitely one of my favourite contemporary writers and worthy of all the accolades he’s received.

 

I particularly empathise with his reluctance to stick to genre or repeat himself. As I writer I feel your only constraint should be your imagination. 

 

Q: Did you know how the novel would end before you started writing it, or did you make many changes along the way?

 

A: I was as much in the dark as the reader! We went on the journey together with me making the final call at the last minute.

 

Writing the story was incredibly enjoyable but undisciplined and I hope I don’t do it the same way again. I would write scenes and characters and backstories as they came to me with scant regard for continuity.

 

That came back to bite me painfully when I was confronted with countless sheets of A4 paper spread across our living room floor, with me on my knees holding various coloured pens trying to make sense of it all.

 

As a writer, it's thrilling to go wherever the creative mood takes you - and I won’t change that element to a degree - but future work will come together in a more pre-organised and structured way. 

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I would love to write a sequel to Fallen Feathers, so I have been playing around with some ideas for that and have already written several scenes.

 

Otherwise, my main focus is a historical fiction based in Scotland hundreds of years ago. It has no title as yet but is the story of an old man who wants to leave the village for a final time to climb the local mountain.

 

It has been his lifelong ambition and he sets out to achieve it with an orphan girl for company. Together they encounter a series of existential challenges while she takes the opportunity to learn more about his life. I hope people find it magical and thrilling as well as surprising at the end.  

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: I think Fallen Fathers is quite a filmic story and visually rich, which was intentional as I wanted it to be vivid for the reader.

 

It blurs genres slightly and I was careful not to exclude younger audiences with language or ideas they’d find difficult to understand, as my hope was to create a novel that would appeal to readers of any age - one of my daughters read it when she was 9 and understood most of it. I would love to hear what readers think!

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

Q&A with Carol Matas

 

 

 

Carol Matas is the author of the new middle grade novel Zevi Takes the Spotlight. Her many other books include Who's Looking?. She lives in Winnipeg.

 

Q: What inspired you to write Zevi Takes the Spotlight, and how did you create your character Zevi?

 

A: The inspiration for Zevi Takes the Spotlight came from a crazy experience early in my career.

 

My cousin, Manny, a psychiatrist, was interested in the paranormal and recommended I see a psychic he thought was very good. I went to the psychic and asked him whether I would ever be published again because I could not find a publisher after my first book was published. He told me that I would have three books published within a year and by a publisher in Saskatoon!

 

It’s too long a story for here but, in fact, within a year all three books were published by a Saskatoon publisher - and no, I didn’t contact them because of that reading! It really was a true psychic prediction.

 

From that time on I became interested in psychic phenomena, near death experiences, etc. But when I wrote my first book about a young Jewish girl who suddenly becomes psychic after a near death experience, I used the construct to explore the idea that our lives can change in a second, and how do we react to that?

 

I was also interested in the push and pull between fate and free will and that series, Tales of a Reluctant Psychic, explores that.

 

Zevi Takes the Spotlight focuses on a teen who has been “burdened,” from his point of view, with this gift from a young age and that has naturally had a big effect on his character. He just wants to be a normal kid.

 

He is part of a close loving Jewish family, has close friends, and has managed to separate his psychic abilities from his everyday life. He loves acting and wants to be a famous actor. Is that so bad?

 

But instead, in this story, he suddenly becomes famous as a psychic (he saves a young child who was lost) and he fears that is going to ruin his life. Now, only he can save a famous actor from harm but by doing so he could derail all his own dreams.

 

Still, with his values and the support of his friends and family he chooses to put the life of another ahead of his own ambitions.

Q: The Association of Jewish Libraries said of the book, “Prolific Canadian author Carol Matas has another winner with this fun middle-grade novel that seamlessly blends elements of mystery, Jewishness, friendship, and the extraordinary...” What do you think of that description?

 

A: I love that description!

 

Q: How was the novel’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?

 

A: The publisher didn’t like the original title, Fame, so we started to throw around some ideas one Friday night at Shabbat dinner. My whole family comes every Shabbat, which is a great delight to me.

 

Earlier that year my eldest grandchild, Zevi, joked that no one would ever use his name in a book because it’s too hard to pronounce. “Challenge accepted!” I replied. When I submitted the manuscript, I asked the editor if we could change the lead character’s name to Zevi and she thought it was a great idea!

 

And at that Shabbat, it was Zevi’s sister, Naomi, who suddenly said, “How about Zevi Takes the Spotlight.” I loved it immediately and then so did the publisher!

 

And, speaking of grandchildren, all my grandchildren have parts in this book. Most of the characters are named after them, although to be clear, including Zevi, they are not based on them!

 

Q: What do you hope readers take away from the story?

 

A: I hope they have fun following the mystery of who is out to get Robert Lemon, the famous actor. I hope they enjoy all the bits about acting and film production. (I was an actor before I became a writer, so I was able to draw on that experience.)

 

Also, I wanted to write a fun book but a book that would get kids thinking about what fame really is. I started noticing that young people have gone from wanting to become scientists, or vets, or firefighters, to YouTube influencers. It seemed to me that fame had become the goal, not the result of hard work or inspiration. So, something to mull over.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: Right now, I’m working on a number of things. I have two books coming out in 2025. 

 

The first is a picture book with Kar-Ben publishers, called Kai and the Golem. It’s a story about a young boy and nothing is working out for him so he decides that some entity is wrecking his life on purpose. Since he happens to be reading a book about Golems he names the thing “Golem” although it actually isn’t a Golem at all.

 

And by the way, the name Kai…another of my grandchildren! That work is pretty much done.

 

The second project is a Holocaust novel set in Berlin, 1933 to 1935. It has a working title of Mia and Max but I think that will be changed. Scholastic Canada is publishing it.

 

It focuses from when Hitler came to power, until after the Nuremberg Laws were passed and how quickly life changed for the Jews of Germany. In fact, how everything changed  for all Germans. Almost overnight. I am still deep into revisions.

 

I am also working on numerous picture books, many out for submission, and just hoping some get taken.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: Yes, Zevi Takes the Spotlight is my first Hi/Lo book, for reluctant readers. Wow - what a challenge that was! It is aimed at all middle grade readers but those who are reading at a grade two to three level will be able to read it. High interest but low vocabulary.

 

I was determined to make the book as much fun as possible for all reading levels. When I had to change words that were too long, I made sure they were still interesting, and the same goes for sentence structure, and even the plot. Those had to be simple, but I tried to make sure they were varied and never boring.

 

I’m hoping to write a sequel.

 

Thank you Deborah, for hosting me and Zevi on your blog. We very much appreciate it!

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Carol Matas.

Dec. 2

 

 

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
Dec. 2, 1909: Joseph P. Lash born.

Q&A with Rosa Kwon Easton

 

 

 

 

Rosa Kwon Easton is the author of the new novel White Mulberry. Also a lawyer, she lives in Southern California.

 

Q: What inspired you to write White Mulberry, and how did you create your character Miyoung?

 

A: I found some old, faded documents on my father’s desk and learned that they were my Korean grandmother’s old Japanese nursing and midwife certificates, dating back to the late 1930s.

 

I knew my grandmother had lived in Japan and my father was born there, but what I didn’t know was that my grandmother was a single mother working as a nurse and raising a son alone in an unwelcoming country.

 

I yearned for stories of strong, female heroines like my grandmother but couldn’t find many growing up, or even as an adult. That’s when I knew I had to write White Mulberry.

 

My interviews with my grandmother formed the basis of my character Miyoung. Even though my grandmother was reluctant to share her story at first because it was painful, she eventually opened up, and Miyoung was born.

 

My grandmother led a remarkable life of resistance and resilience, and I crafted a character that I believe was true to her spirit and filled gaps in her history with my imagination.

 

 I was able to write about Miyoung’s journey to a new country at a young age because I experienced similar struggles growing up as an ethnic minority in the US. I hope readers will be inspired by Miyoung’s courage to be herself in a society that didn’t readily accept her, just as I was.

 

Q: How did you research the novel, and what did you learn that especially surprised you?

 

A: I spoke to many of my Korean relatives who lived in Japan while I was studying abroad in Kyoto in college, and subsequently during family visits. I read books on Koreans in Japan in graduate school while earning my master’s degree in international affairs.

 

In the last 10 years while I was writing this novel, I dove into history books, scholarly articles, memoirs, and fictional accounts of how Koreans lived in Japan during the colonial period. These resources deeply informed my research for this novel.

 

What surprised me the most about my research was that discrimination against Koreans in Japan is still prevalent today. On a recent trip to Kyoto, one of my second cousins recalled that she couldn’t gain employment at a clothing manufacturing company because she was Korean.

 

She is a third generation Korean born in Japan, but regardless of whether they keep their Korean names, pass as Japanese, or intermarry with Japanese, many Korean Japanese continue to live as outsiders in the only country they know and the land they call home. It’s important that people are aware that this problem still exists.

Q: The writer Lisa See said of the book, “A beautiful and deeply researched novel…How does a woman protect her family, honor her heritage, and save herself? If you loved Pachinko, you’ll love White Mulberry.” What do you think of that assessment?

 

A: I think Lisa See’s assessment is correct because White Mulberry is similar to Pachinko in that it explores the Korean ethnic minority living in Japan and their struggles for acceptance over decades of oppression.

 

However, I believe my novel is different in a few crucial ways. First, it closely follows the point of view of the spirited heroine who forges her own path when forced to make the impossible choice of saving herself or leaving her child.

 

My novel is also more a coming-of-age story of a Korean girl who is forced to conceal her true identity and "pass" as Japanese, while Pachinko is a multi-generational novel. White Mulberry is also inspired by my Korean grandmother’s life, so it’s based on a true story.

 

Q: What do you hope readers take away from the story?

 

A: My hope is that readers feel empowered to trust who they are and claim their unique place in the world. Miyoung’s courage to save her family from racial injustice despite grave danger is timely and inspiring given that our gender, race and identity are still being challenged today.

 

I hope this book inspires hope that tolerance, perseverance, and dreams can take root in the roughest soil and blossom in the toughest conditions, just like a beautiful mulberry tree.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: My second book is a sequel, but also a stand-alone novel. Red Seal continues the story of White Mulberry as Miyoung, a 26-year-old widow and single mother, and Ko-chan, her 6-year-old son, return to Korea and strive to claim their true selves, symbolized by a name seal, against the backdrop of WWII, the Korean War and eventually immigration to America.

 

Also inspired by a true story and told through alternating chapters in Miyoung and Ko-chan’s voices, it spans 30 years of Asian and American history and explores themes of family, identity, separation, and belonging.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: I share a Maltipoo (Maltese/Poodle mix) named Joey with my brother, who lives about an hour away. When we go on vacation, we leave Joey with my brother’s family, and vice versa. Joey loves his two families and is so happy every time he sees us. Dogs are amazing, loyal creatures, and the best writing companions.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb