April 27

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
April 27, 1759: Mary Wollstonecraft born.

Q&A with Renee Rosen

Renee Rosen is the author of the new novel White Collar Girl. Her other books include the novels Dollface and What the Lady Wants. A former advertising copywriter, she lives in Chicago.

Q: How did you come up with the idea for White Collar Girl, and for your main character, Jordan Walsh?

A: After I finished What the Lady Wants, my editor, agent and I started brainstorming on what my next book should be.

We were all intrigued by the idea of the Chicago Tribune and the Daley Machine, but it wasn’t until I met Marion Purcelli, a woman who started at the Tribune in 1949 as a “copyboy,” that the story really began taking shape. Marion took me under her wing, sharing many wonderful stories of her days at the paper.

Jordan Walsh and her mentor Mrs. Angelo are both based on Marion Purcelli, and after meeting her, the book pretty much wrote itself. I really did not know what would happen from one chapter to the next. The characters took the story and ran with it and I was just along for the ride.

Q: You’ve written three historical novels about Chicago. How did the writing and research process compare this time with the previous two?

A: The biggest difference between this book and my previous novels, Dollface, which was set in the 1920s, and What the Lady Wants, set in the Gilded Age, is that many of my readers were alive in the 1950s. They remember first-hand many of the events that I was writing about so it was important to get the details exactly right.

That was a real challenge, and yet, the beauty of writing about the not too distant past is that I was able to interview people who could give me personal accounts of the very subjects I was researching.

Q: What do Jordan’s experiences say about women in journalism in the 1950s?

A: I think Jordan’s experience of coming up against sexism in the workplace wasn’t unique to journalism. I think women in the 1950s were treated as second-class citizens in just about every field.

They were rarely in management or positions of power and their careers were often stalled in the rolls of secretaries and coffee-fetchers and the like. It took courageous women like Marion Purcelli and Jordan Walsh to challenge their male coworkers and pave the way for the generations to come.

Q: How much were the stories Jordan covers based on real incidents?

A: Great question. Nearly all the stories she investigates in White Collar Girl were taken straight from the headlines. I literally scoured back issues of the Tribune in search of the most scandalous events I could find—and thankfully, Chicago has many of those to choose from.

In a few instances I did shift the timeline and set the events back in the 1950s, but things like the horsemeat scandal, whereby horsemeat was being passed on to the consumer as beef, actually happened. Same for the Summerdale Scandal, in which the cops were helping a burglar in his robberies.

Also, the issue of voter fraud that surrounded the Nixon/Kennedy election has been well documented and given today’s political shenanigans makes it especially timely.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I’ve just turned in my new book, Windy City Blues, about the Chicago Blues and Chess Records, which was a tiny record label in Chicago that introduced the world to such iconic artists as Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry and Etta James.

Even the Rolling Stones crossed the pond to come record at Chess Records. Chicago’s Michigan Avenue was once known as Record Row because of all the music coming out of this town, including the Beatles’ American debut.

And of course you can’t tell the story of the Blues without going into the Civil Rights Movement, the Payola scandal, and the British Invasion. So there’s lots of themes in this book and it’s told from three different points of view, which was something new for me.

Obviously I could go on and on about this. I’m just on fire about this book. It changed me more than anything else I’ve ever worked on.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: I’m on the hunt now, looking for what I’m going to write about next. This is always an interesting journey since I know that whatever I pick, it’s going to have to be something that I can become completely obsessed with and live with for the next 18 months or so.

Right now I haven’t a clue as to what that next book will be, so wish me luck as I begin the process of searching for topics. 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. For a previous Q&A with Renee Rosen, please click here.

April 26

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
April 26, 1914: Bernard Malamud born.

Q&A with Eve Chase

Eve Chase, photo by Clare Borg-Cook

Eve Chase is the author of the new novel Black Rabbit Hall. She lives in Oxford, England.

Q: How did you come up with the idea for Black Rabbit Hall, and for the Alton family?

A: I’d been dreaming about four children in a big house in Cornwall for a long time, mulling it over, visualising it, so by the time I actually wrote Black Rabbit Hall, it felt like I had a 360 degree stage set in my head: I knew my way around the house itself, and the basic backbone of the story.

Q: You switch back and forth between one character, Amber, in the late 1960s, and another character, Lorna, in the early 21st century. Did you plan the structure of the book and the ending before you started writing it, or did you make many changes as you went along?

A: The structure was set from the start but not each chapter, which were written in a linear way but freely, not planned in any detail. I wish I could plan more – I suspect it would make the writing process less stressful! – but it doesn’t work for me.

The characters were led by Amber – she was always going to be this sincere, bookish young girl, poised on the verge of womanhood, torn between her loyalty to her wild twin brother and the desire to cut free and fall in love. Only once I knew Amber could I realise Lorna because of the way their two stories intertwine.

Q: Why did you decide to write Amber's sections in first person and Lorna's in third person?

A: The honest answer is that it just read right, sounded right to my ear – as a writer and reader – so I went with it.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: A novel called The Wildling Sisters about four teenage sisters from London sent to stay at a house in the English Cotswolds during the heat wave of 1959 - a summer that will change the course of their lives forever, bind them to a terrible secret.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: I work from a studio at the bottom of my garden – I have to put an internet blocker on my computer to stop myself Googling plants rather than writing. By far my best ideas come to me when I run – I don’t run very fast, I’m a plodder, but it’s the perfect antidote to writing. I drink too much tea. I cried when David Bowie died. 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

Q&A with Hannah Tennant-Moore

Hannah Tennant-Moore is the author of the new novel Wreck and Order. Her work has appeared in a variety of publications, including The New York Times and The New Republic. She lives in Upstate New York.

Q: You write that you found the inspiration for your novel during a trip to Sri Lanka. What about that location made it the right setting for your novel?

A: In my mid-20s, I spent two months backpacking around Sri Lanka, a country that appealed to me because of its Buddhism, its affordability, its smallness and relative isolation.

Solitude and unscheduled time are probably the conditions most conducive to writing, and I had both in Sri Lanka to an intoxicating degree. I had no cell phone, checked email rarely, and knew not a soul in the country.

I spent my days wandering, looking, listening, sitting, daydreaming, having occasional conversations with people who were open and unguarded because we knew we would not see each other again.

Being all alone in a foreign place creates a rare openness and receptivity to the outside world that has always been good for both my mental health and my writing.

My life had no context in Sri Lanka; I was reduced to an organism of observation. I wanted to give my character that same sense of self-forgetfulness, to put in relief the more chaotic, difficult aspects of her life.

I also couldn’t help writing about Sri Lanka because I found daily life in the country so rich and compelling—the food, landscape, politics, gender dynamics, religion—that I only had to sit down with a pen and paper and wring myself out like a sponge at the end of each day. These notes later helped me create a sense of place in Wreck and Order.

Q: The writer Mona Simpson called your character Elsie "a new kind of feminist." What do you think of that characterization?

A: I’m honored by it and hope there’s truth to it!

To be more specific, I’ll first give my definition of feminist, since the word has become so overused as to be meaningless. To me, a feminist is someone who believes men and women are entitled to the same rights and privileges, and is willing to take action to stand up for this belief. In this way, Elsie is not exactly feminist, but Wreck and Order is.

None of Elsie’s feelings about sex are conceptual or ideological. They are just feelings, and she rarely allows them to inform her decisions, so that she is often caught up in bad, preventable sexual experiences.

But by describing the particular pain she feels when her body is used as the object of a man’s pleasure and her own pleasure is overlooked, I hoped to signal a common problem facing young women in a new way: through emotion rather than prescription. Righteous feminist rage can be off-putting (I know mine is to me) without an acknowledgment of the pain underlying the rage.

The inequality of pleasure in our contemporary “sex-positive” culture has been well documented, through diatribes against porn; the lack of colloquial, sexy words for female masturbation and oral sex; the double standard that gives rare cunnilingus scenes in movies an NC-17 rating, while common depictions of fellatio get a common R.

But a dry observation of this discrepancy does not explain what’s wrong with it. Only a description of how the discrepancy feels—as a bodily, emotional experience—can do that.

I do not presume to speak, through Elsie, for what all women want and need. But I did want to make one woman’s desires, and the inaccessibility of their fulfillment, real, immediate, and relatable—not conceptual, not ideological, but human.

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

A: The whole time I was writing the first half of the book, I thought I knew where the narrative was heading, but I turned out to be very wrong. Elsie’s subtle transformation surprised me, and by the end of the book, I found myself following her lead, moved by the unorthodox inner strength she eventually reveals.

Still, I edited this novel dozens of times, and the particulars of Elsie’s transformation changed a lot along the way. The one thing that I never altered is the book’s final scene, which has always felt to me like the only possible ending.

Q: How did you come up with the novel's title, and what does it signify for you?

A: I’m afraid I can’t give that way! The meanings of the title—both literal and metaphorical—are revealed in the course of the novel.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I’m about a third of the way into a new novel, which makes playful use of research I’ve been doing for the last decade about the relationship between two of my favorite artists.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: Just that I’m very grateful to all readers, like you, who have taken an interest in Wreck and Order. Writing a novel can be quite lonely, and it’s nice to feel that the fruits of that solitary labor result in a greater sense of connectedness in the end.

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

April 25

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
April 25, 1908: Edward R. Murrow born.

Q&A with James F. Brooks

James F. Brooks is the author of the new book Mesa of Sorrows: A History of the Awat'ovi Massacre, which examines an event in 1700 that deeply affected the Hopi community in the American Southwest. His other books include Captives and Cousins. He is a professor of history and anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and he lives in Santa Barbara.

Q: You’ve lived in the American Southwest for many years and been fascinated with the history of the region. How did you come up with the idea for Mesa of Sorrows, and what has been the importance of the Awat’ovi Massacre in Hopi history?

A: I was a fellow at the School of American Research in 2000-2001, and was finishing Captives and Cousins, a history of intercultural slavery in the Southwest.

I was wrapping the book up, and was wondering if there were any cases in transactions of women and children between or within indigenous people.

Ruth Van Dyke, a colleague, said there was a terrible event where some of the survivors were women and children, and were distributed over other villages.

I don’t think I would have done the book unless the story was revealing itself in a way that you could get a sense of redemption and forgiveness…

I really believe these guys [in a Hopi delegation who attempted to negotiate with the Spanish] were trying to figure out a way to avoid all this, but it didn’t work out. Once I was to that point, I thought the book could do some good in the world.

It’s something that’s haunted them [the Hopi people] for a long time. It shaped their fundamental cultural views around communitarian commitments and pacifism.

Q: You write that your previous research on the Southwest involved violence between different groups of people, and this time you wanted to look at violence within a group of people. How did this book develop?

A: I imagined this early on as intra-cultural violence, except I realized it’s the social product of difference even within a group. You may imagine yourself as a community, but when tensions erupt, you may differ. It’s like [what happens] within religious communities: orthodoxy and heterodoxy…

It’s interesting. What I tried to do was to tell a particular story, but this is about all of us.

Q: Yes, I was going to ask you about how you see the universal nature of the story.

A: I was trying to talk the publisher into American Ilium [as the book’s title]. If Troy is the root stock for our cultural traditions, this is for the Hopi.

Q: I know you’ve written about the links you see with The Iliad and also with Neighbors, the book about the murder of Jews by their Polish neighbors in the town of Jedwabne in 1941.

A: The closing line of my acknowledgments is to my now-grown kids, “Let us try not to make strangers of our kinfolk and neighbors.”

Q: You’re writing about a time period hundreds of years ago. How did you bring the characters to life?

A: By trial and error. My writing process is the world’s worst! I just sit down and start, and the story begins to take over. At the end of one chapter, another story begins to bubble up.

I had the opportunity to work with one of the great editors, at Norton—John Glusman. I had to unlearn everything I learned about writing to do a trade book. I don’t know if I can do academic writing again! It’s so much fun to let the story lead.

Q: Was there anything that particularly startled you in the course of your research?

A: I was very surprised, even though people have known about the event for more than 100 years, and the Peabody did work [on it] in the ‘30s, that nobody had called out the odd features we see in the kivas, and the church burials [in the community] were not significantly discussed.

It appears to be very strong evidence for experimental piety going on. When you’re scared and times are turbulent, it makes sense that you would experiment with spiritual seeking.

Q: I was going to ask you about the role of religion in this episode.

A: It’s so hard—there’s a lot of criticism about Westerners imposing the notion of “religion”—there’s not a clean break between the spiritual and the secular [in this culture].

When the Franciscans arrived, there were people, because of their vulnerability, who were receptive to the new message. Some women and younger men who were not invested in kiva society.

Why at Awat’ovi and not other [locations]—I don’t know. Because of the location [as the easternmost town in the area], there was a transfer of ideas between Hopi and Puebloan peoples to the east, especially the Keres peoples of the Rio Grande. Add the trauma of Spanish colonization, missionization, you see people doing things…

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I’ve got a project I’m sitting on, [involving] research in the Colorado coalfields, near the border of New Mexico and Colorado…industrial capitalism comes in. I’ve got oral histories that would lend themselves to a creative nonfiction project…

The academic humanities are under assault from political critics outside the academy. Our best defense, in this case, is to showcase stories that inspire a wider public to reflect on the meaning of the past in their own lives. I hope this book may offer that kind of story.

--Interview with Deborah Kalb