Q&A with Mary Jane Black

Mary Jane Black is the author of the new book She Rode a Harley: A Memoir of Love and Motorcycles. A high school teacher for 14 years, she is a literacy specialist for the State of Texas. She lives in Austin.

Q: You've said you began thinking about writing this memoir when your late husband was diagnosed with cancer. Over how long a period did you work on the book?

A: Grief kept me from writing our love story for almost three years, until 2014, when I attended the Joyce Maynard memoir workshop in Guatemala. Joyce asked me to write about one of the happiest moments in my marriage instead of writing about cancer and death. I wrote all night.

The next morning, I read an essay called "Shovelhead" to the group of women writers, and this story of Dwayne and me buying and building our first Harley together – a 1980 Harley called a shovelhead for the shape of the motor – became the start of my memoir. Three years later, I had finished the last chapter. Then I spent a year revising and polishing it.

Q: What impact have motorcycles had on your life?

A: Motorcycles gave me a sense of self-confidence and independence that I will never totally lose even though I've not been on a Harley for nine years. My daughter once told me that if I could ride a Harley, I could do anything. I still believe that! I also miss it every day, and I long for that “wind in the face” feeling again. I lost my husband and my biker self at the same time.

Q: You write about some difficult times in your life--how hard was it to write this memoir?

A: To capture those experiences on the page meant I had to live them again, and that was emotionally exhausting. I felt again the pain of moments like the one when Dwayne whispers, "I have cancer." Some days I'd write a chapter or essay, and then I'd just go to bed and cry myself to sleep.

Of course, I also got to live the joyful days again. I sat on a Harley again and felt the motor rumbling beneath me. Dwayne was riding beside me again. 

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

A: I want readers to close the book after reading the last page and believe that love can change your life and that it stays with you forever. I want readers to know you should never give up hope because even in the darkest moments you can find delight in the small things. Unexpected people will show up in your life just when you need them.

I also want those who've lost someone they loved to know that you don't get over grief. Grief become less intense, but it will be always be a part of you. I often say grief for Dwayne lives in the marrow of my bones; it's part of who I am. 

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I'm working on a book based upon my mother's story of growing up Catholic in a small Northwest Arkansas town filled with Baptists and her elopement with my father who was 20 years older than her – but it's fiction with some real-life people and events woven in.

I always plan out scenes on a white board, creating a possible narrative arc. I need to know where my story starts and where it will end, but everything shifts as the narrator starts to tell her story. 

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: I want to be sure everyone understands that my memoir is one about love and motorcycles. Being a woman riding a Harley is the heart of my story, and my finding love and confidence again by traveling down the road on two wheels is the true story. When someone admires my independence and confidence, I always say that's Harley Mary. 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

Oct. 2

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
Oct. 2, 1879: Wallace Stevens born.

Q&A with Michael Hughes

Michael Hughes is the author of the new novel Country, which is based on The Iliad. He also has written the novel The Countenance Divine, and is an actor. Originally from Northern Ireland, he lives in London.

Q: How did you come up with the idea for a retelling of The Iliad set in 1990s Northern Ireland?

A: I grew up near the border in Northern Ireland, and the conflict there was the backdrop to my childhood. But it didn't really affect me directly, and I've lived in England since I went to college, so for a long time I didn't feel like it was my story to tell.

A few years ago, I attempted a polite literary novel about someone like me trying to come to terms with growing up in that time and place, but it was too close to my own experience, which I always find hard to write about directly, basically because it's usually so boring!

So, I abandoned that, and in the end my first novel The Countenance Divine (published in the UK by John Murray) was a sprawling multi-strand historical fantasia about the end of the world. 

Three or four three years ago there was a series of major terrorist attacks in France, and talking about those with friends, I found myself suggesting that my background gave me some understanding of the mentality of people who plan and carry out this kind of slaughter.

And that suggestion really troubled me. Was I really saying I understood what drove someone to murder civilians in the service of a political idea? It scratched away at me, and in the end I realized that if I was going to write about the Northern Ireland conflict, I had to do it from the point of view of those directly involved, on both sides, and let the reader see it through their eyes.

I know nothing at firsthand about violence of any kind, so I began to read history and memoirs from the period, and I also started into some of the classic war narratives. But I didn't really get any further than the Iliad. Everything I could want to say on the subject was there. I had a hunch that the nature of armed conflict, and what it does to the people involved, hadn't changed very much in a few thousand years. 

Q: In a review in The Irish Times, Eoin McNamee says of your writing, "He mixes Border idiom with Greek formalism." How much did you try to recapture the original Iliad, and what did you see as the right balance between it and your own story?

A: Using the structure of the Iliad was a way of allowing me to write about a real conflict without being tied to either dramatizing historical events, or inventing incidents that never happened, both of which felt like queasy territory, given that the grief and pain of those affected is still very much on the surface in Northern Ireland.

But I'm not a classical scholar of any kind and I probably read the Iliad in translation 12 or 15 times before I started writing, just to get it into my bones, without a clear idea how I would approach it. 

At first, I thought I would just pick a couple of vignettes and build a novel around those, but the more I dug into the ancient epic, the more parallels I found, and I began to enjoy the game of knitting the two together, sometimes to make a serious point, sometime playfully.

So, in the end it's much more of a beat-for-beat retelling than I originally intended, though I really did have to tone down the violence - the level of gore is off the scale in Homer! But there's plenty too that's my own invention, and someone who has never read the Iliad can certainly enjoy it as a pure political thriller.

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

A: I always settle on a title before I start writing seriously, but in this case, I realized the one I wanted to use - Fury - was also the name of a recent movie, and in the world of Google and Amazon that felt like a mistake. So, for most of the writing I had no idea what it would be called, which I found weirdly unsettling.

Every so often I would send my agent and publisher a list of possible titles, but none of them really stuck, until I suggested Country, which they both loved. The idea was to invoke the patriotism the characters feel is driving them, and also to reflect the rural setting – this territory really is the backwoods, in Irish terms.

At first, I was a little concerned it might sound romantically nationalistic, and the book could be mistake for a celebration of the violence I was writing about. In reality, it's probably more of a danger that people think it's something to do with country music.

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

A: It's very easy to condemn political violence as mindless savagery, particularly when it affects our own communities. But those involved almost always feel they are on the right side of history and will be remembered as heroes. It's that balance of savagery and glory that I found in the Iliad, and above all that's what I wanted to explore.

If you already have a clear view of the rights and wrongs of the Northern Ireland conflict, I hope this novel will make you think again, and reflect on the complexity of the situation. And if you never really understood what it was all about, I very much hope this book offers a primer on the issues and dynamics behind it, especially as the Brexit situation makes those unfortunately relevant again. 

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I always write best when I run towards what scares me most. This time, that means I'm finally working on something that's rooted in my own experience. My life has been pretty conventional: I had a happy childhood in a stable family, I went to college and had fun in my 20s, then settled down in my 30s and developed my career, and right now I live in the suburbs, married with two kids and a dog.

But sometimes, all that feels like the most unlikely thing in the world to have happened to me. So, I want to dig into those questions: how we form intimate relationships, and what drives us to make the choices that define what our lives become. It's basically a romantic comedy, is what I'm trying to say!

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: I also work as an actor, under the professional name Michael Colgan, and I had a small role in the recent HBO Chernobyl miniseries. If you saw it, I was the Minister of Coal who went to talk to the miners, and ended up with a serious dry-cleaning bill.

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

Q&A with D.Z. Stone

D.Z. Stone is the author of the new book No Past Tense: Love and Survival in the Shadow of the Holocaust. It focuses on the experiences of Holocaust survivors Kati and Willi Salcer. Stone is a journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times and Newsday. She lives outside New York City.

Q: How did you come to write No Past Tense, and how did you first encounter the Salcer family?

A: After Ron Salcer convinced his parents to interview for the Shoah Visual History Foundation in 1996, he wanted to know everything about their wartime experience and decided to hire a writer to find out. A friend of the Salcer family I knew through Columbia and a writing group recommended me.

I didn’t think I was the writer for this project as I was only part Jewish and didn’t know much about the Holocaust. However, I agreed to meet the Salcers. I was writing for Citibank/Citicorp and the Salcers suggested we meet at a nearby New York Health & Racquet Club, where they were members. As they were concentration camp survivors I expected them to be people who had been broken by life. Instead the most regal couple I had ever encountered entered the club waiting area and introduced themselves.

Q: How did you research the book, and did you learn anything that particularly surprised you?

A: I think I checked out every book in the Rockland County library system on the Holocaust (one librarian recently reminded me how if no one else wanted a book she would renew for me so I wouldn’t have to lug it back in). I also had access to the Columbia University library as an alumna.

One research problem I had was Mrs. Salcer describing being taken from Auschwitz to work in a vast underground munitions factory. She didn’t know the name of the factory or where it was located. Even her husband questioned if the factory were the result of traumatized memory. A lead from a Columbia professor ultimately connected me with Dr. Dieter Vaupel, a German history teacher who had documented where Mrs. Salcer had been.

The Salcers were Czech Jews who were teenagers living in Hungary when the Nazis occupied the country in March of 1944. I was shocked to learn that both of the Salcers had no idea that most of Europe’s Jews had already been killed and that they had never heard of Auschwitz. At the time they had believed deported Jews were being sent to work.

Q: You've said that the manuscript for this book "sat on a shelf for fifteen years." Can you describe its journey to publication?

A: When a draft was first completed, the manuscript was considered too experimental in style and a literary agent had me rewrite it in a more traditional third-person narrative. It didn’t work and the Salcers told me if I wanted I could forget what the agent said and write it how I thought it should be put together. Their only requirement was that it articulated how it felt for them.

However, when I completed another draft it was again called too experimental. Mrs. Salcer said when you have a perfect black dress with pearls you leave it as is while Mr. Salcer said the book was simply before its time and not to worry.

I’d make an effort now and then with a query letter, but I was either ignored or told there was no interest in Holocaust memoir. So the book essentially sat on my shelf for 15 years. After Mrs. Salcer passed in 2015 their son Ron asked about trying to get the book published. I sent out queries and a book proposal but to no avail.

Finally I told Ron about Dan Gerstein, who had a writing firm where part of their business was helping writers get published. We talked to Dan and he suggested that we first have the manuscript evaluated by an industry professional to see if it were marketable or if we should look to self-publish.

I was astounded when this industry professional said the book belonged on the shelf with classic Holocaust memoir. With this new evaluation and analysis of the manuscript, we put together a book proposal that brought immediate interest from publishers.

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

A: To quote Willi Salcer: “Who would have thought when you started this book about the Holocaust that you would have ended up with a love story?” 

The Holocaust in Hungary has been called the most brutal and methodical application of the Final Solution. Yet even under these circumstances when the Salcers first met after being forced into the same Jewish ghetto, they talked and flirted with each other the way any teenagers do. 

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I am currently completing a screenplay based on my own unpublished novel for the production company Burgeon & Flourish, LLC, and I am a producer, co-creator and writer of The Disabled List, an episodic comedy web series that gives voice to those living with disability, now under development by New York Rep.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: Writing No Past Tense was the most difficult and rewarding project of my life. I am forever grateful that the Salcers chose me to recount their story.

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

Q&A with Julie E. Justicz

Julie E. Justicz, photo by Jay Dunn

Julie E. Justicz is the author of the new novel Degrees of Difficulty. She is an attorney and advocate who focuses on civil rights issues. She lives in Oak Park, Illinois.

Q: How did you come up with the idea for Degrees of Difficulty, and for the Novotny family?

A: In one way, Degrees of Difficulty began years ago – in the spring of 1977 -- when my father told me my youngest brother Robert had been born with a rare chromosomal anomaly. I didn’t know what “Partial Monosomy 21” meant at the time, but I could tell Dad was concerned. No one in my family could have known that we were starting a journey that tested our love and our commitment to each other in a thousand ways.

My novel is a fictional exploration of a family caring for a child who has profound needs; it asks what love requires and what love costs each member of the Novotny family. Many works of fiction find their roots in an author’s childhood. Fiction gives a writer freedom to examine underlying truths that trouble and challenge her.

During my MFA program, I wrote a short story about a young boy with disabilities and his relationship with two siblings. I tapped into some of my own feelings as a sibling—namely. a profound sense of family loyalty, an incredibly deep and abiding love for my disabled brother, and, to be honest, a good deal of resentment, too.

When I began to write in in the point of view of the sister, Ivy, I found the resentment. I had a much harder time finding tenderness, concern, vulnerability. I realized that I needed to add the voices of the other family members to give the story more breathing room. The four different perspectives grew into a novel. From there, the challenge became structural . . . how to explore and balance the four points of view through the arc of the novel.

Q: The novel begins in the early 1990s and ends in 2008. How did you decide on the time frame? 

A: The reasons for this time frame are a bit convoluted. Here's my thought process: I wanted 1977 and 2000 to be markers in the novel, because those are the years when my brother Robert was born and when he passed away. (Although a work of fiction, this book is written in memory of him.)

In the early 1990s, when the novel opens, the three Novotny siblings are all teenagers—making their proximity to one another constant and unavoidable, their competition apparent, and all the family tensions palpable.

One of my MFA professors said that every story must start with a slightly unstable situation; I doubled down on that! The parents in my novel would also be tired and stressed beyond belief with three teenaged children, one of whom is profoundly disabled. We’d follow this stressed-out family, and then a major crisis would develop in 2000. I don’t want to spoil anything, but this is an event that fractures the family, perhaps beyond repair.

Finally, I knew that I wanted enough of a gap to bring the Novotny siblings to young adulthood—hence, 2008, for the last section of the novel. This is a time when they are beginning to know themselves as individuals, apart from their family, to begin to circle back to their parents, and perhaps ready to explore and understand the weight and the wonder of their combined experiences.      

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

A: Degree of difficulty refers to a rating scale of the complexity of an athlete’s maneuver in diving. Hugo, one of the POV characters in my novel, is a champion diver, who channels his emotions into a strict and rigorous training regimen. So, the title is a direct reference to his sport and his physical achievement.

The title is also a play on words, referring to the various difficulties that every member of the Novotny family encounters in life and in love.  Interestingly, a degree of difficulty in athletics is always multiplied by another number . . . a qualitative assessment of performance. So how hard are the various challenges each family member faces—and how do they manage these challenges?

Q: What are some of your favorite books?

A: Many of the writers whom I love are completely different from me in terms of style and form. Works that hold a special place in my heart because of the wonder they sparked when I first discovered them are: Lolita; Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson; Atonement by Ian MacEwan; Beloved by Toni Morrison, and just about everything written by Alice Munro.

The books that I most want to emulate tend to be written from a very close POV, often with a young narrator, and always an emotional intensity. I am thinking about Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones or Edwidge Danticat’s Claire of the Sea Light. I adore all of Elena Ferrante’s work—there’s an immediacy that excites me, that I strive for in my writing.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: My second novel, Conch Pearl, is set in Freeport, Grand Bahama Island. It’s the story of a young girl trying to escape a dangerous situation, which is larger, more diffuse than she can understand. It’s the story of island politics, sexual power, and post-colonialism, as seen through a young girl’s eyes.

I’ve got a good draft, but I am reworking the novel’s ending . . . which, if my first novel is any indicator, can take a considerable amount of time.

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

Q&A with Roselee Blooston

Roselee Blooston is the author of the new novel Trial by Family. She also has written the memoir Dying in Dubai, and her work has appeared in a variety of publications, including AARP The Magazine and The Vital Force. Also an actress and playwright, she lives in New York's Hudson Valley.

Q: How did you come up with the idea for Trial by Family, and for your cast of characters?

A: I went through a similar family experience many years ago––an inheritance battle involving my father’s second wife, me and my siblings, which went all the way to a jury trial, transforming everyone involved. I wanted to explore the fraught situation: how a crisis clarifies and sometimes exacerbates long-standing relationship challenges.

Some of the characters are loosely based on people I knew. Others are entirely fictionalized. Because the story is told from multiple points of view––I am inside the heads of nine people, an impossibility in real life–– even those characters that have some basis in my personal story, are invented.

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

A: I did not know how Trial by Family would end before I began writing. I did know, however, that it wouldn’t end the way the real situation concluded. My goal was to follow each character’s journey to its organic and logical conclusion, which, as I had hoped, took the story in directions that surprised even me.

Q: As you mentioned, the story is told from various characters’ points of view. Did you write it in the order in which it appears, or did you focus more on one character at a time?

A: I did both. In the first draft, I worked to structure the story so that each chapter was told by the person most impacted by the circumstances described in it and to move through the plot in order, i.e., the sister who receives the inciting phone call, the attorney who must handle an unwanted trial, the housekeeper who witnesses key information.

Then I printed out a hard copy of the draft , sat on my study floor and cut and amassed each character’s chapters/sections in piles, in order to ascertain whether or not their individual trajectories built strongly enough to both move the story forward and to deepen the reader’s understanding of that person. I addressed what I discovered during this process in the second and third drafts, pumping up some of the character’s actions, playing down others.

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

A: Many of us have family struggles with love, money, greed, and need, and many have a hard time dealing with sibling rivalry and forgiveness. I hope that Trial by Family gives readers a glimpse into the interior lives of a family under duress and that this fictional peek at different perspectives helps them understand what families leave, inherit and, for each member’s well-being, must let go.

In order to move on from a crisis, from past wounds, and to finally earn genuine adulthood, the sibling protagonists publicly defend themselves. In so doing, they gain self-mastery and better understand each other.

Practically speaking, the novel is also a cautionary tale for anyone, old or young, dealing with or anticipating estate issues.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I’m working on a memoir, tentatively titled Almost, My Life in the Theater–on ambition, failure, and the drive to create. It covers my first passion, acting, from childhood all the way through my encounters with four Oscar-winners.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: I love to hear from readers, and I love to meet with book clubs, either in person or via FaceTime. If you read and enjoyed Trial by Family, want to share your thoughts, or have a book group you’d like me to speak with, do feel free to contact me at roselee@roseleeblooston.com. And if you are so inclined, please post an Amazon or a Goodreads review. Much appreciated. Thank you!

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Roselee Blooston.

Oct. 1

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
Oct. 1, 1946: Tim O'Brien born.