March 3, 1926: James Merrill born.
Tuesday, March 3, 2020
Monday, March 2, 2020
Q&A with Nazila Fathi
Nazila Fathi is the author of two new children's picture books, My Name Is Cyrus, about Cyrus the Great, and Avicenna: The Father of Modern Medicine. She also has written the book The Lonely War: One Woman's Account of the Struggle for Modern Iran. She worked as a journalist in Iran for two decades, and now lives in the Washington, D.C., area.
Q: Why did you decide to write these books for kids about
Cyrus the Great and Avicenna?
A: I wrote these books for very personal reasons. My son was
5 and my daughter was 3 ½ when we left
Iran. They didn’t know much about Iran except for what they heard from us or on
the news media—which was often negative. There was a period that my son did not
want to be affiliated to Iran and changed his name!
So, I began telling them these stories when they were 7 and 8
so they would learn their country has over 2,000 years of civilization.
Q: What kind of research did you do to write the books, and
did you learn anything that especially surprised you?
A: For My Name is Cyrus, I went back to the earliest
accounts about him. I read the translation of The Histories, by Herodotus, and
also Xenophon’s Cyrus the Great by Larry Hedrick.
Both Xenophon and Herodotus were Greek, which means the
books were written by Persia’s enemies, but interestingly, both authors depict
Cyrus in a positive light as a leader.
For Avicenna, the Father of Modern Medicine, there were many
stories written by Avicenna and his students.
Q: What was it like for you to turn to children's book
writing after writing for adults?
A: The voice came much more naturally. Both my kids, who are
14 and 15 now, were my best coaches. They loved stories and wouldn’t go to
sleep until they listened to two or three stories. During road trips, I
entertained them with stories.
Q: What do you hope kids take away from the books?
A: First, I hope they like the stories and enjoy them. But I
also hope they inspire them because they need to dream big and learn to work
hard from a young age.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I am working on another story about Cyrus. To Iranians,
Cyrus is what Moses is to the Jews. He is truly their liberator and a source of
pride. I have another story about him that I feel I need to tell.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I do want to urge parents to read more global stories for
their children. There is so much in these stories that we can learn as adults
too. My kids enjoyed them and I believe they shaped their perspective of people
in other parts of the world. Stories are fun ways to teach kids about different
cultures and their values.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
Sunday, March 1, 2020
Q&A with Katrin Schumann
Katrin Schumann is the author of the new novel This Terrible Beauty. Her other books include the novel The Forgotten Hours. She lives in Boston and in Key West, where she is the program coordinator for the Key West Literary Seminar and Workshops.
Q:
How did you come up with the idea for This Terrible Beauty, and for your
character Bettina?
A:
In November 1989, I flew with my father to the German island of Rügen, up north
on the Baltic Sea. A Berliner, my father had spent summers there as a little
boy, not unlike Bostonians who head to the Vineyard to escape the city.
But
for three decades, the island had been on lockdown: after World War II, half of
Germany fell under Russian control, trapping millions of Germans behind a
physical and metaphorical wall. Luckily, my father escaped to the West and
eventually made his way to freedom in America.
Just
a few weeks before our trip to Rügen, the actual wall that split Germany in
two—patrolled by sharpshooters and dogs, lined with bombs—had finally come
down. Truth be told, until that visit to the island, my family’s history felt
distant and confusing to me.
That
all changed after my father and I crept into my great aunt’s abandoned cottage
on a medieval square in Saßnitz, where I came face-to-face with the epic, yet
also crushingly mundane, struggles that defined 20th century German history,
and dramatically changed the course of millions of lives.
The
derelict fisherman’s cottage was filled with debris and broken bottles, unloved
and unlived in. In a corner of the cramped living room was a large iron
firepit, and behind it a huge coal stain had blossomed over the floral
wallpaper.
For
decades, East Germans relied heavily on cheap and dirty lignite (brown coal),
which heated and polluted their homes and cities. The damp wallpaper itself was
peeling off in places, and underneath it I saw layer upon layer of designs from
past eras.
In
that moment, it struck me just how many German women had struggled to live
ordinary lives under extraordinary circumstances, first under fascism then
under communism.
I
learned that when the Russians arrived on the island, my great aunt (fearful of
retribution) had rushed to the local cemetery to try to scrape the swastika off
her husband’s gravestone with a kitchen knife. That terrible contradiction
stuck with me.
This
was when my novel’s protagonist, Bettina Heilstrom, first came to me as a
character: a young woman who yearns for love and finds herself in conflict with
political forces entirely outside her control.
Do
you fight? Do you give up? Do you accept guilt and seek redemption? How on
earth do you keep going? History is complicated, and there are stories that
haven’t been fully told yet; Bettina’s is one of them.
Q:
How did you research the novel, and did you learn anything especially
surprising?
A:
I still had so much to learn about that era, despite the fact that I’m German
by birth and my parents have history in East Germany. Doing the research for
this book was great fun for me—I learned so many fascinating things.
I
read a lot of books about World War II and the Cold War, and my favorites were
books that managed to really make the era come alive, such as The File by Timothy
Garton Ash, Stasiland by Anna Funder, and In Times of Fading Light by Eugen
Ruge.
I
also loved the memoir Twelve Years by Joel Agee.
I watched movies and TV
series, many of them in German; while those don’t provide good source material
they are helpful in terms of understanding mood and environment.
Over
the years, I ended up travelling to Rügen a number of times. I don’t think I
could have written this book without having a very clear sense of the geography
of the island.
The
setting is hugely important to the story as Bettina’s deep attachment to her
hometown (and her homeland) raises the stakes for her when politics interfere
in regular life, and she’s forced to take a hard look at her loyalties.
One
of the most surprising things I learned is that the Berlin wall wasn’t built
until 1961 and there was actually fairly free movement between East and West up
until then.
I
became fascinated by how Communism—and the brutal methods of the Stasi, the
secret police (spying on its citizens, limiting freedoms, etc.)—kind of crept
into everyday life slowly but steadily.
History
could have been very different for the Germans. Those years of transition were
painful and destructive and yet also full of hope, and I was drawn in by that
terrible contrast.
Q: How was the novel's title chosen, and what does it signify for you?
A:
The novel’s working title was The House of a Thousand Eyes, which was the
nickname the East Germans gave to the Stasi HQ in Berlin.
Locals
knew that dark, secretive things were going on behind the façade (which was
pocked with hundreds of small windows), and that the Secret Police were spying
on everyone… you could look out but not in.
Over
time it became clear that the book had outgrown that title— ultimately, the
themes became broader and the story was less about the mechanisms of the State
and more about the struggle of the individual to find love and beauty in a
violent and unpredictable world.
In
one cliff-side scene, I had used the term “terrible beauty” to describe
Bettina’s feelings about her environment, and I felt it embodied that unending
struggle we all engage in to make the best of our situations.
In
Yeats’ poem "Easter 1916" he uses the line “all changed, changed utterly: A
terrible beauty is born” in reference to the Easter uprising in Ireland (when
the British brutally beat down the Republicans), which launched regular folk
into a devastating, decades-long, unwinnable battle—a kind of necessary evil,
according to Yeats.
That
resonated with me in terms of my story: how we hope and dream, and yet must
also tragically compromise. How we continue to strive and yearn and fight, in
spite of the price exacted from us.
Q: In our previous interview, you said that this novel, like The Forgotten Hours, is "about a young woman dealing with circumstances beyond her control" and "also explores this idea that people are not easy to define and label; they’re rarely all good or all bad." How would you compare the two novels?
A:
On a superficial level these two novels could not seem more different, yet I
think they grew out of a compulsion I have to explore female agency and the
notion that, despite being social animals, in the end we can only rely on
ourselves, on our own personal sense of moral obligation and destiny.
I’m
fascinated by what makes us and what breaks us, especially as females who’ve
been trained toward certain behaviors by our culture.
In
The Forgotten Hours, Katie wants to be the good daughter, trusting and
trustworthy, and I was interested in exploring her need to know the truth in
order to be a fully whole adult. She starts out compromised and ends up
stronger, with a healthier sense of self.
Similarly,
in This Terrible Beauty, Bettina’s circumstances take away all her power and
she struggles to grow into the person she wants to be. That’s why she’s
vulnerable to falling in love with Peter—he restores her sense of possibility
and growth.
In
the end she has to face the same question Katie faced: in my own personal moral
universe, what choices will I make and can I live with them?
The
idea that we are all complex human beings who aren’t easily pigeon-holed is a
strong connecting thread between the two novels. In each book there are
characters that readers want to love or hate, and yet the story forces those readers
to constantly re-assess.
I
think This Terrible Beauty takes this idea even further—how do we live our best
lives in those murky gray areas? When global politics, individuals, or
institutions seek to control or limit us, will we choose to fight for our lives
or will we give in?
Q: What are you working on now?
Q: What are you working on now?
A:
I’m working on a novel which is a loose reimagining of Madame Bovary set on a
scorching Mediterranean island during the summer of 1969, a time of immense
social upheaval.
It
centers on a troubled young wife and mother who insists on accompanying her
husband on sabbatical to Ibiza, where the freedoms they encounter and the
choices they make change their lives forever.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A:
I’ve found that one of the most joyful things about being a professional writer
has been encouraging other people to develop and share their own stories
through my teaching and my blog.
I
taught for a couple of years in prisons in Massachusetts and saw firsthand how
much we can learn and heal when we’re given permission to share our stories
with others.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Katrin Schumann.
Q&A with Frank A. von Hippel
Frank A. von Hippel is the author of the new book The Chemical Age: How Chemists Fought Famine and Disease, Killed Millions, and Changed Our Relationship with the Earth. He is a professor of ecotoxicology at Northern Arizona University.
Q: How did you come up with the idea for The Chemical Age,
and how did you select the topics to include in the book?
A: The history of the environmental movement has always
fascinated me, especially the outsized role of pesticides in the bitter fights
that took place between industry and government agencies on the one side and
people fighting for a clean environment on the other.
The political context of this history especially interested
me, coming as it did on the heels of the Second World War and the broadcast of
synthetic chemicals such as DDT on such a massive scale.
Never before had humanity manipulated the chemistry of the
global environment to such an extent, and with absolutely no concept of what
the impacts might be to nature or human health. The hubris of this chemical age
had to hold some lessons for humanity.
I decided to focus the book on the people involved – from
the scientists who made the discoveries to the people such as Rachel Carson who
warned of the risks – because marching through that history from the
perspective of the critical people allows the reader to see the story unfold as
a quest.
Scientists were on a quest to conquer famine and disease,
and to receive the glory of discovery. But they did so in the context of
national conflicts, colonialism, and ceaseless wars.
Chemical advances in public health fed into similar advances
in chemical warfare, and vice versa. Meanwhile, environmentalists were on a
quest to save the world from ourselves.
The question for me as the writer was how far to back up in
the telling of this story, and what to include.
I decided to anchor the book’s beginning in the Irish Potato
Famine because it occurred just before the critical scientific discoveries,
both theoretical and empirical, that would launch the chemical age, and it
included two major ingredients of human tragedy: famine and infectious disease.
Both motivated scientists to develop effective pesticides.
I chose to focus the second part of the book on four
vector-borne diseases that each played a major role in human history and that
each presented different scientific problems in the identifications of the
pathogen and vector.
I focused the third part of the book on war because of the
cross-fertilization of scientific talent and chemistry that produced such
startlingly toxic weapons and pesticides.
Together, these three elements – famine, plague, and war –
defined human misery since the origin of civilizations. And they culminated in
the transformation of both societies and the global environment into one
dominated by chemicals.
We still live in that world, and we are still in the process
of an ecological awakening regarding the place of humanity in a world forever
altered by chemistry.
Q: How did you research the book, and did you learn anything
that particularly surprised you?
A: I don’t think I could have written this book 15 or 20
years ago. It required reading a vast historical literature that only recently
became accessible via scanned documents held in libraries throughout the world.
I read 100-200 historical books and documents for each chapter, some extending
back as far as the 5th century BCE.
A challenge for me was deciding what to exclude – how could
I narrow down two-and-a-half millennia of scientific advances into a coherent
story?
Reading many of the centuries-old documents in English took
a bit of getting used to, given how much the language has evolved. For
non-English documents, I read the earliest translations I could find.
I was not naïve to the history before I began my research,
but I was still surprised by the extent of the bigotry that formed a consistent
storyline throughout.
I included many quotes along these lines to bring the reader
into the mindset of the era, and to show how that mindset influenced monumental
atrocities such as slavery and genocide.
And even how that mindset led prominent men to dismiss and
disparage Rachel Carson, who gave voice to the growing concerns about pollution
at just the right moment. To me that moment felt like the right place to close
the book – with Carson’s death and its aftermath.
The world has changed so much since then, since 1964. But
people have not, and the lessons of human efforts to combat famine, plague, and
each other are just as crisp today as they were when Rachel Carson penned her
last words.
Q: What do you see as Rachel Carson’s legacy today?
A: Carson was a humble person who galvanized a global
movement. She did this by writing eloquently about faceless bureaucrats
and industrial tycoons who decided for everyone else what risks were
acceptable.
She made ordinary people realize that they had a voice and
role to play in decisions that affected their communities and the broader
environment. She explained how all of life is connected, allowing people
to see their place in the natural world.
Many other people followed her example and took on
environmental threats that were not yet apparent in 1964. This includes
global issues such as stratospheric ozone depletion and climate change that
threaten all life on earth. But she also inspired people to act locally to
combat pollution in their communities.
I think that her legacy is beyond estimation.
Q: The book's epilogue focuses on your own family history.
How much of this story had you already known before writing the book?
A: I knew of my family’s role in the history of science
before writing the book, but I learned a great deal about the context in which
they worked that made the history much richer.
For example, I had not read much of the correspondence
between my great-grandfather James Franck and other leading scientists as
Europe descended into World War II.
Reading those letters, I felt like I was looking over his
shoulder as the weight of getting his family out of Nazi Germany weighed upon
him, or as he corresponded with Einstein after the war to try to avert a famine
in Germany.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I’m sketching out a book on the history of science –
especially the personal interactions of scientists – during the lifetime of my
great-grandfather, from 1882-1964.
Reading correspondence between scientists as I wrote The
Chemical Age, I grew increasingly fascinated by their shared experiences and
how these shaped their ideas. Scientists share a common method and appreciation
for knowledge, even as they engage in fierce rivalries to be the first to
discovery.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: My original contract from the University of Chicago Press
provided for less than 18 months to write the book. It took me nearly nine
years.
This was in part due to my deep dive into historical
documents. I found that many contemporary science histories repeat errors
that originated in secondary sources because the writers did not go back to the
original source material to check the accuracy of facts or quotes.
It is similar to the problem with Wikipedia, which contains
an incredible breadth of information, but much of it is wrong or
misleading.
I often find the same problem in the scientific literature,
where authors misattribute ideas, fail to cite the original source, and rely on
oft-cited secondary sources that contain errors. I hope that I have
avoided these pitfalls in The Chemical Age.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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