Q&A with Katharine Branham

 

 

Katharine Branham is the author of the new book Self Help Slut: Starting with a Clean Slate. It's the first in a series. She also has written the book How I Found My Superpowers. She is a psychic medium, and she lives in The Woodlands, Texas.

 

Q: You’ve said that the title Self Help Slut came to you during a writing class, when another writer said something that sounded like that as his microphone faded in and out, and although you knew that wasn’t what he said, it sounded like a good title for your workbook series. Can you say more about the inspiration behind the book and its title?

 

A: As I fully contemplated using this title, I realized there were other factors to consider. The clients who I’d been working with for all these years had beautiful hearts, yet they lacked the belief that they were worthy of knowing or understanding anything of the spirit world.

 

Many had been taught that only a select few are worthy of the spiritual walk. They were people who’d been discarded by their families or friends and made to feel as if they were worthless. I grew up feeling the same way, feeling that I could never be loved.

 

If you remember, in How I Found My Superpowers, I shared the story from my childhood of the peeping tom at the kitchen window when, though I was just age 7, my mother called me a slut. While I didn’t even know the word or its meaning at the time, it was a term that she continued to use when she would get jealous.

 

So, in a sense, if a person can get past the false belief imposed by society, family, or stigma of a certain word or phrase like slut, then they are on the path to becoming their authentic self. And, they can begin clearing their energy field of other people’s shit like I did with my mother. 

 

Q: What led you to become a psychic medium and what is the difference between the term “psychic” and the term “psychic medium”?

 

A: I am considered a psychic medium as opposed to just psychic. There is a big difference. There are fewer truly gifted psychic mediums. 

 

A medium has psychic abilities but not all psychics are capable of becoming mediums.

 

A medium can directly communicate with the spirits in the afterlife. This special ability cannot be performed by a psychic. A medium serves as a channel between the world of the living and the afterlife which is beyond the abilities of a psychic. 

 

On the other hand, a psychic can foretell the future by using several spiritual channels. For example, a psychic can provide insights for you concerning relationships, career, money, or love. A medium cannot foresee these things or future events. Some mediums cannot read tarots or harness the power of other spiritual channels like crystal balls, runes, or cards. 

 

A medium reads the messages of the spirits in the afterlife. This means the reader will just transmit to the sitter the messages or signals from the spiritual world. In contrast, a psychic reads your aura and the presence that could influence your future. This means that a psychic directly interacts with the sitter and will not be able to contact the spirits at all. 

 

This is a very basic understanding of the difference between the two. My abilities are much more unique than the basics, such as being a remote viewer. I can see people, places, things, and events in real time as though she is participating in the event. 

 

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

 

A: I believe this series can be helpful to everyone, male or female, who wishes to clear their energy field and raise their frequency through healing trauma and relationship contracts that they’ve carried in this life.

 

Q: What is your plan for this series? How will the books build off one another? 

 

A: The main effort will be in teaching about clearing the seven main chakras and how they relate to our everyday experiences. There will be many more stories involving people, places, and spiritual beings.

 

The one theme that you will find in all of my workbooks that you typically won’t find in other’s is the stories of how I learned these teachings and the experiences behind them.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

July 20

 

 

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
July 20, 1933: Cormac McCarthy born.

Q&A with Victoria Shepherd

 

 

 

Victoria Shepherd is the author of the new book A History of Delusions: The Glass King, a Substitute Husband and a Walking Corpse. She produced the series A History of Delusions for BBC Radio 4, and has produced many other documentaries. 

 

Q: What inspired you to write A History of Delusions (also the subject of your radio program), and how did you choose the cases to include?

 

A: I was working on something completely different when I stumbled on the subject, researching for a radio documentary about the history of the heart. In a book about early modern Europe I found a brief reference to the Charles VI of France, a 14th-into-15th-century monarch who had believed that he had turned into glass. Eh? What’s going on here?

 

The heart documentary would have to wait. Here was a king publicly embroiled in the Hundred Years War with England (a busy day job undoubtedly), but privately terrified that he would shatter if he sat down. He apparently wrapped blankets around him and had iron rods sewn into his trousers. It’s an absurd scenario.

 

On closer consideration I began to hear something more serious. To the glass king, the situation is no less than life and death. The courts of Europe are laughing at him. So what was the delusion offering him that was worth that ridicule and social exclusion? What kind of help or protection?

 

After all, it’s a considerable feat of imagination and stamina to challenge the generally accepted reality and then keep that challenge up in the face of others – everyone else – who don’t agree with you. I began to hear a whispered communiqué, its meaning encrypted and smuggled inside the absurdity, demanding an audience; attention and interpretation.

 

A moment or two reflecting on glass as a material was rewarding. Glass was a relatively new technology at the time, specifically “plate” glass developed in Rouen with its distinctive “bullseye” at the centre and thinner, clear glass at the edges which could be used in domestic windows.

 

Charles may have seen glass in Chartres Cathedral or held a hefty clouded-glass drinking vessel at court, but glass was new in homes and had an alchemical magic to it: Here was sand, heated to extreme temperatures which was transparent yet hard; breakable, beautiful, fragile.

 

It’s not hard to see how being “made of glass” might operate as an instruction to the world on how to treat you. Being glass is an effective distance regulator, “Stay back, or you’ll break me,” you announce, but also “I’m precious; a treasure.”

 

Glass isn’t new any more, of course, but it still presents unique qualities and elegantly embodies contradictions. Its magic lingers today in the fairy tale glass slippers we still grow up reading about.

 

I made a documentary about what become a more widespread early modern psychological phenomenon called “Glass Delusion,” seen as a symptom of “melancholy” (broadly speaking what we’d think of now as depression) and then I was hooked as a historical detective of delusions.

 

I went in search of traces of the real lives of other people from the past with delusions, their struggles and challenges, and I could see that the delusions, separated by hundreds of years, were operating in the same way.

 

I chose more subjects for a BBC Radio 4 series, each of them one of the principal “types” of delusion as established by the World Health Organisation. When I came to write a book I chose yet more subjects whose delusions were enduring “types” and also presented the most intriguing psychological mysteries from centuries past.

 

“Madame M” is a French housewife who walked into a Paris police station in 1918 demanding a divorce on the grounds that her husband had been murdered and substituted for a double. It’s like the opening of an Edgar Allan Poe short story. Her “delusion of doubles” incorporated a conspiracy that scores of children had been abducted and hidden under Paris.

 

It was in Paris just after the Revolution that psychiatry began to develop as a discipline in a number of pioneering asylums, and it was here that physicians were first asking questions of people with delusions and making detailed notes trying to create a taxonomy for delusions.

 

Many of the subjects I chose were the “poster girls” for new delusion types presented by doctors as cases studies under pseudonyms to their peers in the medical establishment. My endeavour as a historian was to find the real people behind the “marvels of the mind” as they were presented.

 

These people include James Tilly Matthews, an 18th-century conspiracy theorist, “Léa-Anna B.”, a case of “erotomania” who believed that George V of England was madly in love with her, and the 19th-century “Madame X” who believed that she was already dead. Can we understand?

 

Q: How did you research the topic, and what did you learn that particularly intrigued you?

 

A: My research involved many 19th and early-20th-century case notes from Paris asylums so I needed to up my game with formal French! These documents were my primary source material and I feel enormous gratitude to the physicians who conducted these interviews with individuals experiencing delusions, and took such detailed notes, sometimes over many decades.

 

Much of my research took place during the Covid-19 lockdowns of the past two years and so I was reliant on helpful archivists in France and the UK and occasionally their willingness to pop documents in the post.

While remote archive research has its challenges, I benefitted hugely from seismic leaps in the digitisation and searchability of parish records in Britain, containing births, marriages, and deaths. Specifically I was able to search a person’s name and include variations in spelling in one single search.

 

For example, this allowed me to learn that James Tilly Matthews was recorded as “Tilley” in his birth record and therefore discover that he was born in Staffordshire, not in Wales as historians had previously assumed.

 

This meant that Matthews had grown up in the cradle of the industrial revolution and made more sense of the content of his delusional conspiracy theory – its centrepiece was a contraption he called an “Air Loom,” a sinister machine operated by villainous sympathisers of the French Revolution that emitted magnetic rays to influence the minds of politicians in Westminster.

 

Without that amazing search engine facility I would never have been able to find him in Staffordshire without trailing round all the parishes of England!

 

I also found Matthews’s marriage record in St. George’s Bloomsbury, London, which included his wonderful looping signature. He was a brilliant draftsman and illustrator and it was very exciting to see a sample of his handwriting.

 

Q: The Publishers Weekly review of the book says, in part, “Reminiscent of Oliver Sachs, Shepherd opts for empathy over prurience, highlighting the humanity of her subjects and lucidly drawing out the dream logic by which their delusions operate.” What do you think of that description?

 

A: Well, I couldn’t be more delighted! I’ve learned so much from Sachs about the neurology of delusions: the front right cortex and how delusions can be traced to disfunction in that region – a particularly intriguing part of the brain responsible for sense of self and other.

 

I’ve also been so inspired by the way Sachs champions the subjective, imaginative storytelling at work when patients talk to their doctors about delusions. He suggests we listen to the stories themselves as we might do a fable and might understand better what is really being communicated if we do.

 

Today science is wary of the anecdotal and prefers to look instead to large quantitative analysis and control studies for its data. Sachs’s plea is to “restore the human subject at the centre – the suffering, afflicted, fighting human subject,” in other words to look for the person and the particularities of their real life between the lines of the story they tell.

 

I’ve come to see the meaning of delusions as encoded. Delusions demand attention and interpretation and I’ve come to think that, truth be told, we all want a bit of this, and that there’s dignity in the request. Dignity is not something that has traditionally been afforded to people with delusions.

 

And in Sachs-ian spirit I’ve tried to listen to the delusion itself and interpret; to pull up a chair, metaphorically speaking, and try to understand what’s being communicated through these wildly imaginative creations.

 

I had an organising question in my mind as I set off on the trail of my subjects: yes, a delusion might be “mad,” but it means something real, what is it? Delusions do have a lot in common with dreams. They are not conscious, they are also encoded, but they do have an internal logic as the unconscious, buried feelings, hopes, fears and possibilities take shape.

 

I’ve tried to catch a glimpse of real people and real lives behind the “curios” and the pseudonyms, and having written the book, I’m full of admiration for my subjects’ ingenious imaginations, using delusions to help them navigate tough lives.

 

Q: What do you see looking ahead when it comes to the study of delusions?

 

A: Neurology and shiny new scanning technology will continue to teach us more about the part organic brain disease or brain damage plays in delusions. I’ve taken a certain poetic license in putting a psychological lens on people who were alive before such technology existed.

 

Organic brain disease has been the prevailing explanation for delusions for some time and I’ve tried to fill in other pieces of the puzzle - to see if I can understand these delusions better psychologically and understand the social context of the time.

 

“Madame M” with her “delusion of doubles” had experienced the death of several of her children in infancy and was living through the trauma of WWI with the trenches disappearing a generation of young men just a few miles from her door.

 

We can’t know if there was a neurological dimension to her false belief, or what the balance might have been. Minds aren’t neat and it’s necessarily an incomplete picture.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I’m lost in the archives again. It’s nonfiction - the story of an intriguing character from Edwardian London with a dark secret.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: Someone should let my family know that I’m renewing my subscriptions to the online genealogy sites and may disappear down that rabbit hole for some time!

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

Q&A with Tina Cane

 

Photo by Cormac Crump

 

 

Tina Cane is the author of the new poetry collection Year of the Murder Hornet. Her other books include the young adult novel Alma Presses Play, and her work has appeared in a variety of publications, including Spinning Jenny and The Literary Review. She is the Poet Laureate of Rhode Island.

 

Q: Over how long a period did you write the poems in Year of the Murder Hornet?

 

A: I wrote this collection over a couple of years--the latter half of the previous administration and the early portion of the pandemic.

 

I culled many poems from the book's earlier incarnation, since they were rooted in political speech--taken from impeachment transcripts and the like--used in personal context. I am still interested in that overlap, but their immediacy didn't feel as enduring as when I wrote them.

 

Q: The writer Camille Guthrie said of the book, "With boldness and grace, Cane negotiates a tense present, a distressing future, and the wish for a 'perfect past' tense." What do you think of that description?

 

A: I think it's apt--in terms of what I wish to negotiate. I think it's kind--in terms of 'boldness" and the "grace." Especially coming from a poet like Guthrie whose writing I admire.

 

Q: How did you choose the order in which the poems would appear in the collection, and how was the book's title chosen?

A: Poet and friend Sean Singer was a big help when it came to ordering the collection. He read some of these poems as they I wrote them, but was able to step back and discern an arc that was difficult for me to see. I knew I wanted the long poem, "What We Talk About When We Talk About Paths" to figure at the center of the collection--as a kind of associative interior of sorts.

 

The first version of this book was called Dog Whistle, since there were many more political allusions. After I wrote the title poem and as the collection emerged, I thought Year of the Murder Hornet captured the notion of a temporal frame and flux with a feeling of fleeting, ever-changing hysteria--which is one way to describe recent times.

 

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

 

A: Perhaps, "that we don't struggle alone," which is a line from "Shelter in Place." I am not sure it's for me to hope what a reader comes away with. I do, however, hope there exists a reciprocal recognition of shared humanity through the poetry. In any case, that's the reason why I write.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I am finishing writing a new novel-in-verse for young adults for the same imprint--make Me a World/ Random House--which published Alma Presses Play.

 

I am also slowly writing new poems for a collection called Search Engine, and editing Poetry is Bread: The Anthology, with Nirala Press, which will feature poems shared through the distance reading series I began at the start of the pandemic.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: I think frank: sonnets by Diane Seuss is brilliant. I don't necessarily equate accolades with merit, but the Pulitzer people got this one really right.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Tina Cane. 

Q&A with Michelle Wright

 

 

 

Michelle Wright is the author of the new historical novel Small Acts of Defiance, which is set during World War II. She also has written the story collection Fine. She is based in Melbourne, Australia.

 

Q: What inspired you to write Small Acts of Defiance, and how did you create your characters Lucie and Yvonne?

 

A: During the 12 years I lived in Paris, I developed a deep love for French language, culture, and history. I noticed, though, that there was often a sense of unease around discussing the period of German occupation, or a willingness to focus solely on the acts of the French Resistance.

 

I wanted to explore this period, examining the lives of ordinary French people and their diverse responses to the occupation, from resistance to collaboration and everything in between.

 

I chose to create a protagonist, Lucie, who, like me, was initially an outsider. When I arrived in Paris as a young woman, I was pretty politically naïve and had to learn a lot very quickly.

 

I wanted to explore how Lucie, too, gradually comes to understand the situation in which she finds herself. As her knowledge of French history, politics, and society deepens, I hope that the readers will accompany her on her journey and develop their understanding alongside hers.

 

In creating Lucie’s mother, Yvonne, I hoped to highlight the different expectations placed on women from that generation. At that time in France, women didn’t have the right to vote and the Vichy regime was intent on confining women to their roles as mothers and wives. Yvonne is initially constrained by these expectations and her relationship with her brother, Gérard.

 

I thought it was interesting to explore the contrast between Yvonne and Lucie, and how Lucie’s influence has an impact on Yvonne’s sense of self-identity.

 

Q: How did you research the novel, and did you learn anything especially surprising?

 

A: I was very fortunate to be awarded an Australia Council for the Arts residency which allowed me to spend six months at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris to do intensive research for the novel.

 

My studio was next door to the Holocaust Memorial and I spent countless hours there examining their extensive collection of documents and artifacts. I also had access to incredibly moving first-hand accounts from survivors and their descendants, as well as other fascinating primary sources such as letters of denunciation written by collaborators.

 

One surprising piece of information I discovered was the existence of the baby smuggling network operating out of the Rothschild Hospital. There was very little documentation about it and many people I spoke to weren’t aware of its existence.

Luckily, in my research at the Drancy Memorial, I discovered little-known but fascinating details that I was able to integrate into the narrative, such as the fact that the babies were smuggled out through the hospital morgue. I was able to find the door that I describe in the novel and walk the streets around it at night just as Lucie does.

 

Q: The author Lee Kofman says of the novel, “Wright re-creates occupied Paris with immediacy and with melancholy tenderness, and asks questions about personal responsibility that are just as relevant today as they were eighty years ago.” What do you think of that description?

 

A: I absolutely agree that the questions of personal responsibility are just as relevant today. While I was writing the book, there were daily news reports describing the resurgence of neo-Nazism, fascism, racism, anti-Muslim and anti-immigration sentiments in many countries around the world, including Australia and the United States.

 

Faced with these developments, we are all having to ask ourselves where we stand and what we should be doing in response.

 

And since the novel’s publication, we have seen tanks rolling across borders in Europe, a peaceful country occupied by foreign forces and ordinary citizens forced to engage in acts of defiance, both small and large, in order to defend their freedom and their lives.

 

So, yes, 80 years after the events portrayed in my novel, the central questions it raises are still tragically relevant.

 

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

 

A: I hope that, despite the terrible violence and grief the characters experience, readers will take away a sense of hopefulness and optimism. I hope they will detect in the story an underlying belief in humanity’s ability to rise above its worst moments and to rediscover solidarity and community.

 

Given what so many people in the world are living through currently, I hope that this might be a useful thought to take away and reflect on.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I’m always writing short stories for anthologies and competitions, but I’ve also started working on my next novel. I can’t say too much about it yet, as it’s still in the very early stages. However, I can say that it’s partly based on my experience in a men’s prison when I was 18, as well as several weirdly coincidental encounters with three-legged greyhounds!

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: Writing is an incredibly solitary pursuit and once the book has been launched out into the world, it feels like I lose touch with it – a little like an adult child who’s left home and is living their own life.

 

So, I love to hear from readers who’ve encountered the book on its travels. I love to hear what they took from it, their questions, their own tales of Paris. So please don’t hesitate to get in touch via Facebook or Instagram.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

Q&A with Ellen Hagan

 

 

 

Ellen Hagan is the author of the new young adult novel in verse Don't Call Me a Hurricane. Her other books include the middle grade novel in verse Reckless, Glorious, Girl. Also a performer and an educator, she lives in New York City.

 

Q: What inspired you to write Don’t Call Me a Hurricane, and how did you create your character Eliza?

 

A: The story of Hurricane arrived in poems for me. It started with lines and words that held onto the feeling of everything you own being washed away and your community being destroyed. I kept coming back to the words on the cover: After the storm, what is left behind? And the tension of that moment.

 

Climate change is devastating and the main character is dealing with severe anxiety and fear while also navigating new love and rising up for her community and pushing back against overdevelopment of her island home. So this is a character dealing with extreme emotions and powerful language, so poems felt like the best way to hold those emotions.

 

Eliza showed up so clearly on the first page. Her voice, what she believed in and her love for her family, friends and island were evident to me. It was such a joy to write in her voice and follow her journey on the page. 

 

I grew up going to Long Beach Island, New Jersey, every summer. My mom spent her summers in Harvey Cedars and my family had a home in Holgate, New Jersey, so I spent several months each year working on the island. I sold sunglasses at the Sunglass Menagerie and have such beautiful and powerful memories down the shore. The ocean has a special meaning to me and I wanted to hold that feeling in a story.

 

I also wanted to talk specifically about climate change, especially after Hurricane Sandy and the damage that was done all along the coastline. The island felt so unique to me, and also so fragile - I wanted to tell the story of a community fighting back against overdevelopment in order to protect and hold onto what they love most - their home. 

 

Q: The writer Olivia A. Cole said, “The way Hagan writes about the land is the way she writes about love--with passion, humanity, and clarity.” What do you think of that description?

 

A: It was so beautiful to get this blurb from Olivia A. Cole. She was a student of mine at the Kentucky Governor’s School for the Arts in the creative writing program and I remember being in awe of Olivia’s talent as a high school student and I feel so thankful to be in conversation with Olivia now as a friend and fellow artist.

 

We are both Kentucky writers and I think there is a powerful connection to the land - to all the lands that raised us. I feel this same generous love for the hills of Kentucky as I do the waves of the Atlantic Ocean.

 

These landscapes brought me up - they are part of my story, and so I am always thinking about how to show them love in my writing. How do I show off the land and introduce it to people who have never been or are just getting to know this new place.

 

And as a community-based artist, I am always searching for the humanity in everything. How do I help shine a light? How do I listen more and pay close attention to my community and my changing world? I care deeply about this work, so I am thankful when fellow artists that I respect and love see that in my writing and hope future readers will see that love as well. 

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

A: The title comes from a line in one of the poems. Eliza’s father used to call her a hurricane - the poems are in conversation below. Eliza shares the reasons for the comparison and then having lived through an actual hurricane on the island, she shares why they will never compare her to that again.

 

The title is a way of acknowledging the destruction that hurricanes bring. It brings me back to the danger and destruction of climate change - and how we rise up to fight back. The poems are shared below:

 

My father used to call me

a hurricane.

 

wild & unruly

rowdy & messy

fast & reckless

 

unmoving & impulsive

headstrong & willful

unexpected & quick

electric & fleeting

floating & flying

scrappy & break-neck

 

all the time

         moving

& flowing

& hurried

& flashing

 

 

& free

 

free

 

                           free

 

 

Now—

 

we are careful

not to compare anything

to a hurricane

because we know

how dangerous

& destructive it can be.

We know its death toll.

From the US

to the Caribbean

to China

to Canada

to Cuba

& on & on.

Wrecking lives

& families across the globe.

We know its winds & rains.

Floods & rising waters.

We know the damage.

& the loss.

We know the trauma

& the pain

& the doubled over

& the weeping

& my mother holding onto us

to save us

from the storm.

How the shape

of our lives

changed

forever.

 

We know

the cost.

 

Q: What do you see looking ahead when it comes to coastal New Jersey and the impact of climate change?

 

A: I feel hopeful, especially seeing young people who are not only interested, but are activated around protecting the island, the dunes, participating in beach cleanups, pushing back against overdevelopment while at the same time working to make the community as sustainable as possible. There is more renewable energy popping up all the time, more information getting shared and more stories being told.

 

As I researched this novel, I was motivated by all of the young climate activists that I was reading about such as Xiye Bastida, Hannah Testa, and Katie Eder. I was also buoyed by organizations like the Climate Museum in New York City and The Long Beach Island Foundation of Arts and Sciences in Loveladies, New Jersey.

 

The more I researched, the more I discovered about artists, activists, and organizations doing this work together. As an educator working with schools around the globe and a mother to two young children, I am ignited by this work and the passion and love for our environment.

 

I wrote Don’t Call Me a Hurricane as a love letter to the ocean, to the community, and as a way to protect and honor the places we come from.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I am working on a new novel in verse that is set to arrive in 2023. It is a story about the complications of class set in Lexington, Kentucky. I am sharing the synopsis below and thrilled to share these new characters and this new story with you all. 

 

Chloe Brooks was born into wealth - so much that she never even thought about it. Raised in the rolling hills of Lexington, Kentucky - home of horse country, bourbon and limestone fences, she had it all - everything she could ever want. When her father loses the family fortune and moves them ten miles away into an apartment complex on the outskirts of town, her world begins to unravel. What does it mean to have everything and lose all that you thought mattered and all that you imagined made you who you are? Meeting Clint and Skye and seeing the side of Kentucky she had long ignored and forgotten changes everything. Can Chloe still hold onto who she was and figure out who she needs to be without losing her new friends - the ones who somehow see her for who she truly is.  

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: I would love to share some prompts and writing activities that I return to and that work well for me. I got the chance to share poetry prompts in April with Oprah Daily and these are exercises that I do with my students and that I do myself to get into the writing process. Check them out here: Oprah Daily Prompts and on my website as well.

 

I believe that everyone can write and tell their own stories and my work as an educator is rooted in building community, sharing who we are, where we come from, and how to sustain those essential relationships to each other and to our planet. I hope you will write and create with me!

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Ellen Hagan.

Q&A with Lenore Appelhans

 

 

 

Lenore Appelhans is the author of the new children's picture book The Family Business. Her other books include Chick-O-Saurus Rex. She is based in the Washington, D.C., area.

 

Q: What inspired you to write The Family Business, and how did you create your character Lucky, a raccoon?

 

A: I started writing what would eventually become The Family Business way back in 2004. The earliest draft revolved around a raccoon named Ezra who found a treasure in a trash dump and was inspired by a news article about a scavenger finding a rare Beatles album in someone's trash.

 

Lucky developed over the years (13 years with critique groups and workshops and four with my wonderful editor Jill Davis) and drafts (probably over 200 drafts in all) into a character with a strong sense of self who nevertheless still longs to fit into his family. 

 

Q: What do you think the story says about raccoons?

 

A: The idea that the raccoon family is a part of a crime syndicate is a tongue-in-cheek look at how humans negatively respond to completely natural behavior on the part of the raccoons. Animals are just trying to survive! 

 

Q: What do you think Ken Lamug’s illustrations add to the book?

 

A: We really lucked out getting Ken to illustrate. All the spreads are delightful, and there's so much attention to detail. 

 

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

 

A: The central tension of the book is Lucky looking for a way to remain true to his values while also fulfilling his role as part of a family. Kids often have this same tension in their own lives, so this book shows how creative solutions are possible. It's also just fun! 

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I have all sorts of projects in various stages of the pipeline. Let's hope some of them make it all the way to publication soon. 

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: Picture books are an art form and persistence can pay off. I'm so thrilled to finally introduce Lucky to the world! 

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb