Tuesday, October 15, 2024

October 2024 Jewish Book Carnival

 


 

 

October 2024 Jewish Book Carnival

 

I'm pleased to be hosting this month's Jewish Book Carnival. We have a lot to talk about, so let's get started...

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The Book of Life Podcast features a two-part series, "Festive Friends." Both episodes feature pairs of author friends, talking about their books that are perfect for the fall Jewish holidays. 

 

Part I: Gayle Forman (Not Nothing) and Marjorie Ingall (Getting to Sorry) talk about the themes in their books of teshuvah, growth, and the art of apology, just right for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

 

Part II: Erica Lyons and Christina Matula, co-authors, discuss their picture book Mixed-Up Mooncakes, about a Chinese Jewish family celebrating Sukkot and Mid-Autumn Festival.

 

Find both parts on the Association of Jewish Libraries blog at https://jewishlibraries.org/festive-friends-series-on-the-book-of-life-podcast/

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Multicultural Kid Blogs is hosting a Jewish Joy series of interviews with diverse Jewish authors. The first interview is with Ruth Behar, Latina Cuban Sephardic Ashkenazi Jewish author of Across So Many Seas

https://multiculturalkidblogs.com/2024/09/09/jewish-joy-with-ruth-behar/

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This month Gila Green speaks to author Ann Koffsky about her latest children's book, marketing Jewish books post-October 7, and contemporary American Jewish society.  

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Zibby Books is publishing a new book, On Being Jewish Now: Reflections from Authors and Advocates, edited by Zibby Owens. The publisher describes it as “An intimate collection of meaningful, smart, funny, sad, emotional, and inspiring essays from today’s authors and advocates about what it means to be Jewish, how things have changed since the attacks on October 7th, 2023, and the unique culture that brings this group together.” https://zibbymedia.com/blogs/our-books/on-being-jewish-now?srsltid=AfmBOooPZmyT1sfecjX8aBo5wd4feVwLJphWbapiBGXslQSCZGqYSwy6 

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Life Is Like a Library encounters some of The Heroes of October 7th, through a recently released English translation of a Hebrew book published in April 2024: https://lifelibrary-ksp.blogspot.com/2024/10/heroes-of-october-7th.html

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In this episode of "What If? Why Not? How?" Sally Wiener Grotta chats with fellow author Alex Shvartsman about his latest book, Dreidel of Dread: The Very Cthulhu Hannukah. A beautifully illustrated board book, Dreidel of Dread is filled with wry humor and social commentary that will delight adults as well as children. SallyWienerGrotta.com/2024/08/02/dreidel-of-dread-the-very-cthulu-hannukah-a-chat-with-author-alex-shvartsman/ 

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Talia Carner’s essay “Flaunting My Star of David” was excerpted in full in Dan's Papers from the anthology On Being Jewish Now by Zibby Media. It describes her battle against anti-Semitism in the publishing world. https://www.danspapers.com/2024/10/author-talia-carner-antisemitic-attack/

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At Jewish Books for Kids and More, Barbara Bietz interviews Dr. Edith Eva Eger about The Ballerina of Auschwitz, a YA edition of her award-winning memoir The Choice: Embrace the Possible. Dr. Eger is a well-known psychologist, speaker, and author. In her career, she has focused on helping people deal with trauma and has been praised worldwide for her contributions. Jewish Books for Kids

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On her My Machberet blog, Erika Dreifus routinely compiles news of Jewish literary interest. Here's one recent post.

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Jonathan Sapir focuses on a celebration of Jewish achievements in America on his blog. https://www.jewishachievements.com/blog

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And here on my blog, I interviewed Samantha Greene Woodruff about her new novel, The Trade Off.

 

Thanks so much to all the participants!

--Deborah

 

 

 

Q&A with Debra Bruno

 


 

 

Debra Bruno is the author of the new book A Hudson Valley Reckoning: Discovering the Forgotten History of Slaveholding in My Dutch American Family. Also a journalist, she lives in Washington, D.C.

 

Q: What inspired you to write A Hudson Valley Reckoning, and how much did you know about your family history before starting work on the book?

 

A: I was inspired to write the book because an historian friend of mine said to me, if you have Dutch ancestors in the Hudson Valley, they were probably enslavers. I didn’t believe her, so she told me to check it out.

 

All I knew of the Dutch side of my family before that time was that they were farmers and had lived in the Hudson Valley since the 1600s. Not only did I not know that New York State had had almost 200 years of slavery, I had no idea that my family would be so involved in it.

 

When I learned the truth, I knew that the most resonant thing I could do was to write about it, first in an article for the Washington Post Magazine (RIP) and now in this book.

 

Q: What do you think are some of the most common perceptions and misconceptions about the history of slaveholding in the Northern United States?

 

A: One of the most fascinating things I found in my research was how much Northerners feel separate from, and superior to, our country’s history of enslavement. We were supposed to be the good guys, the ones who had the Underground Railroad and who fought for the Union in the Civil War.

 

What many people do not realize is that before that time, the North had a system of slavery that was as long and cruel as slavery in the South. Enslavers in the North tended to have fewer numbers of slaves, but the stories I found proved that they were often treated cruelly and inhumanely.


Q: The writer Jonathan Eig called the book an “enthralling story and an important work of history, impressively researched and beautifully told.” What do you think of that description, and how did you research the book?

 

A: I was honored that Jonathan Eig, one of my role models in writing compelling history, offered read the book and give me an assessment. His book King, which won the Pulitzer Prize, took many of the supposedly well-known stories of Martin Luther King Jr.’s life and told them in a new light.

 

My own research took me back as far as the 17th and 18th centuries, and of course that meant spending many hours in libraries, especially the Vedder Research Library, home of the Greene County (NY) Historical Society, poring over letters written during the American Revolution, sales records, newspaper advertisements, and oral histories.

 

Online, I also was lucky to be able to find ancient wills, census records, and genealogical books through Ancestry. It was often frustrating and time-consuming work because the enslaved were not given family names and often barely acknowledged.

 

Q: What impact did it have on you to write this book, and what do you hope readers take away from it?

 

A: Writing the book made me realize, more than I did before, how much of our country is founded in built-in inequities that linger today. It also made me believe even more fervently in the power of education. If we know our true history, we can grow as a country with a better perspective of equality and fairness.

 

This is not, as some pro-censorship folks have said, about feeling guilt. It’s about knowing our entire history.

 

I hope readers think about looking into their family histories, and what else we may not have been taught about the origins of our beautiful democracy.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: Besides scheduling book talks and spending time with my two sweet grandchildren, I have started to think a bit about a new project. So many of my writer friends have come out with novels recently, and they seem to be having so much fun doing it. I have an idea for a ghost story that I’d like to try.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: Um, register to vote! Make sure your voice counts! Off topic, I know, but that’s another topic that keeps me up at night.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

Q&A with Natalie Anna Jacobsen

 


 

 

Natalie Anna Jacobsen is the author of the new novel Ghost Train. Also a journalist and marketer, she lives in Washington, D.C.

 

Q: What inspired you to write Ghost Train, and how did you create your character Maru?

 

A: While studying Japanese history and media at the University of Oregon I came across a collection of folklore that was emerging from the tumultuous Meiji Era -- Japan's own Industrial Revolution and modernization period.

 

This transformative time is often considered the country's most important, as it moved them from the feudal reign of nearly 300 years, into an imperial nation that rapidly westernized and became a global power in a matter of years, leading right up into the World Wars.

 

During their own import of foreign technologies and ideals, society experienced an existential crisis in some ways as they saw massive cultural shifts happening day-by-day. I harken it to our own collective experience with the dawn of the Information Age with the ushering in of computers and globalization.

 

During the Meiji Era, the country saw huge changes and made great strides every year; and without the ability to rapidly share information, citizens were often left in the dark and confused over what was going on, and why.

 

This led to a resurgence in folklore to help reconcile lack of understanding or information. Folklore and ghost stories explained the unexplainable, and answered for the strange noises and ways the world seemed to evolve.

 

In the middle of it all, I envisioned what it would've been like to be an ordinary citizen living through those transformations. Most historical documents I read recounted the lives of the nobles, as it is largely typical in surviving history.

 

But I wanted to put the reader behind the eyes of someone also coming-of-age, and witnessing these changes. Maru--her name means "full circle" in Japanese--took shape. I needed someone to experience love, joy, grief, pain, curiosity, hope, confusion (and a bit of delusion), fear and anxiety through these pivotal moments in Japanese history.

 

I devoured books from the Meiji Era, read diaries, and then wove her emotions together with folklore -- and thus, Ghost Train had its bones and flesh.

 

Q: The writer Shirley Miller Kamada said of the book, “A work of fiction--and in some respects other-worldly--this book is solidly based on research of Japan's history and folklore, as well as the author's personal experience of living in Japan.” What do you think of that description, and how did you research the book?

 

A: It took years to research and write Ghost Train. I did not take this self-assigned work lightly.

 

Even when I was just starting to write Ghost Train as a college student, I knew I wasn't ready yet. I didn't have the skillset as a writer nor as someone who was fully knowledgeable of the subject matter.

 

As mentioned in my previous response, I had been inspired by my studies in Japanese literature and how folklore was so effortlessly woven into their stories. Though I had a strong vision for the novel, there were too many gaps in the content and plot, and I knew I needed time and a bigger toolbox to do it justice. 

 

After graduating, I spent years in Japan as a writer and working different jobs in TV, education, music and photography, from Hokkaido to Kyoto.

 

All of these experiences introduced me to so many incredible people, who taught me something new about the culture, their history, outlook and ways of life. Without those firsthand interactions and witness of events and the culture in motion, Ghost Train could not have happened.

 

So many of Kyoto's streets since Japan's medieval (Edo or prior) eras have been preserved; walking through their streets can feel like time-traveling. Many of their festivals have continued traditions for hundreds, if not a thousand, years.

 

Much of the historical research was done through reading of firsthand accounts, government documents, even student theses. I think all together I wound up reading about 3,000 documents; I saved my list of citations, just like I do in my journalistic work.

 

I also interviewed subject matter experts and historians to get clarity on some events that I was trying to describe or accurately portray. It was a group effort, and I am glad that I held off on writing Ghost Train until I had done my homework properly.

 

I am grateful it seems to have paid off, with authors Shirley Miller Kamada, Jake Adelstein, and Robert Whiting all commending Ghost Train for its details and accuracy. I'm really proud of this effort, and am thankful to all who have supported and lent their own family history and knowledge to the book!

 

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

 

A: I always knew how it would end. And actually...the ending of Ghost Train isn't the real end. When I first wrote the story, it was three times as long -- that's right, it was written as a trilogy! My hope is that, if sales go well for this first book, I will have the opportunity to publish its two sequels, so readers can enjoy the ending I envisioned all along.

 

Now, I think most authors will say they had to make some changes along the way; and that's true for me, too. Between the three novels, I did have to move some scenes around that would make Ghost Train more of a standalone, just in case the sequels don't move forward.

 

One of the things that got moved was a wedding scene for Maru's friend Ai, and some extra scenes with Maru's Oba-san (grandma). Those would both appear in book two; so those parts aren't gone forever.

 

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

 

A: In all of my writing endeavors, I love to share information. So first and foremost, I hope readers come away having learned something new about Japan, Japanese history, or folklore.

 

To go a step further, I hope readers use Ghost Train (and other historical fictions set in places outside of where they live) as a vehicle to go elsewhere and travel (without an expensive plane ticket!) to gain a broader perspective on world history and their place in it.

 

We each have a story to tell, and so do billions around the world. I love historical fiction, both reading and writing it, as they remind me we aren't alone in our experiences.

 

All cultures and societies have gone through drastic changes and reckoned with their identity -- the more ideas and stories we exchange with one another, the stronger our bond and greater our humanity will be.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: Right now -- surviving! Launching this debut novel has occupied most of my spare time outside of work, so I haven't had a great deal of opportunities to work on new creative endeavors lately. But I'm hoping to change that soon!

 

I'd love to devote some energy to refining the two sequels to Ghost Train, and exploring publishing options for them. From what I've heard from some early readers so far, they'd also love to see more from Maru and Kitsune.

 

These two sequels have not been edited nearly as much as Ghost Train, so I would need to put some significant work into both of those before they are ready! It's been years since I first wrote the story, but I'm ready to go back to Japan.

 

Outside of Japan, I do have another story in mind that I'm halfway through -- a contemporary fiction story on the recent, historic wildfires in Oregon. It's shaping up to be a thriller that explores complicated family dynamics and follows one character who fights to change laws in the wake of the disaster after tragedy strikes. There's more to come!

 

I still do freelance work in journalism occasionally; I'm working on a few pieces around AI that I'm shopping around right now too.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: For updates on my works in progress, publications, blog, guest articles and more, readers are invited to subscribe to my monthly newsletter: https://www.najacobsen.com/newsletter-subscribe -- this is the best way to stay in touch with me outside of social media, and be the first to know about events, collaborations, and more.

 

I'm looking forward to joining book clubs and engage with more readers and authors in the near future, and invite you to reach out! 

 

Thank you so much for having me :)

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

Q&A with Maria Vetrano

 


 

 

Maria Vetrano is the author of the new novel Queen Bess: A Tudor Comes to Save America. She is the founder of the PR and marketing firm Vetrano Communications.

 

Q: What inspired you to write Queen Bess: A Tudor Comes to Save America?

 

A: In 2018, a full two years after the 2016 presidential election, I still felt overwhelmed by the daily onslaught of distressing news about the Trump administration.

 

I tried different coping mechanisms, but boxing couldn’t fix it. Wine couldn’t fix it. Even mindfulness couldn’t fix it, though it helped. There wasn’t much that I could do other than fantasize about a different reality.

 

I asked myself at this point, what kind of woman could win the presidency in the United States? That’s when I remembered Queen Elizabeth I. I’ve been a fan of Elizabeth Tudor since I watched the late Glenda Jackson in Elizabeth R, the 1971 Masterpiece Theatre TV series, when I was a child.

 

If we could just bring someone as strong, brilliant, and politically savvy as Elizabeth Tudor to the present, we would have a woman candidate who could defeat Trump—and save the best of America before he burned it to a crisp.

 

Unlike an actual political candidate, however, Elizabeth Tudor would have no past to target because she isn’t from the modern era. That’s an attribute that no other living presidential candidate, male or female, can match.

 

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

 

A: I toured some Elizabethan sites in England on more than one occasion, from the Tower of London—where Elizabeth was imprisoned upon suspicion of treason for two months when she was in her early 20s—to Hampton Court, one of King Henry VIII’s favorite palaces.

 

I’ve also seen some of Elizabeth’s portraits at the National Gallery of London and have toured the British Museum to view some artefacts from the time of her reign.

 

More recently, I also visited Elizabeth’s tomb at Westminster Abbey and the site of the home where she spent most of her childhood until the age of 25 when she ascended the throne in 1558: that site is Hatfield Palace, and it is absolutely splendid.

 

In December 2023, I also saw one of the most famous Armada portraits of Elizabeth at the Queen’s House museum at Greenwich.

 

I also did research on paper. I read numerous biographies of Elizabeth, including biographies by Tracy Borman (one of my favorite Tudor-era historians and writers), Alison Weir, and Susan Doran. See: https://www.whatwereading.com/elizabeth-i-books/ .

 

And one of the most invaluable books I’ve read is Ian Mortimer’s The Time Traveller’s Guide to Elizabethan England.

 

There are wonderful resources online as well, including an Early Modern English to Modern English translator, and lists of Shakespearean curse words.


Q: How did you create your character Dakota Wynfred?

 

A: I wanted Dakota Wynfred to be a different kind of tech billionaire, a billionaire with a strong social conscience. And she is. She comes from humble roots. Her parents were social activists who taught her that it was her responsibility to help correct societal wrong-doings. This ethos was formative to Dakota’s personality.

 

I also based Dakota’s technical expertise in part on a friend of mine, Professor Latanya Sweeney, who is the first Black woman to have earned her Ph.D. in computer science from MIT.

 

While Dakota isn’t Black, her BFF from her undergraduate days, Dr. CeCe Gibbons, is a Black woman, who has a Ph.D. in psychology from Boston University. As Dakota says in the book, CeCe is her most emotionally astute friend because most of Dakota’s friends are nerds like she is.

 

I built a few biographical elements into Dakota as well. My favorite store is REI and I wear lots of Smart Wool sweaters (as well as cashmere) and Ecco lace-up shoes. Also, my mother was named Camille and she died of breast cancer when she was 42 years old.

 

Q: What parallels do you see to today’s actual political world in your creation of President Robert Vlakas?

 

A: Vlakas is loosely inspired by Donald Trump. He isn’t identical nor do I want readers to view him as such. Vlakas represents the potential dangers that an autocratic, narcissistic leader could affect in the US: chief among these are the loss of civil rights that were hard-won over decades as well as the loss of access to healthcare, reproductive freedom, secular education, and more.

 

Vlakas is like other authoritarian rulers with no apparent moral compass, including Vladimir Putin.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I’m working on the second book in the Queen Bess trilogy.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: Yes. My hope is that readers of Queen Bess will enjoy the political-fantasy aspect of the book. Our presidential campaigns are long, expensive, and exhausting. And our two-party system—as realized today—is deeply partisan.

 

That’s not good for democracy because members of Congress rarely reach across the aisle to collaborate. They are tasked with scoring political points and are also, in some cases, beholden to special interest groups, some of which, like the NRA, are nefarious in nature.

 

Elizabeth Rex, the name Elizabeth Tudor takes in the modern era, represents a different kind of politician. She thinks and runs like an Independent. She cares deeply about her people and the environment.

 

While she does want to be admired—as she was widely in most regions of 16th-century England—she understands that this isn’t always possible. She is committed to dealing with political enemies, whether at home or abroad, to the degree that this is possible.

 

Above all else, Elizabeth Rex wants her legacy to be that she left the world a better place than she found it.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

Oct. 15

 


 

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
Oct. 15, 1917: Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. born.

Monday, October 14, 2024

Q&A with Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani

 


 

 

Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani is the author of the new book The Cities We Need: Essential Stories of Everyday Places. A photographer and visual urbanist, she also has written the book Contested City

 

Q: What inspired you to write The Cities We Need?

 

A: Twenty-three years ago, I started asking my neighbors in Brooklyn for tours of whatever they considered to be their neighborhood, and instantly I began to see an incredibly layered, complex, painful, funny, beautiful tapestry of the place.

 

When I moved to Oakland several years later, and asked my neighbors there the same thing, I found no less incredible stories in the most banal of places.

 

While the work that I started in Brooklyn had built on work I’d been doing for years with people about their neighborhoods, it got into gear in the aftermath of 9/11, when I wanted to focus on work that was caring for my city and was paying attention to the small but crucial spaces of people’s lives, in opposition to the huge rhetoric and violent actions - of that day, and of the subsequent war - that would hurt so many people and solve nothing. 

 

The work took many forms before becoming a book, including a public art and dialogue project in which I brought the oral histories —the tours — and the photographs from Brooklyn back to the neighborhood 10 years after they were first made.

 

This was a way to help people talk with each other, and to figure out how to hold on to the changes that were happening in their neighborhoods, how stories of lived experience from the not-too-distant past could help people navigate the bewildering world of gentrification  and displacement. 

 

I realized how, and why, to turn this work into a book — The Cities We Need — in 2020, in the midst of the Covid lockdown in New York City. I’d been wanting to find a way to write a book about this work for a long while, but wasn’t sure of how to convey the depth of what was at stake in our everyday spaces.

 

In the midst of lockdown, kept away from family, friends, and strangers, I realized that the stories my tour guides in Brooklyn and Oakland had told me so many years ago could help me understand why what was happening was so hard, and what, in addition to so many lives, we had the potential to lose. 

 

Q: Can you say more about your focus on Brooklyn and Oakland?

 

A: I started working in these places because I lived in them, and I cared for them. The stories people told me about their places forever shifted the way that I saw my own places.

 

There are, of course, similarities between Oakland and Brooklyn writ large - as cities that have sometimes been overshadowed by more famous cities across the water, that were the sites of war industries, that were marked by redlining, and on and on.

 

As I dug into the particular histories of the two neighborhoods that I focused on, I also saw that the histories and stories of one neighborhood could help me understand, in contrast or similarity, the other neighborhood across the country. 

 

I was also interested in working in these places that physically look quite different, where one is pedestrian-focused and the other more car-centric, yet where everyday places function in importantly similar ways for residents.

 

Q: The author Mindy Thompson Fullilove said of the book, “There's a tenderness about this book that leaps off the page. Reading it, we can't help but feel that we are becoming better human beings.” What do you think of that assessment?

 

A: It’s a wonderful thing to say, of course, and hugely gratifying to me.

 

And what’s most gratifying about it to me is that I always wanted to find public forms for this work that would help people have the kinds of transformative experiences of a neighborhood, and of place more broadly, that I was so lucky to have through being told my tour guides’ stories.

 

In hearing Mindy say that “we are becoming better human beings,” I feel that the book is succeeding in sharing with others what I gained through doing this work — by listening to my tour guides, by walking with them, driving with them in their cars, thinking about their stories, learning from them, valuing them, allowing those stories to shape my adult life, I became a better human being.   

 

Q: What do you see as the relationship between the text and the photos in the book?

 

A: I’ve spent a long time working on how photographs and texts can work together, without photographs illustrating the text, or text captioning the photographs.

 

The structure of this book is meant to allow multiple kinds of readings — you can read just the text chapters, you can “read” just the photo essays, or you can read the chapters and the photo essays in the syncopated back-and-forth order in which they appear.

 

One of the books that most inspired me for the form of the book and the way that the texts and photographs relate is Victor Burgin’s excellent Some Cities. There are many ways of understanding cities, and I wanted to offer that variety to the reader as they walk through this book. 

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: In my practice, Buscada (www.buscada.com), I and my partner Kaushik Panchal continue to work with small mission-driven organizations to help them work deeply in community, and to help them have productive dialogues within their own organizations.

 

My next art / research / book project stems from a return to work I started even before the projects that The Cities We Need grew from. I’ll be returning to the East End of London, where, in the late 1990s, I worked in community centers and photographed and interviewed neighborhood residents from teenagers to elderly people.

 

The neighborhood has undergone huge transformation from development in the intervening time, and I’m working on how my archive, and my new work in response to this archive, can be part of sparking and supporting the kinds of conversations that need to be had in the neighborhood and beyond. 

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: While I hope this book helps us understand Brooklyn and Oakland and their everyday places, I hope that it will help us all understand the important everyday places in our own neighborhoods and cities, and will help us think about what we value so much about them, and what we can do to protect them. 

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

Q&A with Matthew Donald

 


 

 

Matthew Donald is the author of the new young adult novel Teslamancer. It's a sequel to his novel Teslanauts. He lives in Centennial, Colorado.

 

Q: What inspired you to write Teslamancer, and did you know when you wrote Teslanauts that you'd be writing a sequel?

 

A: I definitely knew I was writing a sequel when I wrote Teslanauts, and I plan to write three more afterward as well.

 

What inspired me to write Teslamancer was the idea of expanding the world I set up in the first book and pushing the boundaries beyond what would be expected from a first book.

 

When writing Teslanauts I was introducing the reader into this hidden volt-tech world, and easing them into the craziness that was concocted by Nikola Tesla and his contemporaries.

 

By the time of Teslamancer, I trust the audience enough to accept the weirdness and therefore went kind of nuts for this installment. You just saw a glimmer of the volt-tech world in the first book, now look at it in all of its technological and electromagnetic glory.

 

The first book had airships and mechs and biplanes with lightning zappers; fun stuff, but nothing too outlandish. Teslamancer, on the other hand, has Norse-themed submarines, flying trains, a mech with Rasputin's alive yet severed head on top, an enormous artillery platform with global range, steampunk agents, clockpunk agents, the Baba Yaga, giant mutated reptiles... yeah, I went hard on the insanity for this one.

 

I wanted to see how much I could push the readers' suspension of disbelief, and I wanted to get to the point where I just barely didn't jump the shark. I think that's a fun way to do a sequel. I could go even wackier in the upcoming third installment, or maybe do something more emotional and personal... you'll just have to see.

 

Q: Do you think your character Raymond has changed from one book to another?

 

A: He's definitely accepted his role as a Teslanaut agent more in this book.

 

One of the things I admittedly struggled with when first writing Teslamancer is giving Raymond an adequate emotional arc. His main goal in the first book was to find his missing father, to the point that it consumed every moment of his time and spurred him to join the Teslanauts in the first place.

 

Now that his arc there was completed, I had to find a new purpose for his character, while still building off the loose ends I left behind at the end of the first book.

 

The eureka moment came for me when I realized that if I was struggling to find Raymond's purpose, he would probably also be struggling as well. He found out what happened to his dad, and he now worked for the Teslanauts full-time. So now what?

 

Feeling a lack of purpose became metatextual, so I incorporated it into the book as he's strung along another adventure. What is he doing all this for? He wants to make the world a better place, but that's such a nebulous concept. Better for whom? Better why? Hopefully the answer I give at the end is satisfying; I certainly think it is, but then again I'm biased.


Q: Can you say more about how you created the world in which the stories are set?

 

A: I take a mix of real-life history and the rules and concepts I created for this story's universe.

 

What has given me a sense of freedom is something I figured out early on when writing Teslanauts and coming up with this volt-tech world it takes place in: this isn't hard sci-fi. A lot of the technology used is impossible. A lot of the explanations for the electrical and electromagnetic powers are pseudoscience.

 

Nikola Tesla was a brilliant man, and a lot of his ideas were theoretically possible and have even been proven as history goes on, but he was also a bit of a madman and came up with concepts that aren't feasible in any way.

 

Therefore, I made two overarching rules for the science in this world: that it was based on what Nikola Tesla THOUGHT was possible rather than what was actually possible, and that if the characters bought what happened then the audience would as well.

 

By taking these two rules and combining them with the wide and complicated history of the early 20th century along with my own demented creativity, I was able to create a far vaster world than what might be expected, especially considering I'm treating this as a hidden part of history rather than an alternate timeline.

 

A lot of it are also homages to early science fiction and pulp tales, like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Around the World in 80 Days, The Lost World, and even Frankenstein.

 

By taking these ideas and keeping it consistent with the rules I've set out for this world, I've made myself an expansive playground, and I look forward to showing you what more I have in mind for later books.


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

 

A: There are several overarching themes that I think many can relate to when reading Teslamancer.

 

For one, this book has a lot of diversity, with several characters in the LGBTQ+ spectrum (obviously still in the closet due to the time period, alas), many different cultures and races, and an overall sense of globalization and camaraderie.

 

Everyone from many different cultures are working together to better the world, and even if they might not personally agree on everything, they recognize that we all live on this floating space rock together and should work with each other to make things better for everyone.

 

Also, in Raymond's case, I want people to see that if you struggle with finding your purpose and feel like you're just ambling along in life, if you give it enough time and explore what your passions are, your purpose will find itself.

 

He finds companionship in places he wasn't expecting, and learns exactly why he does what he does. You can too. You will. We all will. We gotta, otherwise what's the point?


Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I've got several creative projects in the works. Firstly is the third installment in my Teslanaut series, which I won't reveal too many details of yet but I will say there's a bit of a time skip and it's now in the 1930s rather than the ‘20s like the first two books.

 

The Great Depression has negatively affected the world in many ways, and that includes the volt-tech world, and I will explore that in this book while also providing new fanciful concepts that will keep things interesting and action-packed.

 

I'm also working on concept art for a potential animated film adaptation of my earlier Megazoic books, which I'm very excited about and can't wait to make more progress on.

 

Lastly, I'm always working on my podcast Paleo Bites, where I and a rotating series of guest co-hosts talk about and rate a genus of prehistoric animal each week, and it's pretty silly while also being a little informative.

 

Basically, I'm a creative guy who has a lot of creative projects all at once. It's pretty fun. If only I could make more money off of it someday... subscribe to my Patreon, maybe? C'mon, help a guy out!


Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: Teslamancer is my sixth published book, so if you're interested in it you should check out my others as well, particularly the first book in the series, Teslanauts, my fifth book.

 

The other four are my Megazoic series, a currently completed sci-fi saga about an advanced civilization of dinosaurs unknown to humanity. It's equally as outrageous and fun and emotional and action-packed as Teslanauts; I have a particular kind of book I like writing, you see.

 

I also have a podcast called Paleo Bites as previously stated, and I'm working on getting some new podcasts started as well, in particular a brand new version of the writing podcast I did for a few years a while back with my buddy and best friend Matt Seivert.

 

Check it all out at my website, matthewdonaldcreator.com! You'll like some of it, I'm sure.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb