Q&A with Rachel Greenfield

  

 

 

 

Rachel Greenfield is the author of the new biography Rose Knox: How One Woman Mixed Kitchen and Boardroom to Remold an American Business. Greenfield spent many years as a publishing and digital business executive. She lives in New York's Hudson Valley. 

 

Q: What inspired you to write a biography of Rose Knox (1857-1950), the businesswomen behind Knox Gelatine?

 

A: When I went to work at Time Inc. in the 1970s, people viewed women in business management as trailblazers and a new phenomenon. Men certainly acted that way, as business was often done at male-only clubs. As a history major, I knew that there had to be women in business before us, but no one had written about them.

 

When I found Rose Knox, and learned the persona she had shown to men and women, the statements she had made, and the positive reception she had received to her portrayal melding domesticity and business, I knew I had to write her back into history.

 

Q: How did you research her life, and what did you learn that especially surprised you?

 

A: I was lucky enough to get an introduction to the Knox family from a librarian in Johnstown, N.Y., Rose Knox’s hometown. The family took me up to the attic of her summer house, which still held all her personal and business documents, letters, pictures, and newspaper clippings.

 

I then spent eight years looking at these documents and pictures, all of which had been stored, in no particular order, in the unheated, and unairconditioned, attic. I put them in order, searched for greater context, and immersed myself in the places Mrs. Knox had lived, including Mansfield, Ohio, where she had grown up. 

 

My friends and I also made the recipes which ended up in the book, in gelatine-recipe-making parties that were great fun.

 

Much of Mrs. Knox’s story was new to me since she had been ignored since her death in 1950.

 

The thing that most surprised me was that, when she took over Knox Gelatine in 1908 after the death of her husband, she didn’t tell anyone she was managing the company. At that time, respectable middle- and upper-class women weren’t supposed to be running the business of a major, national company.

 

I knew that, in 1911, she had attended the American Specialty Manufacturers Association (later the Grocery Manufacturers Association) annual meeting at the Waldorf Astoria in New York City. What I didn’t know was that the men attending thought her husband was still alive, even though he had already been dead for three years. Mrs. Knox didn’t reveal her presidency to American consumers until 1914.

 

Q: The author Julie Des Jardins said of the book, “Rachel Greenfield reintroduces us to Rose Knox, a woman who Americans once knew and yet has been lost in modern memory.” How well known was Knox in her day, and why do few know about her now?

 

A: Mrs. Knox was one of the best-known American businesswomen of the 1920s and 1930s, and her national recognition continued until she died in 1950.

 

She put her name on Knox Gelatine’s ads which ran in women’s magazines read by tens of millions of women every month. Articles were written about her in national magazines and syndicated in newspapers throughout the country.

 

Papers even noted when she took a cruise. Mrs. Knox spoke on radio. The company printed millions of recipe and nutrition pamphlets with her name on the front which it distributed in home economics classes. American women knew Mrs. Knox and her values.

 

When Mrs. Knox died in 1950, women’s history was not a field and the almost exclusively male historians chronicling business history were not paying attention to the few women who ran businesses. It has taken until the 21st century for historians to begin to excavate these women from historical oblivion.

 

Q: What do you see as Rose Knox’s legacy today?

 

A: Rose Knox appeared to do it all. She was written about and visible across America as an attractive, femininely dressed woman who said “every woman can do more than she possibly thinks she can.”

 

Mrs. Knox believed that all women should be able to support themselves if they needed to. She portrayed a female business executive who was both devoted to her family, home, and community, AND devoted to her business. She spoke out for women’s abilities in business, saying business management just took common sense, which all women had.

 

Mrs. Knox left a legacy of doing it all – an aspiration which many American women still have. I believe that, for white women, she was the first 20th-century, national, public example of that. She also left us many surprisingly delicious gelatine recipes.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: My goal in writing this biography of Rose Knox was to write her back into history. I plan to spend the next year speaking about her wherever I can so that women in America realize the sort of example our grandmothers had in front of them when they were growing up.

 

History leaves us visions of who we can be. Understanding Mrs. Knox’s legacy gives us an important perspective on our own expectations and the way others expect us to behave now.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: There are many other women, of all races, who have run local, small, and nationally large impactful businesses. They have been marginalized because either they chose to remain invisible or they were such an anomaly during their time that, when they died, no one knew what to do with their accomplishments and personal stories.

 

Women have made up over 50 percent of the U.S. population since 1950. It is important to revive their stories as executives as well as workers, and claim our place as an important majority voice. 

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb 

Q&A with Jaclyn Gilbert

  

 

 

Jaclyn Gilbert is the author of the new novel Butter Road. She also has written the novel Late Air, and she is the founder of Driftless Literary.

 

Q: Butter Road is based on a 2006 school shooting--why did you decide to focus on that event and its aftermath in your novel?

 

A: I grew up in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, on the borderland between Amish country and the suburbs. Observing Amish customs and traditions relative to my own was a part of my everyday experience.

 

As a child, I remember walking with my parents and grandparents through the covered bridges (one on Hunsecker Road and another on Pine Ridge), hearing the clop clop of horse-and-buggies on the way to church services, held in Amish homes across the countryside.

 

Sometimes you could hear the hammering of a barn raising, the bells of sheep grazing in the fields, or the panting of an Amish border collie eager to say hello along the road. 

 

Later, my parents hired a pair of Amish sisters and their daughters to clean our house. These women--especially the mother, Barbara—were open about their experiences as women in a closed, patriarchal community, curious about literature and “English” (or non-Amish) life.

 

Barbara spoke openly about the impact of Nickel Mines on her everyday life, sharing stories about the survivors she knew. She explained how Amish faith requires its community to immediately forgive an event, no matter how unimaginable the atrocity, leaving little room for individuals–especially women–to process their experiences.

 

I believe that grief is different for everyone, just as forgiveness is, and I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to be forced to forgive an event before I was ready. 

 

In my novel, I wanted to explore what it would mean for a survivor like Emma Walsh, the protagonist of Butter Road, to need writing as a way to process her trauma, even though her community—especially her mother, Ruth—finds it unacceptable.

 

Because I am not Amish, I had to conduct extensive research and multiple interviews. I also had to consider the storyline from the perspective of a non-Amish person with separate, foreign ideas about female liberation.

 

This approach gave rise to the book's third perspective: that of Sara Caldwell, an "English" woman who hires Emma to help with her garden. Sara inspires Emma to rethink her relationship to her past by giving her books to read, taking her to the movies, and encouraging Emma to experiment during her Rumspringa year (the period before Amish teenagers are confirmed into the faith, during which they decide whether to leave or stay).

 

This timeline added urgency to Emma's decision-making as she finds her voice by writing her story from beginning to end.

 

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

 

A: I grew up on the real Butter Road in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, along the Amish borderland, which challenged me to see from multiple points of view (as an outsider of Amish culture curious about the reality of an insider).

 

After my stepfather died in 2020, and we had to sell our house on Butter Road, I also wanted to pay tribute to his life and influence on my life as a writer. Someone who always believed I could write and publish fiction, despite a deeply competitive industry challenged by the tech boom.

 

In many ways, just as Amish culture threatens to be displaced by higher land prices, greater industry and technology, so does my own memory; there is a fragility I feel about having left this place of my childhood and feeling unsure of when I will return again, and under what circumstances.

 

Butter Road signifies a kind of grief this way, but also the desire to preserve my memory and love for Lancaster into the future. 

 

Q: What did you see as the right balance between fiction and history as you wrote the book?

 

A: For me, the right balance is one that moves between rigorous, thoughtful research–across a variety of sources, historical, theological, and cultural–and my own personal experience to create an emotional true story.

 

I need the research to deepen the novel’s setting, the vivid lives of its characters–which are all different from my own–while also leaving room for me to connect to the loss at the heart of this story.

 

While I have never endured a school shooting, I have experienced out-of-body trauma that has taken years to heal from. My writing process has, over the years, allowed me to move through losses that otherwise threatened to keep me trapped in a chronic state of PTSD.

 

By searching for a shared language between the losses I’ve endured–of two fathers, one to addiction and another to cancer–I can better balance the historical impulses of the novel and the personal ones that allow me to expand the inner lives of my characters to, I hope, allow for a more universal reading experience. 

 

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

 

A: I hope readers can confront anxieties about school safety and gun control today in ways that open up meaningful conversations about our current climate.

 

By thinking about what it means for a community like the Amish to have open boundaries in a world that has become increasingly militarized we can begin to ask what kind of boundaries we need now, today, to protect our children and talk about our present reality with them, rather than deny that it is happening.

 

These are extremely difficult questions to confront, but as someone who has always believed that grief never goes away, only stews and re-expresses itself in other forms, I hope that encouraging more conversations can lead to a greater understanding about our current reality, inspiring different kinds of action, along with creation of more support groups for victims of gun violence.

 

In the process, I hope that readers can remember that it takes time–and faith–to heal from atrocity, that no road is clear or even, that we need lots of different individual ways to move forward without pressure for others to grieve in a particular way that feels more safe or acceptable. 

 

Q: What are you working on now? 

 

A: I am revising my third novel, Pauline, inspired by Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 19th-century short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper.”

 

This novel, like Butter Road, blends research on the history of hysteria with my own experience of new motherhood during the pandemic. It explores themes of isolation–as an artist and mother–as well as the power of the imagination to transcend boundaries of time and space to create art in community with other women who share this experience in real time. 

 

Q: Anything else we should know? 

 

A: I have always been an avid distance runner—I grew up training for cross country and track in Amish country.

 

Running through this landscape has been fundamental to shaping my perspective as a writer. It gives me a way of moving through space, observing my surroundings peripherally in ways that inspire me to capture this state in my writing. The language feels rhythmic to me, matching the pace of my breath when I run, timing with my memory of place as I move forward across disparate landscapes. 

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Jaclyn Gilbert. 

Q&A with Melissa G. Moore and Michele Matrisciani

  

 

 

Melissa G. Moore and Michele Matrisciani are the authors of the new book Killer in the Family: The Hidden Costs of Loving Someone the World Hates. 

 

Q: Why did you decide to write Killer in the Family?

 

Michele: By the time Melissa approached me to collaborate on the book, she had already had a publisher for the concept. What drew me to help bring the book to life was Melissa’s passion for extending the dialogue she had become trusted for: a daughter of a killer seeking to build a life in the wake of shame, trauma, and secrecy.

 

By inviting other families to share their own experiences, I believed the book could provide a much fuller, deeper picture of how people grapple with the grief and the loss of a familial relationship alongside mourning the lives of those lost.

 

Even those without a killer in the family could relate to the raw human emotion and the insights and healing that might come out of the thought experiment of What would I do? How would I feel? Who would I be after such a tragedy?

 

As a publishing professional focused on the nonfiction space, I have always been drawn to the true stories of people, especially when they touch upon relatable topics like resilience, rebuilding, and forgiveness. Killer in the Family is ripe with all of these and much more, and I believe it is less a voyeuristic look into true crime than an inspiration to overcome.

 

Melissa: I wanted to show what inside the family looks like when a killer is discovered. The most common question I get is "how did you not know?" This book shows how we all didn't know and beyond on how we live post-discovery.

 

Q: How did you research the book, and what did you learn that especially surprised you?

 

Michele: Each chapter of the book is dedicated to a family member connected to a well-known case, and each takes on a tone, structure, and theme as personal as the family itself. The same was true of the interviews, as no two unfolded in quite the same way.

 

For the Watts family, Melissa traveled to their home and spent several days living alongside them, looking at pictures, and accompanying them to the cemetery—a total immersion into life after their son, Chris, murdered his pregnant wife, Shanann, and their two daughters, making the Watts both family of the perpetrator and family of the victims.

 

For others, a series of Zoom calls was sufficient.

 

With Corban Bates, the brother of Magen Fieramusca, who murdered her best friend, Heidi Broussard, and kidnapped her newborn daughter, he and Melissa met for coffee, texted, talked on the phone, and shared documents by email.

 

Corban was open to sharing court documents, interviews he had with law enforcement and attorneys, and family history that helped the chapter become a layered exploration of a case that will enlighten many.

 

As a collaborator who has worked on many memoirs, I was surprised by how different these stories were from the narratives I have helped shape in the past. Most memoirists are reflecting on a defining period in their lives from some distance; even when the consequences remain, the experience itself has an ending.

 

These families are never really able to move forward in the same way because their stories do not remain in the past. They live within a society that has both a short-term and a long-term memory: short-term because a crime can become a fascination in the moment, and long-term because these cases can reenter the news cycle decades later.

 

A new crime is compared to an old one. A parole hearing takes place. A killer appeals for a retrial, gets married, or experiences another personal milestone that becomes public news. The family’s story is reopened, often without their participation or consent, and they are returned to a tragedy the rest of the world may have treated as a shiny new cultural object before moving on.

 

Melissa: What especially surprised me was the intensity of the online world surrounding these cases. There can be an almost insatiable hunger among online sleuths for another photograph, another detail, another family secret, anything that might provide a new clue or revelation.

 

For the families, those aren't pieces of a puzzle. They're pieces of their lives. That was something I wanted to capture in the book: what it feels like when your family memories, photographs, conversations, and even your grief become something the outside world wants to examine, dissect, and sometimes judge.

 

Q: The author James Renner said of the book, “These are the stories of the forgotten victims--the families that murderers leave behind.” What do you think of that description?

 

Michele: I was blown away when I saw this endorsement because he understood exactly what we hoped the book would accomplish.

 

We have always been mindful that telling the stories of perpetrators’ families—or exploring who these individuals were before they killed, through the eyes of those who loved or still love them—could be misunderstood as justifying or defending their crimes, or as somehow diminishing the victims. That was never our intention.

 

James Renner’s description recognizes that the devastation of murder extends outward, leaving behind another group of people whose grief, trauma, and loss are rarely acknowledged. I appreciated him lending his credibility to the subject and expressing the book’s purpose so clearly.

 

Melissa: I think that description is 100 percent true. I call the families of killers secondary victims because they experience a very particular kind of loss and grief. They grieve the identity of the person they thought they knew, while trying to reconcile that person with what they have now discovered.

 

Then there is everything that comes with the discovery. Their privacy can disappear overnight. There is the invasion of the media, the scrutiny from the public, and the judgment that can come simply because they are related to the person who committed the crime. Some lose jobs, friendships, relationships, and their sense of safety in their own communities.

 

While they didn't lose a life in the same way the victims' families did, they lost the life as it was. There is a before and an after. Their memories change. Their family history changes. Even their understanding of their own past can change.

 

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

 

Michele: For those who are familiar with these cases, I hope they discover a dimension of the family relationships they didn’t know about or hadn’t considered.

 

Some of these crimes occurred before Melissa was even born, so I also hope readers learn about cases from 40 years ago and, in doing so, help honor the victims and ensure they are never forgotten.

 

Most of all, I hope readers come away with a deeper understanding of the families left behind and recognize that they, too, must live with grief, trauma, and consequences they did not create.

 

What has also emerged as a powerful “B” story in the book is a discussion of the evolution of media. From the early 1980s to now, the media has played a major role in shaping narratives, fueling divisiveness, and blurring the lines between privacy and public curiosity.

 

Melissa’s own role in media—and how she became a producer—is a captivating story that makes the point that sometimes, in order to fix something that is broken, you have to become part of it.

 

We have moved from a world of local news and glossy magazine headlines to one of armchair detectives producing and controlling their own content within a 24/7 news cycle. That makes the conversation about media more important than ever.

 

I hope readers will value Melissa’s insider perspective on how we arrived here—and where we should be headed when it comes to ethical coverage, compassion, and care for everyone touched by a crime.

 

Melissa: I hope readers come away looking at breaking crime stories differently and viewing speculation with more critical thinking. Most of all, I hope they see the family as innocent until proven guilty, rather than guilty until proven innocent. Families may truly have no idea what someone they love has done, and they deserve humanity before judgment.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

Michele: What I love about my job as a collaborator is that I’m able to fill the funnel with different authors, topics, voices, and services. I am rarely working in the same capacity from one project to the next.

 

Right now, I’m working on several books in spirituality, parenting, memoir, and hospitality—and even a policy-driven book that I believe will make headlines as we enter the next political cycle.

 

One day, I would love to finish my own memoir, but for now, I remain focused and invigorated by helping amazing authors bring their ideas to life and connect their work with traditional publishers.

 

Melissa: I’m currently helping a young woman in her 20s prepare to confront her father, who is in prison for murder, and ask him the question she has lived with for years: Where is her missing mother?

 

Her father is seriously ill, and if he knows what happened and where her mother is, those answers could die with him. I’m documenting her journey with a film crew as she searches for the truth and, hopefully, the chance to finally bring her mother home.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

Michele: If you are a writer who is interested in book coaching, book proposal writing, developmental editing, manuscript evaluations, or ghostwriting, I’d love to help. michelem.net

 

Melissa: While Killer in the Family is a true crime book, it isn’t traditional true crime. It is an open diary into these families’ lives, shared with incredible trust and vulnerability. I hope readers will receive their stories with the same respect and empathy with which they were shared.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb 

Q&A with P.J. Blumenthal

  

 

 

P.J. Blumenthal is the author of the new story collection Self Portraits. His other books include Winston Hewlett's Impotence. He lives in Germany.

 

Q: What inspired you to write Self Portraits?

 

A: I fear it’s easier to ask this question than to answer it. Self Portraits is a collection of 23 stories, each with a unique etiology and unaware of and uninterested in the existence of its literary neighbor – although they sometimes do have elements in common.

 

Each was the result of some barely describable urgency experienced periodically by the author. Maybe that’s what’s meant by the “creative process.” Suddenly, some image or notion or character surfaces, and soon I am pulling on something like a thread – destination unknown.

 

In no time, words, lots of them, are clustering around this initial impulse and, voilà! A story is born, better said, a first draft – because characters and circumstances usually take form long before the proper words do.

 

What follows is the writing and rewriting which may demand several drafts. It’s hard work but also pleasurable. In my case, it’s also a fight for the logic, the intrinsic architecture at work in the ideas and the language itself.

 

At some point I stop. Probably exhaustion. And once something is published, I never look at it again…well, unless a new edition is planned. Then the fussiness begins all over.

 

Heine edited his Book of Songs five times, and Auden was always looking for better solutions. Paraphrasing Valery, Auden once said: “A poem is never finished, only abandoned.” That same yearning for perfection applies to prose, of course – at least it should.

 

Q: You write, “Self portraits, which is to say, portraits of selves. Of many selves.” Can you say more about that, and about how the book’s title was chosen?

 

A: The title Self Portraits was an afterthought. It seemed a fitting common denominator for this diverse collection of stories, tales and sketches. Frankly, I can’t recall when it first came to mind.

 

At any rate, I felt comfortable with it when it did – though for a while some doubts crept in after someone pointed out that readers might assume I was obsessed with some endless solipsistic portrayal of myself from various aspects, vomiting up the kind of things you might want to heap on your analyst.

 

I’ve heard that in some creative writing programs instructors encourage students to “express themselves” as a font of literary motivation. I don’t know if that’s really true. I’ve never been to a creative writing course.

 

My Self Portraits is not a collection of 23 reflections of my own face in the mirror. In fact, I might have preferred calling the book “Portraits of Selves” but those four syllables sound awkward to my ears.

 

The three syllables of my title may risk being misunderstood, but as compensation they are rich in irony. I decided to take my chances, and now I am sure I made the right decision.

 

Q: Over how long a period did you write the stories collected in this book?

 

A: Uh oh, now this gets personal because it demands revealing biographical information if I am to answer your question honestly. I am referring to the number of years I have roamed the surface of this fascinating planet.

 

But what the hell. Anyone really interested in a fact like that can look up my age in the WWW (which I prefer to call the WoeWoeWoe). I guess I worry – perhaps unnecessarily – about the bias of ageists.

 

But back to your question. The earliest piece in this book, “The Ice Rose,” was written in first draft 50 years ago – though it has been revisited and polished a few times since. Other stories came about between 20 and 35 years ago. Some are maybe five to 10 years old. The most recent, “The Translation Center,” is approximately two years old.

 

Nevertheless, they all underwent a final polishing when I understood that they constituted the content of a single book entitled Self Portraits.

 

Q: The writer Elfriede Jelinek said of your writing, “When you book Blumenthal, your trip is fully guaranteed. Adventure galore in the unknown known: first-class entertainment, funny and serious--just as it should be.” What do you think of that description?

 

A: Yes, I like that: “first-class entertainment, funny and serious.” Elfriede Jelinek, an old friend, knows these stories since “The Ice Rose.” Granted, the humor in Self Portraits is not raucous In fact, usually, it remains sequestered behind intense irony.

 

By the way: I might add that I originally intended to write my stories in German. Elfriede Jelinek suggested a long time ago that I stick to English. And it’s true: they need my voice in English.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: Last year, I translated what I consider my best book, Hieron’s Banquet (Hierons Gastmahl), from German into English. It takes place in ancient Greece and is a work whose source I still don’t quite understand. Suddenly, it insisted on coming into being.

 

In addition, I have been translating into German a play I initially wrote in English 40 (!) years ago based on the Hippolytus story. Since I live in Germany, it will probably be easier for me to find a theater for the German version than the English.

 

Otherwise, I have no new project at the moment. Occasionally, I write a poem. For the past two years, I have been aware of a stirring, and certain images and situations keep surfacing. Occasionally, I make notes but still sense no urgency. I only write when there is no alternative.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: Writing is my vehicle for communicating the ineffable. I am passionate about music too but alas I will always remain an amateur. I would experience a painful loneliness if I weren’t able to find words to clothe certain impulses that reach me from a very deep place in my soul. I never know when the urgency will strike.

 

Nevertheless, in 1986, I abandoned my greatest passion, poetry. For some reason, I saw no more need to write it. Twenty-five years later, in August 2011, within three weeks, a book of poems, The Caedmon Songs, exploded out of me. Since then, I have been writing poetry when the urgency strikes.

 

Whenever I finish a project, I feel empty, silent and sometimes a little sad. That’s part of the creative process, I suppose.

 

One additional point: Readers will have a difficult time differentiating between my recent and my early works. The author, i.e., myself, and the source of the urgency that impels him to write, have always remained the same.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb 

Q&A with Nikki McClure

  

Photo credit: Nikki McClure, Norton Young Readers

 

 

Nikki McClure is the author and illustrator of the new children's picture book A Forest, A Family, A Harbor, A Home. Her other books include Mama, Is It Summer Yet?. She lives in Olympia, Washington. 

 

Q: What inspired you to create A Forest, A Family, A Harbor, A Home?

 

A: I was inspired by watching my child grow up. Each stage of life has joys and challenges: exploring, learning, getting wet, and coming home to open arms to a place where you are liked and loved.

 

I wanted to make a book about home as a place and as a feeling more than a built house structure. Home is a forest. Home is a harbor. Home is a warm hug and the place where you know how a smile feels,  the place where you are totally accepted and at ease.

 

It is all my books smushed into one. It is for the kids who grew up reading All in a Day and Mama, is it Summer Yet? A book to show them how far they have grown and how they will always have a place to return to as they head out into the world.

 

A Forest, A Family, A Harbor, A Home is also for the parents watching, as I am, with amazement at the transformation of their child— a reassurance and reminder that home is love.

 

Q: How do you create your illustrations?

 

A: For this book, I painted paper handmade in Japan with black sumi ink. There are subtle tone differences in the depth of black ink that I could respond to in my compositions.

 

I then cut out an image from the black paper with a knife. This cut layer was then laid on top of paper that I had painted with yellow and blue inks, their mixing creating green. The ink was in dry stick form and I would grind it on a stone with water to make enough liquid to paint a sheet of paper.

 

Sometimes there would be a plan, but mostly it was freeform and I felt like I was 3 years old and painting for the first time. My studio got very messy on painting days! The art was then photographed for the book. All analog!

 

Q: The Kirkus Review of the book called it a “quiet meditation on home, memory, and the places that shape us.” What do you think of that description?

 

A: I think they understand the book. It’s nice to have a review where the reviewer helps me, the author, understand what I made at a deeper level.

 

It is a quiet book with a few moments of light peril. It is meditative. I have been reciting it to myself at night in my mind and it helps me go to sleep.

 

And the idea that places shape us is what I made the book about. Home is more than your house, and even more than your family. It is air and water, and the sounds and smells of place.

 

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

 

A: I probably just answered this above! Home is where you are liked and loved. Home is more than walls and roof; it is trees and birds, tide and wind. Home is place where you are always welcomed with love.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I am finalizing the layout for How to Triumph Like a Girl, a poem written by Ada Limón! I add an exclamation because it is amazing!!

 

Her text is powerful and the artwork I made for it astounds me. I made the art too quick! It was if I was in a trance. And it doesn’t have anything to do with family, forests, boats, baskets, wool sweaters, or kittens. It is a girl and a horse and blood red ink. Pure power.

 

And there are inklings of more books after that.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: I had just finished cutting out the art for the spread where the child rows home. I went down to the beach ( I live along the shore of the Salish Sea) and went for a swim. I dried off, got dressed, and then my neighbor phoned “Orcas! At the beach!”

 

So I ran down and there was a pod of six orcas RIGHT WHERE I HAD BEEN SWIMMING! They dived and leapt and slapped their tails for an hour. It was not the usual glide on by but a full-on whale party.

 

The next morning, I cut out a paper orca whale and slipped it under the layers of paper. The paper I use is slightly translucent. The whale is there, not there—there to be perceived, or not, by a child rowing home in the rain. I like to leave room for things like that to happen in my images.

 

--Q&A with Deborah Kalb. This Q&A was conducted in partnership with Nikki McClure. Readers who follow along on this virtual book tour will have the chance to win a hardcover copy of A Forest, A Family, A Harbor, A Home by Nikki McClure.

Oct .15

 

 

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

Q&A with Lynne Hugo

  

 

 

Lynne Hugo is the author of the new novel Under an Indiana Sky. Her many other books include Mothers of Fate. Also a psychotherapist, she lives in Oxford, Ohio.

 

Q: What inspired you to write Under an Indiana Sky, and how did you create your cast of characters?

 

A: As I thought about writing this novel and what issue might speak to many readers, I realized that I really don’t think I know anyone whose life experience hasn’t brought them into contact with someone whose life has been affected by addiction. It may be themselves, or within their nuclear or extended family or if not, within their friendship or acquaintance circle.

 

But, in my experience, everyone knows someone. Everyone is aware of some true story—maybe of alienation and tragedy or one of the good stories of recovery and hope.

 

Addiction can divide families. Some family members see the problem and try to intervene. Often this goes badly. That’s why I created the sisters, Denise and Angela, with Denise—who senses her sister’s problem and reacts with upset and anger as well as worry because she also has a selfish motive.

 

Some family members are simply blind to the issue out of ignorance and being too much on the periphery, more like Brock’s mother, Nora, and probably, his brother, Tom. Even friends like Mercedes. Addicts are often extremely good at hiding the addiction, too, and that’s a complicating factor with Brock.

 

We can’t discount denial—friends and family often see only what they are capable of seeing as well as what others disclose to them. I worked to create characters that depict the various psychological realities of this complex dynamic while also creating a gripping story with sympathetic, relatable characters.

 

Q: In our previous Q&A, you said, “[A]ll my novels have at their heart some social issue that I think is important and multi-sided.” As you mentioned, this novel deals with addiction--how did you research the book, and did you learn anything that especially surprised you?

 

A: I did an enormous amount of research into how drugs are distributed in this country—especially in our suburbs and rural areas where they are far more accessible than I think many realize: distribution chains from the big dealers to medium-size ones to smaller ones and elaborate delivery systems, which all vary.

 

Another area I researched were specific drugs like oxycontin and it is being cut—often now in a deadly way—with fentanyl, and its effect on the body and what a fentanyl death looks like. I also researched cocaine, how it is consumed and how it acts on the body.

 

Research methods included but weren’t limited to interviewing people who have used substances that characters in the novel use. I also used medical sites and sources.

 

What surprised me, honestly, was my overall ignorance on the subject although I’d thought I was reasonably knowledgeable and—again, as I’ve found with previous novels—the generosity of interview subjects and the critical importance of trustworthy research sources.

 

Q: The writer Donna Everhart called the book “an important novel, one of darkness and loss, but also one of courage, unexpected kindness, and hope.” What do you think of that description?

 

A: I really love that description and am so grateful to Ms. Everhart for reviewing it that way. I am opposed to “tie it up with a red bow endings” for my novels, and my stories don’t avoid or deny the pain or sorrow that is so much a part of the human experience.

 

Still, while I want readers to see a future for my characters that is more realistic than “happily ever after,” my endings always leave them with hope and doors that readers will see that the characters can open.

 

Q: How does your work as a therapist intersect with your work as a novelist?

 

A: I think my work as a therapist has made me particularly aware of the complexities of emotion and of what people go through—how very difficult life can be.

 

I would never use anything that a patient has shared with me as the basis for a story, which would be a serious ethical violation, but I certainly use the understanding of and empathy I have gained for the human experience. My training in listening skills and years of practice have, I believe, given me a really good ear for writing natural dialogue.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I am working on the last chapter (which happens before the first round of revisions—which precedes the second round, and on and on…) of a novel I’ve tentatively titled One Good Thing, which is loosely about patient and potential donor experiences as well as ethics issues for staff in the context of a kidney dialysis and transplant center. (No, I have absolutely zero personal experience with this!—it’s all research-based.)

 

I have only recently learned this about myself for sure: I can’t finish a novel without knowing what the next one will be about.

 

I was having trouble finishing the final chapter of One Good Thing. I thought it was because my mental space is now divided between this new manuscript and Under an Indiana Sky, as launch approaches.

 

But—I’ve suddenly hit upon the topic for the novel after One Good Thing and…suddenly it’s easier. And I realized that this is the way it’s always been. I have to know what is next.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: Nothing anyone else should know, but one thing readers might be interested in knowing: my personal answer to the perennial question that I think every novelist is most frequently asked. “Where do you get your ideas?”

 

I often get ideas from something I see as an ongoing problem that’s affecting many lives, to which many readers might relate. I have to be able to see it, though, as a riveting story I can put in the context of flawed but fully human and ultimately sympathetic characters.

 

Sometimes the specific idea comes from something that keeps popping up in the news or newspaper; this was the case with Under An Indiana Sky—a story that happens to be set in rural Indiana, but is not at all specific to Indiana.

 

I kept seeing stories about the opiate crisis—especially as it existed out on the rural, suburban and city streets of our nation and increasingly cut with fentanyl, unknown to buyers. That’s when I thought: there could be a powerful novel here.

 

The story has to come first. The research needs to be the underpinning. Readers don’t pick up a novel looking for information; they pick it up for a story they can’t put down. My fervent hope is that they find just that in Under An Indiana Sky.

 

Thank you so much, Deborah Kalb, for inviting me to answer your good questions!

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Lynne Hugo.