Q&A with Josh Weil

  

Photo by Claire Potin

 

 

Josh Weil is the author of the new novel What Came West. His other books include The Great Glass Sea. He lives in the Sierra Nevada of Northern California.

 

Q: What inspired you to write What Came West, and how did you create your character Silas Hall?

 

A: I was first drawn to the story not by a character, but by the landscape of the Sierra Nevada—and, specifically, by the history of its destruction by the overwhelming tide of humanity that swept it in the first year of the California Gold Rush.

 

The sheer rapidity of change—the land (a handful of river canyons) went from a place where no more than a few white people had passed through (settling farther down in the valley instead) to a place overrun by 80,000 miners.

 

The devastation to the natural world and the indigenous population was terrible. And terribly dramatic. And I was interested in that. What it was to lose a world so utterly, so quickly.

 

But the story came to life for me once that loss was made real in a character. And that character was Silas, a hermit trapper who flees his own society (the 1800s America of Manifest Destiny) and finds a corner of the world where he can live in peace, more aligned with wild animals than other humans (even the nearby tribes)—only to have that ripped away when the Gold Rush strikes.

 

He came to me in action and in voice. First, in action, because he responds violently to the violence wreaked upon his world, and that violence was my first glimpse of him. But it was complex enough I knew I wanted to understand him.

 

And it was his voice that led me to his interior, his heart. It came to me in a line—one that was the first he spoke to me and that is still his first line in the book: You will want to know why. There was a desperation, a need, a defensiveness, a fragility and strength all wrapped up in that, and I knew that was the character who would drive the book.

 

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

 

A: A ton of research went into this book, both book research and experiential research. It had to. I was very cognizant of the responsibility I had to the native communities who are present in the story—whose history gave rise to the very foundations of the story I was telling—and the first part of my getting their story right was doing the work to really understand it.

 

So I read book after book, dug up anthropologists’ notes, spent hours in the local historical  libraries, and, most importantly, spoke with linguists and historians and tribal representatives.

 

I did as much around the history of the land itself. Though that was also largely a process of personal experience—just hiking the river canyons, swimming the pools, climbing the higher peaks, spending time in all seasons and all weather in the environment and taking note.

 

That’s one of the great joys of writing: that being in the world, noticing the world, is part of the work.

 

And in that work so much surprised me. Small things, like the brilliance of the hidden head-feathers that would appear and disappear on the Ruby-Crowned Kinglets in the willow bush beside my writing trailer. And overarching discoveries—like just how massive the change to the world of the Sierras was in 1849, and how quickly it rushed upon it—that changed the course of the book.

 

Q: The writer Janet Fitch said of the book, “The rawness and intensity of What Came West recall Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree—the harshness, the urgency, the sudden violence, elevated by Weil's soaring language.” What do you think of that assessment?

 

A: I mean, I’m flattered and touched by it—and hope that it’s true. It’s an honor just to be thought of in the same sentence with Cormac McCarthy, who I think of as one of the greatest American writers and certainly was a huge influence on me.

 

I would say that all those things Janet Fitch pointed to, those are things I was striving for. So to whatever extent I reached them, I’m tremendously gratified.

 

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

 

A: It was chosen by my (brilliant) editor, Thomas Gebremedhin! Because my titles were awful. It’s the first time I struggled to find a title. I think because I’d lived with the book under another title for many years, one that Thomas, quite correctly, thought too flat.

 

When he hit on What Came West it felt right because it contains much of the complexities of the book: there’s the fact that Silas came west fleeing the world he leaves behind and the fact that he brings that world after him as a kind of spearhead that drives the destruction of the thing he most wants to protect.

 

I hope that the title feels both reminiscent of some of the romance of the mythology of the American West and carries a lurking darkness, a threat—that is part of the reality.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: A couple things: a short novel that I’m revisiting (set even farther back in history) and a short novel that has been on my mind for some time, that’s set right now.

 

The key to both is that I see them as short! What Came West was a huge undertaking, an all-enveloping one for many years, and I’m ready now for a different mode.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: Nope, these questions have been great. Thanks!

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Josh Weil. 

Q&A with Ellis Scott

  

 

 

 

Ellis Scott is the author of the new novel Night Terminus. His work has appeared in a variety of publications, including The Iowa Review. 

 

Q: What inspired you to write Night Terminus?

 

A: I published my debut short story when I was 55 years old, which was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Time moves differently and folds in on itself as one gets older, and the long past often gains importance. 

 

I considered several ideas for a first novel but kept coming back to the AIDS crisis. Only a handful of AIDS novels have been written in the last 10 or 15 years. There was more to say.

 

I think the aftermath often provides more compelling narratives than the calamity itself, and I couldn’t find novels about the survivors of AIDS: people who watched their friends and lovers die, who were supposed to perish then didn’t, and who suffer from complex physical ailments and emotional scars as they age. These individuals carry the heavy burden of history.

 

I was an out gay teenager when the epidemic started and am now 62 years old. I realized most survivors were older than me and would soon all be dead. Witnesses to that tragedy would be gone, so I was inspired to write the story of what happened, the joy and the sorrow.

 

Q: How did you create your unnamed protagonist--and why did you decide to make him unnamed?

 

A: Personal experience shaped my narrator, though he is fictional. He plays the everyman.

 

I wanted to emphasize his transient nature, and one theme in the novel is this idea of statelessness — a gay diaspora living in liminal spaces and a place of impermanence. Absence and dissolution play large roles in the novel’s plot and in the art and photography highlighted in the book.

 

The narrator anchors the narrative but from a distance, so that the weight of the catastrophe speaks for itself. He circles, watching what unfolds, but each chapter is named after the rebels, fugitives, and artists he meets along the way on three continents over 40 years.

 

Ia Genberg used a similar device in her febrile novel The Details, where the main character is revealed through other characters in four parts. I used a five-part structure to do the same. W. G. Sebald also employed a similar design for his novel The Emigrants. 

 

Being true to his voice was more important than naming him. Not every story will have a traditional form. Life is messy. Things end abruptly. People are left hanging. 

 

Q: In a review in The Brooklyn Rail, Henry Hicks IV writes, “Scott writes a queer novel that is full of abundance—even in its solemnity. Night Terminus is a haunting, a prayer, and an exhale all at once.” What do you think of that description?

 

A: I was so grateful and thought it aptly summed up the mood. He is a wonderful writer, and being lauded by peers is such an affirmation. The entire novel is a haunting. There is such a geography of absence in the narrative yet traces of the long dead and near dead are found everywhere — in 19th-century artifacts, 20th-century political events, the spectral photography of Édouard Baldus, and of course those who died of AIDS.

 

But Night Terminus is also my requiem for a lost generation. An incantation and an elegy. Perhaps the most impactful part of that sentence for me is the exhale. Few stories about that terrible time have been told in literary fiction. I have been holding those tales in for so many decades that writing them was a personal liberation from the grief that struck me so young. 

 

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

 

A: It’s always a difficult question because it’s not my place to suggest what someone would take from my writing, but I would say I hope they are changed somehow, as I am each time I read a wonderful book. There is nothing better than a reader who has grasped your intent and has been stirred somehow — their worldview either shifted or validated.

 

These are universal stories: the search for meaning and agency, the power of chance and coincidence, and the joy in resilience and community. 

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I have struggled with illness most of my adult life. If my current condition remains stable, I am going to start writing my second novel.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: I didn’t just write this for my fellow elders; I wrote it for the young people in my community struggling to find tales about their collective history that have so often been erased from history.

 

The novel is for readers interested in queer historical fiction, 20th-century politics, or just travel in a time with no internet or cell phones. My hope is that the audience is as abundant as the stories within its pages.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb 

Q&A with Caroline Bicks

  

 

 

Caroline Bicks is the author of the new book Monsters in the Archives: My Year of Fear with Stephen King. She holds the Stephen E. King Chair in Literature at the University of Maine.

 

Q: What inspired you to write Monsters in the Archives, and how did you first get interested in the writing of Stephen King?

 

A: I was 12 when I first discovered King’s writing. I picked up Night Shift in my local public library and devoured it.

 

I’d been a very anxious little kid who had stuck close to my mom and  home whenever possible, so when I got to “The Boogeyman”—a story about children getting killed by a monster hiding in their bedroom closet— it scared me like nothing I’d ever read before. It hit my personal “fearbone” (a King neologism) in an especially excruciating way, and has stuck in my mind ever since.

 

When I took the position of Stephen E. King Chair in Literature at UMaine nine years ago, I was told that I wouldn’t be meeting King and shouldn’t reach out to him.

 

I was okay with that: it was a fabulous job that came with a fund to support the public humanities and included teaching Shakespeare, which I’d been doing for decades. I wasn’t a Horror specialist, although I’d kept reading King since that first encounter with Night Shift.

 

Then, four years into the job, Stephen King called me at home. I invited him to come to campus to talk to our English majors, and he spent two magical days with them.

 

We started to develop a lovely working relationship after that, and I felt comfortable asking him if I could spend my sabbatical year exploring his personal archives — specifically, drafts of the 1970s books that had scared me so badly when I was a kid: Carrie, The Shining, ’Salem’s Lot, Night Shift, and Pet Sematary. I wanted to understand how he had crafted them and why they were still haunting me 40 years later.

 

No one had been granted that kind of extended access to his materials before, but he and his wife, Tabitha, generously said Yes.

 

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

 

A: I spent two months on each book, taking them one at a time so that I could fully immerse myself in all of the drafts for each one and explore its unique story.

 

By “story” I mean a few different things: 1) What is it about, and what is its origin story? 2) Where was King in his own life story when he started the first draft? What had changed by the time he was writing the final one? And, most important; 3) How do the manuscript pages themselves tell a story — through King’s margin notes and edits — about the themes and stylistic concerns King was focusing on at the time he was drafting and revising that particular work? 

 

I learned so many surprising things along the way about each of them. Some of the novels originally had very different endings, and it was fascinating to see and talk to King about those larger changes.

 

I was also surprised, on a micro-crafting level, at how he—like Shakespeare— intentionally picks words based on their aural effects.

 

There’s an iconic line in Pet Sematary, for example: “Sometimes dead is better.” In the first draft, he wrote “death is better,” but then crossed out “death” in the second draft and wrote “dead” in his distinctive handwriting. The sonic effect he eventually crafted echoes in your head and sticks so much more effectively than “death is better.”

 

In the final copyedited draft, I discovered a margin response he’d written to a query about another one of his word choices that perfectly illustrates his attention to how words land on the reader’s ear: “The sound of that particular stutter really is ‘shuh.’ Say it loud. You’ll see.”

 

Each day in the archives was a master class for me in the work that goes into creating a great piece of writing that will resonate with readers across time and live in their imaginations.

 

Q: The writer Amy Tan said of the book, “Illuminating and original, Monsters in the Archives takes us deep into Stephen King’s private papers to show us how he crafted some of his most iconic, haunting books and took possession of so many of our imaginations.” What do you think of that description?

 

A: I’m honored, of course, to get such praise from one of my favorite writers. I cite her in my book’s introduction when I’m describing a conversation she and King were having once about the kinds of questions they tend to get at book talks: “ ‘No one ever asks about the language,’ ” she said.

 

When I started imagining the book that I wanted to write about King’s process, her words stuck with me and were my guiding principle: every step of the way, I was asking about the language and working to discover how he had crafted it to create these enduring stories.

 

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

 

A: I learned a lot about myself as a writer, including how to bring my own voice and stories to my subject.

 

When I started my archival work, I didn’t know what this book would look like. I just wanted to explore how King had crafted some of the scariest moments from the stories I had read when I was a teenager. Words and phrases were still sticking in my head 40 years later, and—as a literary scholar—I wanted to understand why.

 

As I got deeper into his manuscripts, though, and reexperienced all the sickening, heart-thumping fears I’d originally felt, I realized that this was also going to be a story about how well-crafted language makes us feel something, whether that’s fear or joy or anger. I became more attuned to these connections as I studied his revisions and talked to him about his choices.

 

When I sat down to write Monsters in the Archives, I made a conscious decision to bring my personal story into it. As scholars, we’re taught to perform an emotional disengagement from our subjects. But, as I learned from King, the most effective writing (whether academic or fictional), connects readers to the humanity of the storyteller and, ultimately, to each other. That was the big lesson for me, and one that I hope readers will take away from my book.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I’m a full-time professor, which means I spend nine months of the year teaching. So I’m giving myself the summer to relax, read books I want to read, and get back to my Everyday Shakespeare podcast, which I co-host with my close friend Michelle Ephraim.

 

As much as I’ve loved promoting Monsters in the Archives— meeting and talking to people around the country and the globe—I’ve missed the fun, collaborative work Michelle and I do together.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: I can’t overstate how generous and brave King was in letting me excavate his manuscripts and publish pages from some of them. For any writer, no matter how famous, having other people see your early drafts is going to leave you feeling a bit vulnerable.

 

He never said to me: “You’re wrong,” or “You can’t say that.” He answered all of my questions with candor and kindness. I am grateful to him for trusting me to tell this story.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb 

June 8

 

 

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
June 8, 1947: Sara Paretsky born.

Q&A with Daria Sommers

  

 

 

Daria Sommers is the author of the new novel Sawadika American Girl. She is also a filmmaker and is the managing editor of VBC Magazine. She lives in New York. 

 

Q: How much was your new novel inspired by your own experiences growing up in Bangkok?

 

A: Sawadika American Girl is a work of historical fiction. However, the narrative elements that drive the story and the characters in it are drawn from the world I grew up in.

 

For example, the main character, Piper, studies piano with a Thai prince who was a student of the great Chilean pianist Claudio Arrau. That character is loosely based on a Thai prince who was my piano teacher and who studied with Arrau.

 

Piper has a high school friend who lives with her brother in a Bangkok hotel so they can both attend Bangkok’s college-accredited International High School while their parents work for the American embassy in Vientiane, Laos. That setup sounds wild but it happened.

 

What I want readers to know is that the events in the novel occurred in some form or another to me, or someone I knew, or they were part of the lore that you lived with as an American in Bangkok during the Vietnam War years.

 

Q: Did you need to do much additional research to write the book, and if so, did you learn anything that especially surprised you?

 

A: I was fortunate to inherit my father’s journals, letters, and program reports that detailed his USAID work in both Thailand and Vietnam. They were a great resource for the specifics of what he was up to, what USAID was doing and what the mood was for the Americans working over there at the time.

 

Equally important was what I got from my mother. Throughout the ‘60s and early ‘70s, she worked as a writer and art director for SAWADDI Magazine, a bimonthly publication of the American Women’s Club of Bangkok dedicated to stories on Thai art and culture. She kept more than a decades’ worth of copies.

 

Sometime in the 2000s, I saw them piled next to the trash bin at my parent’s house and swooped in to save them. I knew I was going to write this book and that they were research gold.

 

While I recalled a lot, the magazines served as a critical check on my memory. They were a great resource for street names, identifying what stores were where, and the location of old markets that no longer exist today.

 

A lot of the names and spellings I use in the book were taken from the magazine. That is important because my novel is told through the lens of the Americans who lived there. Getting that frame of reference right was important to me.

 

The Siam Society in Bangkok was also immensely helpful and responded to my crazy email requests with documents and important links to material I couldn’t access anywhere else.

 

About halfway through the book, I had an epiphany of sorts. I realized that this private, nagging sense I’ve carried with me that I’d grown up in an aberrant world, as wonderful as it was troublesome, was true.

 

In a way, writing the novel confirmed my own history for me and relieved me of that private burden. That was personally liberating. Telling stories really does matter.

 

Q: How did you create your character Piper?

 

A: My intent from the start was to make this a coming-of-age story with a 17-year-old female protagonist. That struck me as an unexpected yet powerful way to shed light on this hidden history. Even though I am younger than Piper, her voice represents my own. Why would I change that?

 

Growing up in Thailand during this period was, at times, great but it also came with enormous burdens and a lingering bewilderment at the world. An enduring dislocation. The war was always present. My character Piper is deeply aware of that. So was I.

 

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

 

A: I knew all the plot points in advance. However, I didn’t know how I was getting from point A to point B or point B to point C. I just dove in and started writing and the way forward always appeared. That was the fun part. Writers say it all the time because it is true. At one point, the characters take over. I followed their lead.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: My next book takes place in during the summer of 2021. All I’ll say for now is that it is an uplifting, spirited story with some unexpected female protagonists that unfolds against the backdrop of the second wave of Covid, the George Floyd protests, and the imminent fall of Afghanistan.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb 

Q&A with Dan Rosenfeld

  

 

 

Dan Rosenfeld is the author of the new book The Confidence Equation: Three Keys to Unleashing Self-Confidence as an Introvert. He is also a psychologist, table tennis player, and comedian.

 

Q: What inspired you to write The Confidence Equation?

 

A: The Confidence Equation started as a memoir. In the book, I share my personal story living with cerebral palsy and how I overcame my disability to become a professional athlete, national stand-up comedy champion, and Ph.D. psychologist.

 

While writing, though, I realized my story offered lessons other people can apply to their own lives too, so I turned it into a memoir/self-help hybrid. Throughout the book, I use moments from my personal story to share life lessons on how readers can overcome self-doubt and build self-confidence.

 

Q: What do you think are some of the most common perceptions and misconceptions about introverts?

 

A: Two of the most common perceptions and misconceptions about introverts are that they’re shy and don’t like people. Shyness is a fear of social judgment; introversion means you fuel up on energy by spending time alone.

 

Those are totally different things. An introvert can be completely confident and conformable in social settings, and love being around people, but just need alone time to recharge afterward. In fact, that’s how most introverts are.

 

Q: What do you see as the major roadblocks to feeling self-confident as an introvert?

 

A: I believe there are two major roadblocks to feeling self-confident as an introvert.

 

The first comes from living in a culture that idealizes extroversion. Many Western cultures reward boldness, quick talking, and constant sociability. When that’s the default template for a “successful person,” introverts can internalize the message that something is wrong with them.

 

The second roadblock, on a related note, is misreading your own needs as weakness. Needing to leave a party early, going quiet in a group brainstorm, or feeling drained after a long day around people can feel like personal failure rather than simply being how you’re wired.

 

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

 

A: Writing the book was therapeutic, as I reflected deeply on my life story and what each challenge I’ve faced has taught me. I believe the writing process brought me clarity and calm.

 

I hope readers take away clarity about themselves and their own lives, as well as a more compassionate attitude toward their own self-doubts and struggles. I hope readers leave the book with not only an understanding that self-confidence looks different for each person, but also a clearer idea of what confidence means and feels like to them.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I’m currently working on a book about modern dating and why it’s uniquely frustrating for so many people. If anyone’s interested in reading that one, they can stay updated on its release by joining my newsletter: https://danrosenfeld.kit.com/45ef212e02

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: I’m active on Instagram @dr.dan.phd (https://www.instagram.com/dr.dan.phd/), so people can follow my day-to-day writing there!

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb 

Q&A with Lisa K. Richter

  

 

 

Lisa K. Richter is the author of the new memoir Fly, My Darling. Her work has appeared in a variety of publications, including Santa Monica Review. She lives in Laguna Beach, California. 

 

Q: What inspired you to write this memoir?

 

A: Sometimes, perhaps only once in a lifetime, there comes along an event so consuming, so psychically altering, that it demands an investigation, an unraveling at the deepest level, to be given a name, to be written out, and through words, to understand, to uncover its truth.

 

For me, it was the entrance into my life of a remarkable woman. Lynda Roth dropped into my being, as my jazz instructor, when I was looking for a freer approach to music. I was 44 and married at the time with children; our unexpected and profound love changed everything about me and my life situation. Then a few years later she was gone from the world.  

 

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

 

A: Pinned to the cork wall in my office is a card from Lynda. A single wish she wrote me just weeks before she died. It watched me for years before I realized it was the place to begin. Three simple powerful words: Fly, my darling. A wish, an endearing command, a theme. Flying, freedom, improvisation in jazz, in life. Letting go. 

 

Q: The Kirkus Review of the book called it a “moving tribute to an unconventional person and the love she shared with the author.” What do you think of that description?

 

A: The description is true to the heart of the story. Lynda was certainly unconventional. She was spiritual, outspoken, and brutally honest—a brilliant and beloved musician. She shared her soul, her love, her life with me.

 

But the book is more than a loving tribute—it is also a personal journey of intense reflection and questioning, of family struggle, of newfound desire, of hope, resilience, and gut-wrenching grief. It is, as well, a musical tribute—a narrative composed of brief lyrical segments and shaped as a three-part musical composition.

 

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

 

A: Writing the book, revisiting those years, assembling all its parts from journal entries, emails, and taped conversations was, at times, a struggle. I had published poems and essays on the joy, eroticism, and grief of those years. But there was a wider story, a larger truth to be quarried.

 

I continued compiling scenes: childhood reflections, philosophical insights, riffs on mathematical and musical concepts, important moments from my larger world.

 

There followed the process of distilling each scene down to its essence. Paragraphs were reduced, sometimes to a single phrase, like the one asked of me early on, then echoed throughout the story: What is it you want, what?

 

Lynda had taught not to force a resolution. To listen. To allow each sound to speak, each riff to find its desired groove. I revisited the narratives of favorite authors to determine what made them work, to uncover the threads that held their stories together.

 

I worked out a rough chronological throughline with past events woven in—a story structure with the bones of a beginning (the searching and finding), a middle (the losing), and an end (the finding again). Segments were shuffled. And shuffled. Rhythms of anticipation, tension, and release began to flow. The process reinforced my belief that all writing is essentially musical when it is good.

 

I hope readers find comfort in the story’s honesty. That they trust to ask themselves the questions I did and realize that love is always worth its tribulations. It is never too late to begin anew.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I am taking a close, revisionary look at the 28 essays in my themed online series, Searching for the Talisman (talismanofhappiness.com), with the intent of publishing them as a book. The essays are a meditation on family, food, the senses, and the Italian language.

 

Inspired by the 1929 classic Il Talismano della Felicità, inherited from my grandmother, my collection is a playful, personal inquiry into the culinary and (often poetic) life advice found in the historic tome of 1,320 pages. As a book, the essays will become a memoir of an entirely different sort, focusing on my Italian heritage and my love of cooking.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: Memory holds so much. Some remembrances arrive as a salve, others shred us. And there are things which simply are too painful to write about, to share with the world. With memoir, it can be difficult to begin, difficult to continue. It can also feel nearly impossible to finish. But once you begin in earnest, it won’t let you rest until you do.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb