Q&A with Jenn Bouchard

  

 

 

Jenn Bouchard is the author of the new novel Palms on the Cape. Her other books include Considering Us. She is also an educator, and she lives in the Boston suburbs. 

 

Q: What inspired you to write Palms on the Cape, and how did you create your character Rachel?

 

A: I knew that my next book would be set on Cape Cod, and I love the idea of an upscale beach bar. I love these kinds of places that are somewhat casual and familiar and warm, yet feature innovative, fresh, and thoughtful menu items alongside live music.

 

This was actually the second book I wrote, but it's being published third. That in itself is a long story.

 

But I knew I wanted my protagonist to be somewhat of a badass. She's been through things. She's had to figure everything out for herself. But still, she's not totally hardened by it all. There's a soft, endearing side to Rachel. I love her complexity.

 

Q: The novel is set on Cape Cod--how important is setting to you in your writing?

 

A: I absolutely adore the Cape, especially the Mayflower Beach area of Dennis on Cape Cod Bay. The sand goes on forever at low tide. I have spent a lot of time there over the past 12 years.

 

I feel an instant sense of calm as I drive over the Sagamore Bridge, even if the traffic is terrible. It's magical to me. Writing a novel set there made me so happy. I had a smile on my face the whole time I wrote this book.

 

Q: The writer Dara Levan said of the book, “This story shimmers with humor, heart, and the kind of imperfect love that makes us feel seen.” What do you think of that description?

 

A: I think she nails it. This book features a big ensemble cast with a found family you'll want for your own. Their interactions are sometimes hilarious. 

 

They are flawed people (well, maybe not Carlos...), as most of us are. But there's an appreciation, a mutual respect, a shared history among them that feels deep and meaningful. I just love them so much. I'm excited to share them with readers.

 

Q: How would you describe the dynamic between Rachel and Carlos?

 

A: They are truly best friends. They have been for years. Their evolution is one for the ages.

 

When Harry Met Sally is one of my very favorite movies. I wanted to write a book that dealt with the same question of men and women as friends, but I approached it in a different way. 

 

Rachel has a lot of things to figure out. And let's be honest: Carlos is about as perfect as it gets. I'm happy to give everyone a great book boyfriend this summer. 

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I am figuring out the next steps for my fourth book, Way Outta Left Field. After years on the baseball and softball sidelines with my kids, a book about both sports was inevitable.

 

And I'm writing my fifth book, Most Likely to Succeed. I have the premise set for my sixth book, but I can only write one at a time. I'm so envious of writers who can work on multiple projects at once. 

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: I will be doing a ton of book signings over the next year or so. Please check my website jennbouchard.com and follow me on Instagram and Facebook @JennBouchardBOS for updates. I'd love to see you on the road!

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Jenn Bouchard. 

Q&A with Jason Prokowiew

  

 

 

Jason Prokowiew is the author of the new book War Boys: A Father and Son Memoir. He lives in Massachusetts.

 

Q: Why did you decide to write this memoir?

 

A: Originally, I thought my dad’s story was so unusual, it was the best story I could find to tell as a writer. I had a sense even when I was young and I heard him tell his stories in a very casual way that listeners were drawn in by the tale of a little Russian boy adopted by Nazis.

 

When I got to college and my Russian politics professor showed great interest, I thought, the story mattered historically, and that also fueled my drive to tell the story of a child of war.

 

Q: How would you describe your relationship with your father?

 

A: Complicated. He was the boogeyman of my childhood. He drank heavily until I was 10 years old and was a source of abuse and neglect in that decade.

 

He then quit drinking cold turkey when I was 10 because he landed in the hospital with cirrhosis of the liver. I suddenly lived with a totally different father who was sober but a dry drunk, meaning he still exhibited many of the dysfunctional traits of an alcoholic, just without the actual drinking.

 

Our relationship shifted many times between the time he quit drinking and when he died 15 years later, when I was 25. I came out to him as Queer when I was 16, and our dynamic shifted greatly from that point because suddenly I was being honest with him about an important part of myself, and he had to contend with having a Queer son.

 

I was also 16 when I began singing and trying in school, after so long not doing anything with my life because my father had taught me throughout my childhood that I was stupid, so I didn’t think I could do anything with my brain or self.

 

My father loved the arts, and once I started performing in music and theatre and writing from the age of 16, he started being very interested in me.

 

Our biggest shift occurred between 1999 and 2001, when I recorded 50 hours of my father talking about his experiences in the war. He fought me at first about doing the recordings, but through the process of recording, he softened, he began to want to tell his stories, and we had several tear-soaked moments during that process.

 

I loved and liked my dad, but I do not forget or condone any of the abuse he inflicted on his family.

 

Q: The writer Karen Kirsten said of the book, “Jason reminds us we can’t choose our parents, but we can expose the pain they buried, empowering us to redefine our own identity and future. A haunting, beautifully written tribute to resilience, transformation, and family.” What do you think of that description?

 

A: I’m honored that Karen Kirsten of all people wrote this, after reading and admiring the hard work she did in her book Irena’s Gift, to uncover family secrets and write about them. Karen’s work was to grapple with and share her family’s difficult stories, and I think War Boys is in conversation with and a continuation of that idea.

 

In order to do differently than my family of origin would have me do, I needed to know the truths of my father’s stories, and I then grappled with them on the pages of War Boys.

 

I think that’s partially how I moved forward in life, with hopefully a better understanding of how I could be as a person in the world. I didn’t need to repeat familial cycles, but I could look at those cycles and choose differently.

 

I think that’s what Karen means when she writes about transformation specifically.

 

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

 

A: The actual writing has been laborious and wonderful for me as a writer. I’ve had so many eyes on War Boys over the years helping me to mold it into what it is now.

 

It especially changed shape between 2021 and 2022 when I worked on it in a year-long program at GrubStreet in Boston called Memoir Incubator.

 

I knew going into that program that I wanted to expand War Boys to include my story of what it was like to be raised by a man who came of age during a war, after his family was murdered, and he was adopted by the murderers.

 

The Memoir Incubator, and my 10 colleagues there, proved to be safe landing places as I began to tell my own stories of childhood neglect and abuse at the hands of my father.

 

My shame about my own experiences shifted once I began telling those stories, and I found that the things I was once most scared to tell were not going to break me once I let them be known. In fact, I was better off for being authentically known rather than carrying these stories on my own.

 

As for readers, I hope they see my father’s resilience as a survivor of war but also the long-term consequences of war on children but also future generations. I hope War Boys reads as the antiwar book I hoped it would.

 

I also hope that readers draw from the Jason storyline that this little boy felt very alone in the world but still found a way in it, and he found his people. I hope that any reader who feels alone, feels some hope from the Jason journey. 

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: Really, I am working on the publicity for War Boys, so I’ve been working on a 24-stop book tour that begins in July and runs through November. I’ll be in conversation across the country with some of my favorite writers, who happen to be my friends from the writing community, and I couldn’t be more excited for those exchanges.

 

As for writing, I’m excited to get away for a week-long residency this June where I’ll hopefully finish revisions on my Queer YA novel, Let Him Be.

 

After working on War Boys for 27 years, I wanted to try to write something quickly because I don’t think I have another 27 years to spend. I wrote the rough draft of Let Him Be in under a month, and I have plans for two sequels.

 

I’m also working on a second memoir called Fat Boy Fat, which is an exploration of what it’s meant to be in a fat, Queer body in America. I hope it also stands as a critique of the ubiquitous, dangerous American diet culture.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: I couldn’t be at this point with War Boys without the writing community. From the actual writing of War Boys to the support in bringing War Boys to as many readers as possible, the community has stepped up for me and War Boys—for the scared little boys Volodya and Jason—again and again. I am so grateful for that.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb 

July 1

 

 

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
July 1, 1804: George Sand born.

Q&A with Teddy Wayne

   

Photo by Tracy Penoyer

 

 

 

Teddy Wayne is the author of the new novel The Au Pair. His other books include The Winner. He lives in Brooklyn. 

 

Q: You’ve said The Au Pair was initially inspired by the movie Anatomy of a Fall. Can you say more about that, and about how you created your character Steven?

 

A: Without giving too much away, I was very taken by the central and unresolved ambiguity of that movie and was interested in writing something in that vein—but not to make the main character the one whose criminal innocence or guilt we judge. Instead, we end up judging Steven’s innocence or guilt in a very different respect.

 

Q: The writer Ayad Akhtar said of the book, “Teddy Wayne has written a book about selling out that doesn’t—a guilty pleasure that earns its guilt. The Au Pair is a canny seduction wrapped in a page-turning thriller wrapped in an elegy for the literary novel: a threefold delight.” What do you think of that description?

 

A: It’s what I was aiming for: a literary thriller that straddles and interrogates both sides of that genre and turns into a statement on what contemporary literature now means to the culture.

 

Q: How would you describe the dynamic between Steven and his wife, Lucy?

 

A: With Steven and Lucy, I was primarily interested in exploring what’s become increasingly common in the U.S., a household in which the wife drastically outearns the husband, and the ramifications that might have for a less than perfect marriage.

 

I was also thinking about the “market economics” of status-conscious marriages; Steven found Lucy when his “stock was likely at its all-time high,” but it declined over the years while hers went even higher.

 

Q: As a novelist and a screenwriter, how do the two interact for you?

 

A: For both The Au Pair and my previous novel, The Winner, I wrote the first several drafts of the novels first before beginning work on the screenplays. Then, as I wrote the screenplays, I revised the novels further, and found in both cases that changes in one medium would work their way into the other.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: A novel about a professional athlete.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb 

Q&A with Marian Yee

  

Photo by Kristin Palkoner Photography

 

 

Marian Yee is the author of the new novel 4 Janes. She is a professor at the Berklee College of Music, and she lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.

 

Q: What inspired you to write 4 Janes, and how would you describe the relationship between your novel and Charlotte Brontë's classic novel Jane Eyre?

 

A: When I was travelling in Vietnam in the ‘90s, I ended up in Hue, where I met a bookseller who was reading an abridged copy of Jane Eyre in order to improve her English.

 

She was very friendly, and actually ended up rescuing me when I had a minor fainting incident (due to dehydration) in front of her little shop, which was actually just a roadside shack. (I wrote this into the book).

 

Anyhow, aside from her being a lovely person, I was just struck by the anomaly of seeing this Western classic being read in this context of an Eastern setting and I immediately wanted to write something where I could bring these two different worlds together.

 

Q: The author Michelle Min Sterling said of the book, “4 Janes is an inventive and heartbreaking epic that reimagines the iconic character of Jane Eyre, exploring how one enduring figure transcends space and time.” What do you think of that description?

 

A: I love that description—it captures both the idea of Jane breaking out of the boundaries of her literary origins and the notion of Jane as a literary character that continues to be important to readers in different places and different times.

 

Q: What do you think still intrigues readers about Jane Eyre, 180 years after the book's publication?

 

A: Jane Eyre is a Cinderella story, but without the beauty and the fairy godmother. She is plain and poor, and really only has her own intelligence, moral courage, and tenacity to rely on. That’s why we all applaud when she gets the broody prince in the end, but on her own terms.

 

She’s passionate, she’s a dreamer, she’s a survivor. But maybe most of all, she’s someone who dreams of a bigger life, and that’s something we can all relate to.

 

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

 

A: I want readers to maybe see a bit of Jane Eyre in each of us. By showing Jane in different story lines, different times, even in a different gender, I hope readers will recognize that Jane Eyre embodies a timeless figure of inspiration.

 

I also want readers to get a sense of the power of reading to change one’s life. One person reading Jane Eyre in Vietnam may start dreaming of a bigger life for herself as well; one person seeing another person reading Jane Eyre in an unexpected context may be inspired to write a story.

 

But finally, I just want readers to have fun following Jane in her geographically and culturally diverse, time-jumping, gender-morphing journey.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I’m working on a reimagining of The Tempest. It’s going to be a story about the relationship between humans and nature, climate change, obsession, and control. It’s also a story about love, creativity, and redemption.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: As I was writing 4 Janes I thought a lot about how stories go and why they end that way. What would happen to the story if characters made different choices?

 

And it seems to me that we can turn those questions to our own lives. What happens if we start thinking of the narratives that we make up in our heads about our own lives, and what might it mean to break free from them to go in a different direction, make new endings, own our own stories? 

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb 

Q&A with Karen Mack and Jennifer Kaufman

  

 

Karen Mack and Jennifer Kaufman are the authors of the new novel The Kings of Vegas. Their other books include Freud's Mistress. They both live in Los Angeles.

 

Q: This is the fourth book you’ve cowritten--how would you describe your writing partnership?

 

A: Like most writers, we have good days and bad days. Bad days are challenging. When one of us tells the other “You’re killing the joke,” or  “This sentence is flat” or “That makes me want die of boredom.” It feels as if we’re arguing like two mental patients.  

 

And then there’s the Oscar Wilde quote, “It was a pretty good day, I spent the first half  putting in a comma and the other half taking it out.” The way we actually work is we sit together at one desk with two computers, side by side, hour after hour. You could say we share the same sensibility. But not necessarily. In many ways, we’re actually the opposite. But somehow it seems to work for us. This is book 4. 

 

Q: Karen, how did your family experiences factor into the plot of The Kings of Vegas?

 

Karen: What makes this book unique is the realistic view into the inner workings of the Las Vegas Casino culture from someone who lived and breathed it. That would be me. My family has lived in Las Vegas for three generations. My grandfather moved there in 1929 during the great depression when his still blew up in LA and he fled to Nevada. 

 

The move was fortuitous. Boulder Dam was being built and there was an influx of workers who needed groceries, booze and someplace to blow off steam. My grandfather was happy to accommodate, opening a small ma and pa casino called The Jackpot. 

 

This was back when cowboys used to ride horses down Fremont Street. It was a small town. Everyone knew everyone. As they say, a sunny place for shady people.

 

So when people ask me about early Las Vegas,  I tell stories passed down from my grandfather and father about a city where opportunity and danger lived side by side. 

 

The characters in our book are based on real people, composite pictures of the people I knew. Our next door neighbor was Ice-Pick Willie. I thought that was a normal name. I went to school with Dave “the man” Berman’s daughter. Likewise I used to think “the man” was a normal middle name. 

 

As a kid, I would hang out at my father’s casino, climb up to the Eye in the Sky in the rafters and look down at the tourists gambling through one way mirrors–trying to catch the cheaters. I would visit the counting rooms where money flew around like cottonwood. Some went here, some went there, and some went in duffles to New Jersey or the Cayman Islands.  

 

It was a male world with all the glitz and excess, violence and danger that people expect. This is the world I grew up in. And the world we created in this book. 

 

All these fun stories are incorporated in our novel. The story captures the energy, risk, and layered social dynamics of the place, offering readers a window into a world where families like mine tried to lead a normal life in a place that was not at all normal. It was glamorous, dangerous, and unlike anywhere else on earth.  

 

Q: How did you create your character Josie, and how would you describe her relationship with her family?

 

A: Josie’s character was created as a composite of girls Karen knew growing up in the casino world. Karen was a casino kid and casino families are like families of policemen, firemen and the military. Hometown joints run by grandfathers, fathers and sons. No daughters. 

 

Josie was an example of the new generation of women who took over their family business. We created a complex and intelligent protagonist who shared her father’s character in every regard. We made her a formidable prodigy in a world where sexist attitudes about female players were ubiquitous.  

 

By the way, she is also a rough version of King Lear’s youngest daughter, Cordelia. Banished from the casino at an early age, she returns as the most loyal and devoted sibling of all. In order to keep the King empire from crashing down, she must do whatever she needs to do, even if it means turning against her own family.  

 

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

 

A: We knew how the novel would end before we started it. But we didn’t realize that Josie’s moral behavior and agency would change so dramatically and she would become just as dangerous and manipulative as her father and her enemies.  

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: We are now working on another thriller set in Las Vegas. 

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: It’s true that Josie is a card-counting blackjack prodigy. And she pushes boundaries right from the start. At the beginning of the book, she encounters a man who is handsome, charming–every woman’ s fantasy—this passionate hookup resonates throughout the novel like a bad dream. 

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb 

Q&A with Ilan Stavans

  

 

 

Ilan Stavans is the editor of the new anthology A Nation Wrestles with God: American Prophets, Philosophers, and Firebrands. His many other books include Conversations on Dictionaries. He is the Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities and Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College. 

 

Q: What inspired you to edit A Nation Wrestles with God?

 

A: As a Mexican immigrant who is Jewish, I have been enthralled with the statement, in the United States Declaration of Independence, “Endowed by Their Creator.” What does it mean? The answer is manifold.

 

For starters, it is proof that this country began with an appeal to the divine. The Mayflower Compact bound a fledgling community into covenant “under God,” and the United States Declaration of Independence boldly proclaimed that human equality rests on rights “endowed by their Creator.”

 

It is now 250 years after that declaration. What sort of relationship, as a country made of people from all around the globe, do we have with God? Is there only one God Americans wrestle with depending on their religion, or are there many? Can a liberal democracy survive if one of these gods acquires supremacy over the others?

 

In other words, how did that daring invocation of God shape the American experiment? How have later generations wrestled with the promise and the contradictions at the heart of that founding appeal?

 

Through the voice of writers, politicians, scientists, poets, theologians, comedians, philosophers, religious leaders, and cartoonists as diverse as Thomas Jefferson, Cotton Mather, Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Thomas Merton, Malcolm X, Albert Einstein, Isaac Bashevis Singer, James Baldwin, Tony Kushner, Anne Lamott, and more, the volume explore the role of the divine in America’s moral language, political ideals, and cultural imagination. 

 

What does it mean for a nation to ground its freedom in a creator? How have ideas of the divine and sacred inspired, challenged, and transformed the United States ever since? 

 

An anthology, as you know, is a portable library in which the authors are in conversation with one another and, mostly, with the reader, who has the final say. The material in this one is organized chronologically by the author’s date of birth.

 

The lesson, I guess, is that the answer to the question “What does ‘Endowed by the Creator’ mean?” is always in the eyes of the beholder.

 

Q: How did you choose the excerpts to include in the book?

 

A: There is a lot I wanted to include. I worked within a limit: 500 pages. In other words, the sum of all pieces needed to fit into a book that would be seen, in its size, as a weapon of self-defense. I excerpted novels, speeches, sermons, poems, and so on. In many ways, the voices included are a statement of the contentious dialogue I carry inside me.

 

Every editor of an anthology must start by imagining the target audience. Mine is made of curious, perplexed individuals for whom the tension between credo and episteme is a source of inspiration.

 

Also, every editor of an anthology imagines themselves as the first reader but surely not the last. I hope this book is read across faiths, across geographies, and across generations.

 

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

 

A: It is no exaggeration to say that I have been researching this book my entire life, keeping notes on an insightful reading, leaving a comment as marginalia in a library borrowing, and, of course, writing, over the decades, all kinds of explorations of the divine, from my autobiography On Borrowed Words (2001), to my play The Oven: An Anti-Lecture (2017) to the poem The Wall (2018). In November, my forthcoming book Fictional Translations: Poems (LSU) continues this search.

 

About to reach 65, I simply sat down and told myself: now is the time. Your experience is part of a larger conversation. Death will erase all that you are. The only items that will survive you are messages you leave behind.

 

What surprised me, you asked? Everything.... Some people are afraid of speaking about faith in public. Others see God as a vengeful being. A few more would prefer for the reals of religion and politics not to intersect.

 

Yes, since the start, Americans do nothing but talk about—and with—God. The epigraph of A Nation Wrestles with God comes from Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. He was mesmerized, after talking to hundreds of Americans, at how relevant religion has been in this country, for better or worse.

 

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

 

A: I am more humble, and perhaps more skeptical, than I was at the beginning. Skeptical about everything: truth, God, democracy. And yet, I don’t think we can do without any of these. All need to be restrained, disabused, authentically examined.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: This year I am in New York City, as a fellow at the New York Public Library on 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, finishing a book that is a history of Hispanic antisemitism from 1492 to the present, told through a dozen lives: of victims, of perpetrators, and of bystanders. I hope to complete it in the fall. I am also almost finished with my biography of Isaac Bashevis Singer.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: Do I believe in God? Yes, no, and maybe—depending on the day. In short, I wrestle. To me, wrestling with God is what humankind has been doing since the beginning.

 

Look at Socrates, a concoction of Plato, Xenophon, Aristophanes, Aeschines of Sphettus, Aristippus, and other Greek contemporaries. Look at Abraham, Jacob, Moses, the biblical prophets, and the rabbinical tradition. Look at medieval Muslim thinks like Avicenna and Averroes.

 

Even non-monotheists, atheists, and agnostics wrestle with the divine. It is a two-way dialogue. Abraham Joshua Heschel said that humans search for God as much as God searches for humans.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Ilan Stavans.