Q&A with Fiona Sampson

  

Photo by Ekaterina Voskresenskaya

 

 

Fiona Sampson is the author of the new biography Becoming George: The Invention of George Sand. Her other books include In Search of Mary Shelley. She is also a poet, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She lives i the UK.

 

Q: What inspired you to write a biography of the French writer George Sand (1804-1876)?

 

A: Becoming George: The Invention of George Sand is the third in my trilogy of literary biographies of Romantic women writers. My first subject was Mary Shelley, and my second the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

 

Like both of these, George Sand is a figure of enormous cultural resonance, prodigiously successful and productive in her own lifetime, whose posthumous literary reputation has been partly shunted aside by cultural gossip about her private life.

 

Mary Shelley is famous as the author of Frankenstein. But even in 2018, when I wrote In Search of Mary Shelley for the bicentenary of the first publication of Frankenstein, there was still an idea around that somehow she might have had the idea for the story, but it was her poet-husband Percy Bysshe who “really” wrote it.

 

Despite the fact that the evidence of her authorship, in the form of the Frankenstein notebooks, is in the public domain at the British Library in London – and digitised and available to the whole world in facsimile.

 

Elizabeth Barrett Browning is well known in Britain for a sonnet that’s often voted “the nation's favourite poem,” one of her Sonnets from the Portuguese which starts, “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.” She’s remembered in the North American canon for her great verse novel Aurore Leigh, the first woman's bildungsroman.

 

But by the time I published Two-Way Mirror: The Life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (W.W. Norton 2021) she had been traduced by 20th century (male) literary critics, particularly Harold Bloom and Lionel Trilling, as a mere auxiliary and indeed impediment to “the greatest poet of the age,” her husband Robert Browning. In fact she was his senior in poetics, and the techniques he made his own were developed by her.

 

Similarly, George Sand was the author of 70 novels, autobiography, travel writing, ecological essays, feminist tracts, politically progressive pamphlets, and tremendously successful plays. She founded periodicals; she was active in support of vulnerable members of society.

 

Yet all of this is forgotten and has been overshadowed by her relationship with the pianist Fryderyck Chopin. Or by the idea that she was just a crossdressing, cigar-smoking, transgressive figure about town.

 

Yet there’s no male writer among her contemporaries who would have been dismissed as unimportant just because he had a bohemian private life. They all did!

 

I wanted once again, as with Shelley and Barrett Browning, to do entirely original research in the primary source (the archives, for example) in order to get back to what is and isn’t true – and build up my portrait that way, rather than by repeating rumour and gossip.

 

Q: How were the book’s title and subtitle chosen, and what role do you see invention playing in Sand’s life?

 

A: We chose the title Becoming George: The Invention of George Sand for the double meaning in “The invention of –.”

 

George Sand had an extraordinarily prolific imagination. She wrote her 70 novels and many plays, as well as her nonfiction, at speed and often at night: having worked the double shift of looking after her partner and tutoring her children.

 

She wrote in order to make money to live; in other words, she wrote at speed for professional as well as personal reasons. But, as well as being able to imagine other people, classes, and situations with emotional immediacy in these stories, she was someone whose whole life was a process of self-invention.

 

For any woman born at the beginning of the 19th century to choose to become a writer was a radical act. There could be no sleepwalking into it. Besides, she came from a strange class background, half aristocratic at the same time that her mother had been a child prostitute. Which meant that she would always have needed to find and define a place herself in society.

 

Sand was also interested in the invention of that society. A true daughter of revolutionary France, she was still on the progressive side in 1848. She was a feminist and an early ecologist.

 

Then there was the question of how she could be a writer, and the extent to which she adopted the uniform and the behaviours of contemporaries who were writers – that's to say the men who were contemporary writers – in order to do so.

 

Finally, there's the extent to which George Sand was invented by her peers. She was immensely successful and notorious right from her debut novel, Indiana, and her reputation has been worked and reworked ever since.

 

She is in a sense her own invention – but also someone every generation including our own invents and reinvents. It’s a very modern model of celebrity.

 

Q: A review of the book in The Times, by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, says, “Sand would probably have appreciated Sampson’s sympathetic assessment of the challenges faced by female writers in a period where ‘Égalité’ was a revolutionary principle that was far more often discussed than put into practice.” What do you think of that assessment?

 

A: I was really grateful to Robert Douglas-Fairhurst for that thoughtful review, and for making the book the London Times newspaper’s Book of the Week.

 

And I think he's absolutely right about the way Sand represents the unequal life chances of women, and especially women writers and artists, in the early 19^th century – as indeed today. I couldn't have put it better myself!

 

Social media often picks up on the extent to which, as my mother's generation would put it, “fine words butter no parsnips.” For example, interrogating #NotAllMen – I think rightly.

 

Because, while obviously not all men are predators or even misogynist, all men do benefit from other men’s misogyny, which they need actively to disrupt if they’re going to claim that exemption. This works the same way as white privilege, from which I myself benefit.

 

And I guess one of my motives for writing about George Sand is that her life “writes large,” so to speak, the experiences of a woman writer today. It's easier to see what's going on when the writing is so large.

  

Literary history gives us the horrifying misogyny of her peers reducing her writing to the most crude bodily terms: Flaubert saying the mucus oozes between her ideas; Nietzsche (not quite a contemporary) calling her a milk cow; Saint-Simon saying she was a great woman with a prodigious talent and an enormous bottom.

 

Because Sand and these friends and enemies of hers were all famous we have these sentiments on the record. What’s hidden today, behind the bland lack of interest male critics take in the great Romantic women writers? Something equally grotesque?

 

For of course nowadays I wonder, as I go around literary – and non-literary – London, which of the men I’m sharing a table with think about me and other women (writers) in just those terms.

 

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

 

A: It’s a paradox that because Sand was genuinely influential as a writer much of her influence today is almost invisible to us. That is to say it's not invisible in itself, but we just don't know where it comes from.

 

George Sand was part of the great flowering of realist fiction in the 19^th century. She helped the novel form shift from something often epistolary or fragmented and sometimes rudimentary – the fiction of The Sorrows of Young Werther or of Pamela or indeed even Frankenstein with its narrator within a narrator within a narrator – to intentionally absorbing storytelling. To which the reader is meant fully to assent, as traditionally we have to theatre.

 

George Sand was a Romantic in her ideology and in her cultural moment. She was revolutionary and progressive. But she was also part of the movement away from Romanticism's origins in abstract ideas, philosophy, observational science and the radical towards the feelingful, familiar and inhabited.

 

Among the British novelists she influenced profoundly are the Brontë sisters, who took from her permission to write with explicit emotion, moving beyond the ceremonial comedy of manners of a Jane Austen. She's also the precursor of Thomas Hardy by some decades.

 

Although she’s known for placing women and children at the centre of stories for the first time, in the 1840s she began to publish what are known as her pastoral novels. These are today part of the French canon and school syllabus.

 

They're striking because it's the first time that the lives of the rural poor are seen as of equal significance as those of the wealthy, and at the same time these lives are also acknowledged as being difficult, not some picturesque pastoral: shepherdess in ribbons.

 

Sand also has a very engaging, exclamatory, rapturous, onrushing narrative voice. She writes her novels in a very similar tone to that of her letters. So she makes literature something intimate and personal, rather than formal and stuffy.

 

Again, in a world of Booktok and book clubs we take this for granted. We forget that it is radically, culturally specific.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I'm working on a book about Rousseau and the self. Jean-Jacques Rousseau is a political philosopher of continuing influence but, like all of us, he was a flawed human being.

 

I'm fascinated by the mismatch between his political philosophies – which are built on ideas about the nature of the human self – and what his own experience of selfhood was. It does feel like an inverted pyramid, balancing great weight on an unstable tip!

 

Rousseau is very enjoyable to read, partly because he has the easy French prose of an autodidact and partly because his writing is full of personality, perhaps for the same reasons.

 

To put it another way, Rousseau’s self, his unmediated and very un-self-aware personality, is in every page of his work. Yet he seems absolutely unaware of this fact.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: Can we talk a bit about the book? The “new biography” is an attempt – perhaps not as radical as George Sand’s own reinventions of the novel form! – to marry excellent literary storytelling with scrupulous scholarly primary research.

 

I like to think I make that hard work invisible everywhere but in the footnotes, but that it means my storytelling is all the fresher. The truth is always funkier and more muscular than repeated and unexamined material – that human equivalent of AI slop.

 

I’m really interested in psychological biography; in asking how and why someone functioned. I’m equally uninterested in letting myself wander into fiction. Historical fiction is great – but literary biography isn’t the place for it.

 

What I’m doing feels like a cross between being a detective and a therapist. I’m close-reading every single piece of actual evidence – from the wording of letters, to the almanacs which tell us the weather on a particular day and place in history – for what we can know from it. Or maybe this is like in infinitely complex jigsaw.

 

I can promise that not a single detail in my biographies is made up, and when I don’t know something I discuss what’s likely and “show my workings-out.” I think of the reader as coming on a quest with me, in which we find out together how an extraordinary figure became herself and emerged.

 

But this brings us back to my first point, about the invention of the title. George Sand was repeatedly made and made-over by her peers, and between every chapter of my book I have placed an “impression.” Each one takes a contemporary image of her and leads into a micro-essay about how she was being viewed and invented at that moment.

 

It’s a continuation of the work I did in Two-Way Mirror, in which I “framed” each chapter with a short reflection (the Mirror of the title referred to the poet’s work) on what itself biography does, and what portraiture is.

 

It’s a profound question, isn’t it, how we shape the people we respond to – and not only the celebrities?

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb 

Q&A with Stig Abell

  

 

Stig Abell is the author of the new novel A Twist in the River, the latest in his Jake Jackson mystery series. He is also a radio presenter, and he lives in London. 

 

Q: A Twist in the River is the fourth in your Jake Jackson series--how do you think your character has changed over the course of the series?

 

A: I think Jake has become a little more tortured over the books, a little more conflicted. He is someone who got a second chance at life, away from the grime of the city, a failed marriage, and all the intrusions of technology.

 

Part of him welcomes the peace of a rural life, set apart from everything; part of him still craves the thrill of a murder investigation, the pull of social contact, the vanity of being needed. He has also found a new family for himself, which brings all sorts of joy but also obligation.

 

I like to think of him still as the nude-swimming, fundamentally-decent, overly-hirsute, book-loving hero, but he probably carries a few more mental scars now.

 

Q: What inspired the plot of this new novel?

 

A: My day job is presenting a radio news programme, and we covered a story of a woman going missing near to a river. I didn’t take much of the real-life detail, but it made me think: despite Britain being a tiny island, it is amazing how mysterious disappearances like that can still happen; that for all the over-civilised clutter around us, there are still wild, uncertain places where the inexplicable is there to be explored.

 

I also loved the idea of the river as a character in itself, what T.S. Eliot called a “brown, sullen god” which could claim victims.

 

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

 

A: Let me absolutely honest with everyone: I am terrible at choosing titles. My working title was Dark Waters, and then I thought – following T.S. Eliot – of The Sullen God.

 

At this point, my editor (as literally always happens) stepped in and gently told me I couldn’t be trusted with naming the novel. They came up with A Twist in the River, which testifies both to the centrality of the location to the story, and the idea of twistiness and surprise you should always get in mystery books.

 

Q: Do you usually know how your novels will end before you start writing them, or do you make many changes along the way?

 

A: I plan out my novels, but only to a certain extent. With this one, I knew that I wanted there to be a killer depositing bodies in the river, I knew about the very unusual method used to incapacitate the victims, and I knew the final whodunnit. Beyond that, a little like the river itself, I allowed things to meander and shift and find their own course.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: This is the fourth Jake Jackson book. I have just finished the final edit of the fifth, which still has no agreed title (see above). It is a tale about a former colleague of Jake’s – a cop gone rogue – coming back into his life, at a time when he is investigating the suspicious death of a Victorian ancestor of someone in the local village. It is slightly different, and I hope people will love it.

 

I have also finished the first draft of the sixth in the series, which sees Jake investigating a cult that squats in an ancient, medieval monastery. 

 

But – in between these two – there is some talk of me writing a standalone novel away entirely from Little Sky and the Jake Jackson universe, so I am currently in full, excitable planning mode for that.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: Reading and writing have genuinely saved my life, given me comparative repose and inordinate pleasure, so I would love to keep doing this as long as readers will have me!

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb 

Q&A with Anna Lee Huber

  

 

 

Anna Lee Huber is the author of the new novel A Bitter Cut, the latest in her Lady Darby Mystery series. She lives in Indiana. 

 

Q: A Bitter Cut is the 14th in your Lady Darby Mystery series--how do you think Lady Kiera Darby has changed from book one until now?

 

A: In the first book of the Lady Darby Mysteries (The Anatomist’s Wife), Kiera was, in many senses, hiding from the world. She had reached her darkest moment and withdrawn from the world after enduring an abusive marriage and the scandal surrounding the discovery of her involvement with her late anatomist husband’s work.

 

She has to find the strength to crawl back into the light and stand up for herself and those she loves, and the books that follow chronicle that journey. By A Bitter Cut, she is a very different woman, and yet still vulnerable to the same insecurities.

 

Each book in the series centers on a particular mystery, but the series is truly about her ongoing evolution and the transformative power of love and acceptance, and it has been an absolute joy to write.

 

Q: What inspired the plot of this new mystery?

 

A: The plot for A Bitter Cut was inspired by several historical aspects.

 

The first is the continuing industrial revolution and the fact that self-made men were suddenly allowed to amass great wealth—enough to rival the aristocracy's wealth and power, which had previously controlled Britain. Their encroachment was not entirely welcomed.

 

The second was the numerous important bills that were up for debate in parliament in 1833, including the Slavery Abolition Act and revisions to the Factory Act.

 

The third was the development of oil of vitriol (sulfuric acid) and its use in a number of vicious acts to maim and or kill rivals, both in business and in personal affairs of the heart.

 

The fact that the father of the woman Kiera’s brother hopes to wed is a self-made mill owner and industrialist who manufactures oil of vitriol and is lobbying against the changes to the Factory Act allows all of these facts to intersect in one terrible crime.

 

Q: How do you research this series, and have you learned anything that especially surprised you?

 

A: Having written in this era for some time, part of what I draw on in my research is accumulated knowledge from past books and research texts addressing issues of the time. I then do spot research about particular aspects of my chosen plot. Newspapers and parliamentary records proved vital to this book.

 

I was surprised by the lack of justice for many victims of oil-of-vitriol attacks in this era. Rarely did the victims die, but they were left with horrific, disfiguring injuries and often forced to withdraw from society, while many times their attackers were given little but a slap on the wrist. This was especially true if the attacker was of genteel birth and believed to have been justified in their actions.

 

Q: What do you hope readers take away from A Bitter Cut?

 

A: As always, I hope readers are entertained and drawn into Kiera and her family’s continually evolving world, but I also hope they come away with a deeper appreciation for how social class does not dictate character.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I am currently writing Lady Darby Book 15, which will release next summer (in 2027), and editing my Gothic multi-timeline suspense stand-alone novel, which will also be published in 2027.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: You can find links to all of my social media, as well as series maps, videos of interviews, newsletter sign-up, and contests on my website – www.AnnaLeeHuber.com.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb 

Q&A with Sharon Virts

  

 

 

Sharon Virts is the author of the new novels Masque of Honor and Bargains of Fate, the first two books in her Fields of Honor series. She is also an entrepreneur, and she lives in Virginia.

 

Q: What inspired you to write Masque of Honor, the first in your new series?

 

A: It began with a house. Some years ago, my husband, Scott Miller, and I bought an abandoned, dilapidated manor north of Leesburg, Virginia, off the Old Carolina Road—now US Route 15—called Selma.

 

As we worked to bring the place back from the brink, I found myself drawn less to the plaster and the joinery than to the people who had lived there, and especially to the man who built it: General Armistead Thomson Mason.

 

The more I learned about him, the more I wanted to know, and at the urging of Scott and my friend, the screenwriter Anthony McCarten, I set out to turn what I was uncovering into historical fiction.

 

What I found surprised me. Most of the accounts of the Mason-McCarty duel cast Armistead as a shining hero cut down by a rogue named John Mason McCarty, and so when I started, I was certain Armistead was my protagonist and that I was writing the tragedy of his hero’s journey.

 

But when I went back to the original sources—the letters, the newspaper notices, the pamphlets the two men published about each other—a very different story emerged. Both men escalated the quarrel between them, but it was Armistead who was the aggressor, and Armistead who, even after truces had been negotiated, refused to let the matter rest.

 

That discovery turned the whole project on its head. I put Armistead down as my hero and went looking, instead, for Jack McCarty.

 

Q: How did you research the novel, and how did you balance history and fiction as you were writing it?

 

A: I believe historical facts should never be incidental to a story—a blurry backdrop that distracts the reader—but woven deep into its fabric: into the characters, the scenes, the settings, the customs, even the cut of a coat. Done well, the history doesn’t weigh the story down; it lifts it and carries it forward.

 

So I cast a wide net. I researched not only Armistead and Jack but the people around them—their fathers and brothers, the families of their mothers, the men their sisters married.

 

I looked at birth order, and at how old each man was when he lost his father and his siblings. I found out where they went to school and who their teachers and mentors were.

 

I read what they wrote and what was written about them, from letters and newspaper articles in the Genius of Liberty, the Leesburg Washingtonian, the Winchester Gazette, the Richmond Enquirer, and the Alexandria Gazette, to the dueling pamphlets Jack and Armistead each published in the summer of 1818.

 

From all of it I built two things at once: a timeline of events that became the backbone of my plot, and psychological profiles of my characters. I even consulted a psychologist who helped me “diagnose” them and test whether my instincts about their inner lives held up.

 

Then, once I had those profiles in hand, I set the index cards aside. Working from the historical timeline, I set out to capture the essence of the events and the spirit of the people, while also telling a story that would reach beyond devoted readers of historical fiction.

 

To do that I altered some events, combined others, removed a few, and in places invented outright. That is where the discipline comes in. The key to writing good historical fiction is staying true to the spirit of the story—which is not the same as making every detail accurate.

 

Strict accuracy is the job of nonfiction. My job is to write a page-turner that brings the past to life. And I’ll say this plainly: there is more truth in Masque of Honor than there is fiction. But it is, in the end, a work of fiction.

 

Q: How would you describe the dynamic between Jack McCarty and Armistead Mason?

 

A: They were cousins, which is the first thing to understand. Both descended from the Masons of Virginia—Jack was a grandson of George Mason IV, Armistead a grandnephew—and they moved through the same small, intermarried world of Loudoun County gentry, where everyone knew everyone and a man’s reputation was the most valuable thing he owned.

 

They were not strangers who fell out. They were family, and that is what makes the story a tragedy rather than merely a quarrel.

 

But they were opposites in temperament. Armistead was the second eldest son of a United States senator, a decorated officer of the War of 1812, a man who believed power was his birthright and who could not bear to be contradicted or criticized.

 

Underneath the bluster of his writing I sense enormous insecurity—a man at war with his own self-doubt and unable to control what others thought and said about him.

 

Jack was the second youngest in a large, fatherless brood of boys, just 21 when the trouble began, still trying to find his footing in the world. He had a temper too, and a hard time governing it, but the difference between the two men is everything: Jack tried, again and again, to walk away. Armistead wouldn’t let him.

 

So the dynamic is really one of pursuit. One man wants the conflict over; the other cannot stop feeding it. Jack negotiates a truce and means it; Armistead, after the truce, takes up the matter again.

 

What I came to see is that the two of them were caught in the same machine—a code of honor that demanded satisfaction and punished any man who refused to play—and that the machine ground them both.

 

It would be easy to make one a villain and the other a saint, but I didn’t find that in the sources, and I didn’t want to write it. I wanted readers to feel the awful logic that put two cousins on a field at a distance of barely a dozen feet, facing each other, and to understand how it could happen. By the end I felt real empathy for both of them.

 

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

 

A: Although the novel builds toward the quarrel and the duel between Jack and Armistead, the book isn’t really about the fight at all. At its heart it is a story about forgiveness and shame.

 

Lucinda has to learn to forgive her father and let go of her own shame before she can ever forgive Jack. Jack has to find a way to forgive himself in order to survive what he has done. And Armistead—Armistead is the warning. He could not forgive anyone, and that inability is what ultimately destroyed him.

 

If readers carry anything away from the story, I hope it is that—the meaning of honor in a time when life was fragile and a name was everything, and the quiet, difficult, life-saving power of forgiveness. I hope Jack and Armistead stay with readers the way they have stayed with me.

 

Q: What can you tell us about the rest of the series?

 

A: Masque of Honor is the first of the Fields of Honor series, and while the duel is the pivot the whole series turns on, the books that follow are really about how a man lives with what he has done—and how a family lives inside the same code of honor and expectation that nearly broke it.

 

It is Jack’s journey across roughly three decades, but it is just as much the story of his wife, Lucinda; her sister, Fanny; and his brother, William, all of whom struggle within the same family and the same unforgiving system.

 

The second book, Bargains of Fate, releases on June 23, 2026. It grew out of another extraordinary coincidence of history and place.

 

On the night before Christmas in 1824, Jack’s cousin Dennis McCarty killed his brother-in-law after a turkey shoot in Aldie, and Jack—with the help of the attorney Thomas Mason, a close relative of Armistead’s—defended Dennis at trial.

 

Thomas Mason once lived at Chestnut Hill, a house Scott and I also came to own, so once again the history was almost literally on my doorstep.

 

The novel braids that murder trial together with affairs of honor, family loyalty, and the widening rivalry between Jack and his brother William.

 

The third book, Swamp of Lies, will release in March 2027. By the late 1820s, America is at a crossroads—its territories expanding, its dearest-held ideals challenged in the name of progress—and the two oldest of the remaining McCarty brothers, William and Jack, are divided, their bond fractured by a stinging betrayal.

 

The ever-ambitious William strikes out for the swamplands of Florida, a territory that refuses to follow any of the rules he lives by, and the harder he struggles against its corruption and its vicious political schemes, the deeper he sinks.

 

Back in Virginia, Jack shoulders crushing family responsibility while learning to navigate Washington’s rooms of power, only to discover how shaky the foundations are beneath relationships he had thought were set in stone—and he finds himself bound once more for the dueling ground, this time to save a life rather than to take one.

 

From the lawless Florida Keys to the poisonous parlors of Washington, both brothers face old flames and new fires, and each must decide which stands he will take and which lines he is unwilling to cross.

 

At its core it is a story about brothers—about what we owe to blood, to conscience, and to the work in front of us when those three things refuse to align.

 

Three more books are planned to close out the series, carrying Jack and William through the 1830s and the early 1840s.

 

Without giving too much away, the through-line is Jack himself—a man who cannot stand down, who plays to win at almost any cost, and who simply cannot abide a bully or swallow what he knows to be unjust. And then there’s his temper.

 

Those instincts are the making of him and the ruin of him both; he suffers most in the moments the world forces him to accept the unreasonable. And by the end, that same refusal to back down turns outward—he sets himself against the dueling culture, determined to break the cycle that has cost his world so much.

 

Across all six books, my hope is to watch honor itself change shape: from a code these men live by, to a burden they carry, to an obstacle they must finally break. It costs them dearly, and it costs the women and children around them even more, which is the truest thing I can say about the age they lived in.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: Only that I write the kind of books I love to read—stories built on real lives and real records, but shaped to keep you turning pages well past the hour you meant to put the light out.

 

Scott and I still live at Selma, the house that started all of this, and there is something humbling about writing late into the night under the same roof Armistead Mason built two centuries ago.

 

These people were not abstractions to me. They walked the same roads I drive, worshipped in the same county, and are buried in ground I visit. I hope readers come away not only entertained, but with a sense of how close the past really is—and how the questions these men and women wrestled with about pride, loyalty, shame, and forgiveness are not so different from our own.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Sharon Virts. 

Q&A with Elisa Faison

  

 

 

Elisa Faison is the author of the new novel Skin Contact. She is also a freelance editor, and she lives in Carrboro, North Carolina. 

 

Q: What inspired you to write Skin Contact, and how did you create your character Frances?

 

A: In 2021, I was working as a bookseller, determined to sell as many copies of Sorrow and Bliss and Nightbitch as I could. I loved recommending books about complicated, angry women; about yearning, avoidant, bisexual women; about tumultuous and beautiful marriages.

 

But as a reader, I was finding myself frustrated. Where were the portrayals of bisexual women who were actually dating women? Where were the portrayals of open marriage that didn’t ultimately suggest they were a doomed or even dangerous phase? Where were the portrayals of polyamory that were as intimate as those of love between two people? 

 

Here’s what else was going on in my life: I was mourning my mother, who died in 2020, and my grandmother, who died in 2019. I was in a very happy open marriage. I was in denial that my relationship with my girlfriend was going to end at any minute. And I was trying to get pregnant.

 

It was a lot! I managed my feelings about it all the best way I knew how: by writing about them in what would eventually become Skin Contact.

 

Frances – probably the main character in this polyphonic, multi-POV novel – shares many of my experiences and traits. But the longer I thought about her – and the more I manipulated her environment and created new characters for her to interact with – the more different we became.

 

It became fun to have her make worse decisions than me, or to say things I’d never say, or think things I’d never think. It allowed me to explore my life in a new way.

 

Q: How would you describe the relationship between Frances and her husband, Ben?

 

A: Ben and Frances are married and have been together since college – so, for over a decade. They know each other incredibly well. They love each other, like each other, are attracted to each other, and support each other, even as they grow and, to some extent, become different versions of themselves. 

 

Skin Contact is a love story – and the love between Ben and Frances is, in my opinion, the constant, stabilizing force that grounds the many different forms of love that the novel explores – and its messiness only makes it more real!

 

Q: The writer Ada Calhoun said of the book, “While exploring the boundaries of desire and fidelity, Elisa Faison’s characters ask big questions about the choices we make and how to negotiate what's beyond our control.” What do you think of that description?

 

A: I love this description! I think Skin Contact uses the open marriage format in order to explore bigger, more universal questions and experiences. It’s about desire, sexuality, and (non)monogamy – but it’s also a story about grief, aging, the fear of disappearing into marriage and motherhood, the value of friendship, and the expansive potential of love more generally.

 

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

 

A: Skin Contact is actually the novel’s second title! When I was querying the manuscript – and when we sold the manuscript to Cardinal – it was titled Mommy. I loved (and still love!) this title – but we worried that its sexiness wouldn’t be evident to all readers.

 

After some brainstorming, we ended up retitling it Skin Contact – and now I can’t imagine it being called anything else; it’s perfect! It refers to a specific moment in the text when Ben and Frances and their friends are on vacation tasting skin contact wine.

 

Frances ruminates on the term – it reminds her of the skin-to-skin contact between a mother and a baby, the first form of intimacy and trust a newborn has in the world. It’s also – of course! – meant to evoke all of the other forms of intimate touch in the novel!

 

For me, it’s a really beautiful way to tie together many of the novel's most important themes: motherhood, intimacy, the physicality of friendship—and even loneliness, the desire to be touched.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I’m very happy to share that I’ve just completed a new manuscript! Without giving away too much, it’s a novel that shares many of the same themes as Skin Contact – but it’s got a much tighter, more cloistered structure, and it’s set during a silent retreat at an Episcopal nunnery. I hope you’ll be able to read it very soon!

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb 

Q&A with Brooks Kolb

  

 

 

Brooks Kolb is the author of the new memoir Landscape in Lavender: A Young Gay Man's Search for His Gay Identity. He is also a landscape architect, and he lives in Seattle. 

 

Q: Why did you decide to write this memoir?

 

A: Landscape in Lavender began in a very happenstance fashion. One day in 2018 after a lap swim, I was getting dressed in the locker room of my local YMCA  when I overheard a man talking to another guy about how he had lived in London for several years. 

 

He soon approached a locker near mine, so I spoke up and mentioned that I, too, had lived in London on scholarship for one year, way back in 1975, and had thoroughly enjoyed the experience. 

 

I then launched into a tale of how Sir Ian Davies, head of the Royal Dental School, had personally bailed me out after I failed to receive the check I was expecting to cover my living expenses at the beginning of the academic year. 

 

On my way out the door, it occurred to me that I could have told the man a lot of other anecdotes as well. I should write a memoir, I said to myself on the drive home. But when I sat down to write, I didn’t know what story I was trying to tell; I only felt a strong urge to reconnect with my younger self.  

 

Now I was leading an entirely different life in Seattle with a new cast of friends and loved ones, so I wanted to ask the younger me who he was and why he had left Seattle to travel far and wide over a span of 23 years. Eventually, my random scrawling coalesced into my story of coming out and coming of age in the 1980s.

 

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

 

A: Choosing a good title was a dilemma, which surprised me because I have a spontaneous habit of thinking up great titles for books I have no intention of writing! 

 

For several years, my working title had the word “rainbow” in it, referring not only to the LGBTQ rainbow flag, but also to the almost inevitable fact that I twice refer to The Wizard of Oz in the book. My baby-boomer generation even had an erstwhile discreet habit of referring to gay men as “Friends of Dorothy.”

   

When my editors pointed out that all this was hopelessly cliché, I had to find a different approach.  Eventually, I settled on Landscape in Lavender. “Landscape” refers to my career as a landscape architect and “lavender” to my identity as a queer man, pointing to the rising conflict I describe experiencing between the two halves of my identity. Despite the risk of sounding like a coffee table book of photographs, it works!

Q: The author William Kenower said of the book, “Landscape in Lavender is more than a story of one man’s sexual self-discovery; it’s the story of an entire era in America.” What do you think of that description?

 

A: I absolutely love Bill for saying that because, once I figured out why I was writing Landscape in Lavender, I realized that I had lived through not one, but two eras in America: the sexual revolution of the 1970s and the devastating AIDS era that immediately followed. 

 

What’s more, I had the good fortune to live in a time and place of prime significance to the history of LGBTQ people in America: San Francisco in the years following Harvey Milk’s assassination in 1978.

 

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

 

A: I understand who I am as a whole person much better now that I’ve written Landscape in Lavender. For decades, I’ve devoted myself to my professional career—the landscape part—but I wanted readers to know about the lavender part, and I wanted to celebrate all the people who nurtured the lavender side of my identity. 

 

Beyond that, I’m more fully aware of how amazingly lucky and blessed I am to have survived the AIDS pandemic, especially after losing my first great love, James Draper, to it. 

 

There are two main ideas I hope readers take away from the book. The first is that the spirit of every single person who died of AIDS is worthy of our sustained grief and our fond memories. Those individual stories, and the individual value of each and every person lost, tend to get forgotten in the overwhelming force of the pandemic, when so many people—mostly men—were dying all at once. 

 

The second takeaway is more positive. I hope readers have a chance to experience the joys as well as the frustrations of actual lived gay relationships, and particularly the nuances of interracial gay relationships. Having read more than a few gay memoirs, I’ve been surprised by how seldom they explore their author’s relationships with his gay partners in any detail.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: For now, I’m mainly working on my Substack blog, brookskolb.substack.com, but I’ve been toying around with the idea of writing a collection of essays. Maybe I’ll revisit my rough draft of a manuscript on a secular or interfaith spirituality. The working title is “Many Paths, One Mountain.”

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: Please tell the young me, the narrator of Landscape in Lavender, that the old me turned out all right. He found a wonderful new love and a terrific community to engage with! His decision to return to Seattle was the right call.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb 

Q&A with Pam Webber

  

 

 

Pam Webber is the author of the new novel Massawa. Her other novels include The Wiregrass. She is also a nurse practitioner, and she lives in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. 

 

Q: What inspired you to write Massawa, and how did you create your character Kit Thomas?

 

A: My brother, Carl Bayliss, aka Buddy, inspired the story. He’s an amateur historian who’s really not an amateur at all. His knowledge and insight into the little-known stories of WWII are phenomenal.

 

I was having lunch with him one day, lamenting about what I would write about next, and he shared the story of the Miracle at Massawa. I knew instantly that it would be my next book.

 

In preparing to write Massawa, I read multiple books on the OSS, MI6, and female spies in World War II. The two that impacted me the most were A Woman of No Importance by Sonia Purnell, which highlighted the incredible work of Virginia Hall, and Wild Bill Donovan by Douglas Waller, which highlighted Donovan’s seminal role as the father of American espionage and sexpionage.

 

I could hardly believe the courage of Hall and the audacity of Donovan. Both helped sculpt the character of Kit Thomas into a fearless yet naive spy who didn’t hesitate to use her gender as tradecraft.

 

Q: What did you see as the right blend of fiction and history as you wrote the novel?

 

A: Great question! The story of Massawa is extraordinary, but as with many historical  events, supporting documentation is often incomplete. I was able to use believable fiction as a vehicle to tell the story and to fill in history’s blanks.

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

 

A: The first thing I did was read Admiral Edward Ellsberg’s book Under the Red Sea Sun (provided by my brother). Ellsberg was the naval officer responsible for the Miracle at Massawa.

 

I then began an exhaustive review of the books and documents surrounding the events in Eritrea, and specifically Massawa. These documents included the declassified materials at the National Archives.

 

I was also lucky enough to connect with Ellsberg’s grandson, Ted Pollard, who shared letters that Ellsberg wrote to his wife during his time at Massawa. Some potentially controversial issues that Ellsberg did not want to include in his book came through in his letters. His grandson has since posted these letters on a website dedicated to his grandfather (https://www.edwardellsberg.com/).

 

Q: The Kirkus Review of the book says that it “keeps readers engaged with a heady mix of adventure, romance, and surprising revelations, all amplified by the high stakes of wartime espionage.” What do you think of that description?

 

A: Another great question! It’s almost surreal to read a review that reflects what you intended to create all along but weren’t sure you had. For this author, a Kirkus starred review is an attestation that I got it right. I’m so grateful to them!

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: The sequel to Massawa. I set up the storyline for the sequel in the last chapter of Massawa so now all I have to do is complete the research and write it. Just to offer a hint to your readers, the story takes place in Algiers.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: Yes. Massawa provides insight into how courage is operationalized, both in the context of what it took for the Miracle at Massawa to happen and in how a young, inexperienced female spy survives her trial by fire.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb