Q&A with Lisa See

  

 

 

Lisa See is the author of the new novel Daughters of the Sun and Moon. Her many other books include Lady Tan's Circle of Women. She lives in Los Angeles.

 

Q: Why did you decide to highlight the Chinese Massacre of 1871 in your new novel?

 

A: I have long been inspired by history that’s been lost, forgotten, or deliberately covered up. With this story, I found multiple layers of lost and forgotten history.

 

It’s hard to imagine the Los Angeles of today as it was back in 1870. The state of California was just 18 years old, the Civil War had ended five years earlier, and the transcontinental railroad had just been completed. People were coming to California from all points of the compass, and they were a rough and tumble lot. 

 

We tend to think of Tombstone, Dodge City, and Deadwood as the wildest of the Wild West towns, but Los Angeles was, by every measure, the most brutal and violent, with a murder rate three times that of New York City and double that of the country at large. Who knew?

 

Los Angeles was home to a little over 5,000 residents, of whom 145 were Chinese men and 34 were Chinese women. What must those women have thought about being in this tiny, dirty, violent place? 

 

On October 24, 1871, only 10 days after the great Chicago fire, one-tenth of the population—over 500 Angelenos—rioted against the Chinese. By the end of the evening, one tenth of the Chinese population—18 men and boys—had been shot, stabbed, mutilated, and then hung for good measure. 

 

The Chinese Massacre of 1871—the so-called Night of Horrors—is considered to be one of the largest mass lynchings in the history of the United States and certainly the largest in California.

 

And boy oh boy, do the events of that night fit exactly with what I care about—history that’s been lost, forgotten, or deliberately covered up. In Daughters of the Sun and Moon, I wanted to write about the events of 1870-71 but from the perspective of the Chinese women who were here.

 

Q: Your characters Moon, Petal, and Dove were based in part on historical figures. How did you research their stories, and what did you learn that particularly surprised you?

 

A: Dove was inspired by a young woman, whose name in real life was Yut Ho. I found much of her story in newspaper accounts and in the surviving trial documents related to the 1871 Massacre, most of which are held in the Huntington Library’s collection.

 

Yut Ho was brought here in an arranged marriage to a much older merchant, who the press described as being “hideously ugly.” She wasn’t here for very long before she was kidnapped and held captive for many months.

 

Reporters at the time and scholars even today believe her kidnapping was the initial spark for what would come to be known as the Night of Horrors. I think of her as the Helen of Troy of the piece.

 

Petal is actually a composite of two women—Sing Ye and Sing Yu—who were sold by their families in China, brought here, and sold into prostitution. From the moment they got here, both women did everything they could to escape and find freedom. I found accounts of their escapes, and in one case kidnapping, in the local press of the day and in surviving court documents.

 

Tong Yu was Doctor Chee Long “Gene” Tong’s wife and the inspiration for Moon. After her husband’s death during the Night of Horrors, she became one of the earliest Chinese women in the country to file a lawsuit. It was against the gang leader she held responsible for the massacre and her husband’s murder. But nothing came of it. 

 

Or perhaps I should say that there’s nothing left in the historic record to show what happened. I kept thinking about that absence and what it might mean…

 

I guess what surprised me most is that these real women each made a short appearance in the press—what we might call their 15 minutes of fame—and then they disappeared from the historic record. Their “disappearance,” while not all that surprising as 15 minutes of fame disappear even today, is what inspired me.

 

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

 

A: I’ve seen one reference to Chinese prostitutes being called “daughters of the sun and moon.” But only the one reference! Still, I kept thinking about the description and what it might say about women in general, Chinese women in particular, and the women in the novel most specifically. 

 

Moon, Dove, and Petal are very different from each other—by class, by their ability to read or not, by the size and shape of their feet, by marriage status, by whether they are free or not. They are as different as can be from each other, yet they are connected as women. 

 

I believe this is true for all women around the world. We may look different, practice different religions, live in very different cultures, and yet we are bound by our shared female biology and anatomy, our shared desire to be loved, and our shared need to survive and endure.

 

Q: Do you see parallels between the events in your novel and our world today?

 

A: I started working on Daughters of the Sun and Moon long before the ICE raids that have disrupted communities, including my own, but discrimination, racism, and violence are nothing new.

 

I hope readers will think about what was happening to the Chinese in America in the 19th century and more specifically during the Night of Horrors in Los Angeles and how those events relate to what many immigrants are experiencing today in this country. Can we learn from our mistakes or are we doomed to repeat them?

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I’m still in the very early stages of research, so the story could still change a lot, depending on what I find. 

 

I can tell you a bit about my initial inspiration, which is a Chinese lute called Xiao Hulei—Little Thunder—which was made in 781, passed through many hands, and is now in the collection at the Palace Museum in the Forbidden City. 

 

This final home—rather, I should say a return to its original home in the palace—inspired me to think about the history of the Palace Museum and what happened to the collection and the curators during the Cultural Revolution.

 

Beautiful Flower and Little Thunder (working title) will weave together two parallel stories of love, separation, isolation, survival, and reunion.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: Each time we’ve done interviews together, I’ve always been struck by this last question. It always reminds me of your dad and what a great journalist he is. And now you too!

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Lisa See. 

Q&A with Kate Khavari

  

 

 

Kate Khavari is the author of the new novel A Botanist's Guide to Tradition and Treachery, the latest in her Saffron Everleigh mystery series. She lives in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.  

 

Q: What inspired the plot of your new Saffron Everleigh mystery?

 

A: The plot of this book follows two traditions I love in longer running mystery series: the sleuth abroad and the sleuth accused.

 

Saffron being sent on an expedition takes her out of her comfort zone and far from the resources she’s developed book to book, and her being accused of the crime and (gasp!) arrested further limits her ability to investigate. It’s a lot of pressure for both her and Alexander, and I hope it makes for a really exciting story.

 

Q: Do you think Saffron has changed over the course of the series?

 

A: I hope so! It was one of my goals when beginning this series, to have her learn and grow in each book.

 

The series begins with Saffron literally hiding in a bathroom from the horrible man harassing her at work, and Tradition & Treachery shows her stepping right up to her bully and telling him off.  She’s at once more confident in herself and her self-worth but starting to question her place in the world and her future in a way she’s never done before.

 

Q: How would you describe the dynamic between Saffron and Alexander?

 

A: They’ve also come a long way from the first book in the series, A Botanist's Guide to Parties and Poisons. This book sees them put to rest some long-standing issues between them but also starts them on a whole new path!

 

They’ve come to not only love one another but respect how they want to move through the world and are learning how best to support one another. Saffron brings the playfulness out in Alexander, and Alexander challenges Saffron to think through her ideas more carefully. I love their dynamic!

 

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

 

A: Learning about the state of Turkey in 1924 was very interesting. I visited Turkey many years ago, so I tried to combine what I remembered of the warm culture and beauty with the details I learned of the history of the country and its development. I really enjoyed learning about where the East-meets-West persona that Turkey is known for today began.

 

I was lucky enough to have a friend read for me as a sensitivity reader and her insight into Turkish food (delicious) and Turkish idioms (occasionally confusing) was both a lifesaver and really fun to learn from!

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I’m currently writing the sixth Saffron Everleigh Mystery and enjoying researching a historical fantasy project, also set in the 1920s but in a world with magical relics. It’s been so fun to combine my love and knowledge of the ‘20s with the ability to make up fun magical stuff!

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: I’m just really happy to be writing these stories, not only because they’re fun, rompy mysteries but also because they give me the chance to brush up on issues relevant today like misogyny and how women like Saffron deal with it.

 

This book gets to address an issue that was hugely important back then and right now—the problem of partage and ownership in archeology. In the past, it was accepted that those who dug things up got ownership.

 

That’s the part that I think my beloved Indiana Jones gets wrong—artifacts don’t always belong in a museum, and rarely do they belong in a museum half a world away from their origins. Saffron and her expedition team confront the ethics of archeology as a part of this mystery. 

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Kate Khavari. 

Q&A with Nina Chayka

  

 

 

Nina Chayka is the author of the new linked story collection Seagulls. She is a Russian-American writer, and is a graduate student at Harvard.

 

Q: What inspired you to write Seagulls?

 

A: Seagulls began as my personal way of processing the Russian invasion of Ukraine in early 2022. I wrote a draft of what would later become one of the chapters only a few weeks into the war. As often happens, I didn’t think of it as a book when I started writing it – it was simply something I had to put down on paper, for myself, without any intention of sharing it.

 

Over time, writing down stories of people impacted by displacement, immigration struggles, and the intensely personal dramas of our lives – divorces, marriages, childbirth, falling in and out of love – unfolding against the backdrop of geopolitical crisis was a way for me to connect with those people, to find resonance between their stories and mine.

 

Q: The writer Cristina García said of the book, “Inspired by Chekhov’s famous play, the characters seem almost to oscillate in time, hovering like seagulls over their own uncertain destinies.” What do you think of that description?

 

A: First, that’s so generous of Cristina! The collection is indeed inspired by Anton Chekhov – the play, of course, but also the short stories.

 

There’s a sense of nostalgia for a lost Russia that permeates Chekhov’s work and deeply moves me: nostalgia even for the Russia that still physically exists, but you can feel it already slipping away. A kind of longing that arrives before the loss itself– missing something even while you still have it.

 

Q: How did you decide on the order in which the stories would appear in the book?

 

A: I wanted first to show the main characters in the lives they built after the immigration. The first three chapters follow these women after they’ve already left Ukraine or Russia – we meet them in Barcelona, New York, and Istanbul.

 

The sense of loss surrounding events as monumental as immigration, war, or displacement can be overwhelming, so I wanted to give these women the dignity of new beginnings. In a sense, I wanted to reassure the reader – these women are okay, they make it through – before leading the reader to follow them into darker places.

 

After this initial flash-forward, the stories move chronologically, and we finish more or less where we started. To quote T.S.Eliot,

 

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

 

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

 

A: Being a Russian in America without outside of an immigrant community can feel isolating. It’s hard to explain to my American friends what this war means to my family and friends back home. Writing this book was my attempt to bridge that distance.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I’m working on a novel set in New York about a woman who’s lying about everything until her lies start catching up with her.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: Thank you so much for your questions and hope you enjoy the book! 

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb 

June 9

 

 

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
June 9, 1930: Happy 96th birthday to my incredible father, Marvin Kalb!

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