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. 

Q&A with Alfredo Cáceres

  

 

 

Alfredo Cáceres is the author and illustrator of the new middle grade graphic novel Through the Black Gate. He lives in Chile. 

 

Q: What inspired you to create Through the Black Gate?

 

A: At first, I was moved by the idea of making something for an older audience. My friend Victoria Maderna (a wonderful illustrator) told me I should make a comic book and it kind of made sense.

 

When confronted with that horrible blank page I drew a scene in which an older woman tells someone that her cat is not a cat but a vessel of her late father’s soul. Then Valdivia, the city where I grew up appeared, and everything started to take shape.

 

Ever since I lost my father 20 years ago, I dream of him visiting and leaving. I tell him a few things, but he always has to go, and it’s a devastating feeling having to say goodbye over and over again.

 

The story changed a lot through the years, but the spirit remained—a walk through the uneasy parts of life getting to know each other’s more vulnerable stories. Solitude is the real enemy in each of the character’s stories.

 

Q: How did you create your characters Irene, Francis, and Moses, and how would you describe their dynamic?

 

A: Irene is sort of based on a lot of people I know. She started as an old woman who confesses something supernatural while having breakfast and then progressed into a girl who is determined to follow Moses just to be sure that what happened is real and not just a bad dream.

 

Francis is based on my brother who plays guitar and in some ways on the character Ralph Macchio plays in a movie called Crossroads. The first thing I thought about his guitar playing is that it should progress from classical music to more modern jazz (a Pat Metheny sort of guitar player). Since I’m no musician, my guitar teacher Diego Farias composed a lovely lullaby that is played all through the story (Sam’s song).

 

Moses represents the unknown, the frustrating truth that we can’t control what happens in our life.

 

The idea was for them to start as antagonists and later become friends after having confronted their own demons together. A very important scene is when Francis loses his guitar in the forest and Irene helps him retrieve it, understanding the sentimental value it holds.

 

Q: How did you create the world in which the novel is set?

 

A: The story started as a Lovecraftian tale of two people (Irene and Francis) interrupting a ritual to bring someone back from the dead.

 

Near Valdivia there’s a town on the coast that is called Niebla, which translates as fog or mist. I took the Spanish forts on the coast and made them part of the Graylands, a place between life and death. I even made a map of the stages one must pass on the way to life’s exit door (Dante and Virgil had an influence on this).

 

Thinking about this, there is a lot that goes unexplained that I could blabber on about for hours. For instance, with what happens to Irene’s parents, you only get a glimpse and make up your own mind if they were playing with something no one should ever play, or they just had bad luck.

 

I also wrote about the mechanics souls use to haunt objects and how the ferryman’s vines worked corrupting the places they were burrowed.

 

But I decided to focus on the point of view of someone who is mourning and just wants to say goodbye to someone they love.

 

Q: Did you work on the text first or the illustrations first--or both simultaneously?

 

A: It was a nightmare of my own creation. I visualized the story, then drew it, then wrote the script which influenced the pictures that then influenced the words—basically a never-ending cycle of doom.

 

But my agent, Jennifer, and her husband, Ben, helped me a lot with the loose ends, and Julia, my editor at Atheneum, had the faith I was missing to see it come to life.

 

I always thought graphic novels were something much cooler folk than me made and there were a lot of times I lost confidence and started comparing with everyone I could think of. Overcoming those feelings and finishing the story is a reward I will treasure for the rest of my life.

 

Now I think I’m ready to tell more stories even if there are complicated parts. In the end everything comes together if you keep rowing in the same direction, which was not an easy thing to do.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: My deal with Atheneum is for two graphic novels and I already have the idea for the next one. I have two actually, and I’m having a blast with the world building.

 

One of these stories is set on the town of Lican Ray (South of Chile) and its surrounding areas and the other is based on an old forgotten boardgame we are re vamping with a friend.

 

Maybe not all these ideas are home runs, but there is magic on trying stuff and seeing how far you can go. Through the Black Gate started like this and it’s surreal to see the final product.

 

The second idea could also be an illustrated novel about magic and learning to tell stories in a world full of people telling you how to think and feel about everything.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: Well, maybe a sort of thank you to the universe for being an illustrator, in these times. The world seems to be out of control with people seeking power, money and don’t care about others or the environment.

 

When we tell stories, borders seem to fade, people of different origins can talk about it, and share their favorite part or even disliking it together.

 

My goal in telling this story was to open up about grief and how I have tried to overcome it. Many of the things Sam and Ruth say are things I have told myself in dark times.

 

Nobody knows a whole lot about how to live the perfect life, but I feel sharing stories is a fantastic way to go through it instead of wanting to own half of the world.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb 

Q&A with Lisa Johnston Hancock

  

Photo by Maribel Farina

 

 

Lisa Johnston Hancock is the author and illustrator of the new children's picture book Santiago and Great Bear. She lives in the Los Angeles area.

 

Q: What inspired you to create Santiago and Great Bear?

 

A: I’m fascinated by the Greek and Roman myths behind the constellations in our night sky. I love the idea that each grouping of stars has a story as to how they ended up there.

 

I’ve been a fine artist and art teacher for a long time and when I started seriously thinking about writing and illustrating my own stories, I knew that I needed to do a lot of research.

 

My kids were 3 and younger when I began taking them to our local library each week to pick up new picture books. All of the books that we were finding on constellations and stars were nonfiction. I knew that I wanted to write an educational fictional picture book, with my own version of what the constellations were doing up there.

 

I first had an idea of a girl who drew in her sketchbook. The creatures that she drew came to life and caused trouble and she had to figure out how to stop them. I liked the story but I felt like it was missing the SEL (social emotional learning) themes that I wanted to include.

 

I worked on this story and the illustrations for several years. I even attended the Highlights Foundation Writer’s Retreat in Pennsylvania. A year later, we moved to Long Beach, California, for my husband’s job, and six weeks after that, Covid happened.

 

I felt isolated and longed for new friends, especially since we were in a brand new place with no sense of community (yet). Once the restrictions were lifted, I decided that we all needed to find new interests, in order to make some friends.

 

Camping sounded like a good idea. My kids joined Cub Scouts and we went tent camping about once a month. I saw the Ursa Major constellation for the first time, in its entirety, at the Joshua Tree National Park. This park would later become the inspiration for the imagery in Santiago and Great Bear.

 

I started to develop a story about a boy who moves from the city to the countryside with his mom, and is longing for a friend, so he makes a wish on a star. I signed with my agent shortly after, and she gave me wonderful edits that made the story even stronger. 

 

Q: How would you describe the relationship between the two, and what do you think the book says about friendship?

 

A: It’s an unusual relationship in that Santiago is a boy, and Great Bear is, well, a big bear full of stars. Santiago and Great Bear form an instant bond and Santiago immediately wants to help. He cares about Great Bear and Santiago shows persistence in that he spends a long time (through several phases of the moon) working on ways to get Great Bear back home.

 

Through this journey, Santiago learns a lot about the phases of the moon, constellations and why you can see some stars at night and not others, all from Great Bear.

 

Great Bear helps him to get over his loneliness and form new interests that give him the courage to make a friend closer to home. I think it shows that friendships can come in all forms, even where you least expect it.

 

Q: Did you work on the text first or the illustrations first--or both simultaneously?

 

A: I worked on the text first. I did not study creative writing in school, but I’ve taken several writing classes online and attended in-person workshops. I was encouraged to begin the manuscript before working on illustrations and I find that this process works best for me.

 

I will go through many edits of the text before I start working on thumbnails for the dummy. Sometimes I will draw out the characters because it helps me work through the text when I can visualize what the characters look like. 

 

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

 

A: I hope that kids will get out and explore our beautiful natural world. Notice the things around you and try new things. A big move is not easy, but be open to new opportunities in every change. 

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I’m working on two different stories. I’m re-working a dummy about bird sounds and how we can confuse them with everyday sounds in our community. It’s a humorous, silly book about imaginative play. It went on submission and I got some good feedback that I think will make the story stronger.

 

I’m also working on another picture book dummy about mindful meditation through the form of a nature walk. 

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: I’m in the process of scheduling various book events to promote and share Santiago and Great Bear. I’ll have lots of book swag to share! The event schedule can be found via my website at www.lisajohnstonhancock.com. You can also find me on social media @lisajohnstonhancock on Instagram and The Curious Illustrator on Substack. 

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb 

June 30

 

 

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY

June 30, 1911: Czesław Miłosz born.