Q&A with Daniel Peña

  

 

 

Daniel Peña is the author of the new essay collection How to Look Away: On American Cruelty and the Refusal to Disappear. Also an educator, he lives in Dallas, Mexico City, and Germany.

 

Q: Over how long a period did you write the essays collected in How to Look Away?

 

A: I’d say two-thirds of the book was written between 2022 and 2026. Only a few essays appeared before then (“The Joys of Biking at Night” and “Letter from Houston instantly” come to mind).

 

I had the narrative arc and essay ideas down early, but of course the world changes as you write. And I found myself updating the collection up to the very last draft. As late as June of 2026. 

 

Q: The author Ed Morales called the book “a powerful, thoughtful rant against the monstrous innocence of twenty-first century America.” What do you think of that description?

 

A: I’m such a huge fan of Ed as a thinker and writer. That blurb was especially meaningful for me because I’d been reading his work for years. And I’m lucky enough (in this writer’s life) to now call him a friend. We’re both now with One World.

 

I think Ed is so smart to hone in on my interrogation of “innocence” in this collection of essays. There’s a line from this book that interrogates what he’s speaking toward regarding the connection between violence and innocence. In How to Look Away the gist of it is: white impotence begets white innocence, which is often the pretext for white violence. Now and historically.

 

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

 

A: That’s a great question! How to Look Away as a title came to me pretty early. It’s a double entendre. I was interested in not only the process through which we look away from the suffering of others, but also the line itself as a question: How to look away? 

 

Which speaks toward a phenomenon I unpack in the book called “morbid fascination.” It’s the reason everyone stares into a car wreck when they pass it on the highway. 

 

The subtitle was a lot more complicated. It went through many, many drafts. Eventually my editor and I landed on “On American Cruelty and the Refusal to Disappear” because it spoke toward the thematic structure of the collection which moves from disembodiment to embodiment.

 

The subtitle tried best to capture the ways we’re disappeared in the American fabric and the revolutionary nature of refusing to disappear (and remain embodied) in places that try to make us feel smaller. Or eliminate us from the landscape altogether.

 

Q: What do you see looking ahead when it comes to cruelty in the United States?

 

A: I think a lot about the jazz musician Wynton Marsalis when I think of this question and the future of the United States. Marsalis smartly pointed out once that can go to any number of places in the world where fascism took root—Berlin, Tokyo, Madrid, Santiago, etc.—and eventually you’ll find that fascism collapsed under its own weight.

 

That is because the human impulse is to create; fascism’s impulse is to destroy. In those places today, life is still happening. Fascism couldn’t stop people from falling in love. Or people from creating art. Or people writing poetry. It is outside the fascist imagination to create anything beautiful.

 

As humans, we don’t have a very high tolerance for operating on that wavelength indefinitely. And I think the strain is beginning to show. 

 

To these ends, I’m reminded of a line from James Baldwin: “I can't afford despair…you can't tell the children there's no hope.”

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I’m breaking ground right now on a new collection of essays and revising an old novel I have that needs a ton of work.  

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: My favorite collection in the essay is “The Joys of Biking at Night.” It originally appeared in The New York Times. It inspired the cover of the book, which is the side of the Haus des Lehrers in Berlin.

 

It was the artist’s idea of what the Americas looked like. It shows Latin American cyclists just finishing a race. The winner receives his flowers from a little girl. It’s such a sweet image and one very different from the usual images we get in the press from Latin America. It shows us fully embodied, fully ensconced in our humanity.

 

I think it’s a good simulacrum of the book as a whole. Which ultimately is about what it means to be responsible not for each other but to one another. Our humanity exists in the communal.  

 

When I saw the cover, I knew on a cellular level that it was the correct one. 

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb 

Q&A with Frances Boyle

  

 

 

Frances Boyle is the author of the new novel Skin Hunger. Her other books include the story collection Seeking Shade. She lives in Ottawa.  

 

Q: What inspired you to write Skin Hunger, and how did you create your characters Rowan and Evie?

 

A: Several different strands pulled together as inspiration for Skin Hunger, and led to the emergence of Evie and Rowan.

 

The first was a strong sense of wanting to explore in fiction some of the mental health challenges that my mother experienced, including hospitalization. This was never discussed at home so imagination (and research) gave me an entry point.

 

I knew I wouldn't try to tell my mother's story, so I worked out a very different life trajectory for Evie and wrote my way into it.

 

The daughter, now Rowan, took a bit longer to become clear to me. I eventually started thinking about the vital nature of human touch, and exploring the impact that being deprived of maternal touch in childhood might have. That led to Rowan as someone who becomes a people pleaser in search of acceptance, connection and love.

 

The final strand, the animal rights activism, came when I remembered images of experiments on baby monkeys clinging to wire-frame, terry cloth covered artificial "mothers" for the small comfort they provided. I am not a "plotter," so the experiences that both Evie and Rowan go through in the story developed as I wrote and shaped their personalities.

 

Q: How would you describe the dynamic between them?

 

A: Rowan is separated from her mother, Evie, for much of the book, so the dynamic is largely one of longing and regret.

 

Evie feels her child was stolen from her, and reassembles a life around this aching absence. Rowan struggles with the belief that her mother abandoned her, and allows herself to feel both anger and hurt while yearning for the comfort of mother love.

 

Despite the separation, there remains a thin vibrating wire of connection between them, which I show in Evie's occasional premonitions about events in her daughter's life, and Rowan's musings about what she might have inherited from Evie.

 

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

 

A: Skin Hunger is a translation of the Danish term "Hudsult," meaning starved for touch. I think I first encountered it in Robin Beth Schaer's moving poem "Holdfast" that I quote as one of the book's epigraphs (the poem also refers to the monkey experiments). 

 

I'd already been building my draft around the idea of touch deprivation for some time, and hearing the term clicked it firmly into place. I knew I had my title.

 

Q: The author Jack Wang said of the novel, “Alternating between the wayward lives of Evie and Rowan, the novel explores how absence, captivity, and privation affect humans and animals alike.” What do you think of that description?

 

A: I think that Jack really captured a good part of what I was getting at in Skin Hunger. I'm incredibly grateful for his empathetic reading, and kind comments. As I've already mentioned, absence and privation are integral to who Rowan and Evie are.

 

I also see the impact of captivity as key. Evie is literally captive in mental institutions, while Rowan's passions are a reaction to the injustices of animals held captive, whether for entertainment, as in zoos and aquariums, for science or to provide food for humans.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: My current project is a collection of short stories (which will be my second, after 2020's Seeking Shade). The new manuscript has the working title "Turbulence" and most of the stories deal with characters navigating turbulent currents of family, relationships and life.

 

The collection veers more overtly to the speculative than my previous work. A couple of the stories are published, others are out on submission while still others are at far earlier stages of draft.

 

I'm also slowly writing and piecing together a new poetry collection that returns to the themes of mental health challenges through a recurring metaphor of water.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: I'm delighted to be asked to contribute, and very thankful to anyone who picks up a copy of Skin Hunger!

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb 

Q&A with Mary Finnigan

  

 

 

 

Mary Finnigan is the author of the new biography Zina: The Woman Who Changed Worlds. It focuses on the life of Zina Rachevsky, a socialite, actress, and Buddhist nun. Finnigan's other books include Psychedelic Suburbia. She is also a journalist and broadcaster, and she lives in Devon, England.

 

Q: Why did you choose to write a biography of Zina Rachevsky (1930-1973)?

 

A: It took decades to get around to writing it. I met Zina at Kopan in Nepal in 1970. When I left to return to England, Zina gave me an unpublished typescript of her memoir, with instructions to turn it into a proper book.

 

It lay untouched in my files until 1994, when I skim read some of it and decided to travel round the world, interviewing people who knew her. I finally got around to turning the memoir and my recorded interviews into a book in 2022.

 

Zina was one of the dedicated pioneers who leveraged Tibetan Buddhism out of the Himalayas and into the world.  

 

Q: How would you describe your relationship with her?

 

A: We became friends at Kopan and stayed in touch via letters until she died in 1973. I think, like most people who knew her, I was fascinated by her beauty, her charisma, and her enthusiasm, and also puzzled by her apparent lack of a moral compass.

 

Q: Did anything particularly surprise you as you researched the book?

 

A: My meeting with her ex-husband Conrad Rooks terrified me! He lived in a Thai sin bin town called Pattaya, which I hated. He was angry, rude, and arrogant and I felt genuinely threatened when he took me to his home.

 

Q: How would you describe Zina’s legacy today?

 

A: There's no doubt that her initiative at Kopan kickstarted the spread of Tibetan Buddhism around the globe. This has been of great benefit to thousands of people and is still a powerful source of wisdom and compassion. 

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: My garden! I'm 88 and doubt if I'll write another book. But I will probably compile a words and photos family history for my grandchildren.  

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: Zina's trajectory from high society and boho life, film stardom and privilege into ordination as a Tibetan Buddhist nun who spent the last years of her life in contemplative retreat in austere conditions is a truly extraordinary story.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb 

Q&A with Mark Shelhamer

  

 

Mark Shelhamer is the author, with Brian Gallagher, of the new book Are We Ready for Mars?. He is the principal investigator of the Johns Hopkins Human Spaceflight Laboratory and a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.  

 

Q: What inspired you to write Are We Ready for Mars?

 

A: The publisher made me an offer I couldn’t refuse – to pair me with a professional science writer and help guide the book to completion.

 

More than that, however, the book captures several key ideas that have been on my mind since I spent time at NASA 10 years ago – in particular the idea that a Mars mission has to be designed in an integrated manner, with the role of humans as key contributors to mission success taken into account.

 

Q: The scientist Caleb Scharf called the book a “fantastically rich read that makes a powerful argument for why preparing humans to successfully travel to Mars—and back—will transform what it means to survive and flourish in the universe.” What do you think of that description?

 

A: I love it, of course. I’m honored. This captures the essence of the book – learning how to help humans thrive (not just survive) on a Mars mission will help us do the same in other settings, including here on Earth where we all live in stressful and demanding situations with many of the same challenges that will be faced by a crew going to explore Mars.

 

All of these problems will be much more acute on a Mars mission, given the extreme challenges and relative lack of resources onboard, so studying human resilience for Mars will have benefits for understanding human resilience elsewhere.

 

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

 

A: The title was suggested by the publisher, and I wholeheartedly agree with it. The title indicates that – despite already sending people to the moon and landing rovers on Mars – it’s still an open question as to whether or not we are ready to send people to Mars.

 

We could send people now, if we had the rockets, but it wouldn’t be pretty, and the crew wouldn’t perform at a high enough level to make the trip worthwhile. More research on human adaptation to spaceflight is needed.

 

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

 

A: Sending people to Mars will be a human endeavor, not just a technological endeavor.

 

Humans will be both the weakest and the strongest components of the system-of-systems that will constitute a successful mission to Mars. They require resources like air, water, food, and exercise. But they instill a mission with a great deal of resilience – the ability to cope with the unknown.

 

It is in everyone’s best interests to maintain human health and performance, not just because it is the right thing to do, but because this will enable the astronaut crew to perform at a high enough level to make the trip worthwhile, to maintain the spacecraft and habitat, and to perform science and exploration at peak efficiency.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: My lab is trying to figure out how to assess, quantify, and maintain the kind of multi-system resilience that we talk about in the book.

 

This will be applicable not only to spaceflights of the future (including commercial spaceflights to research and tourist facilities in Earth orbit), but also to health and wellbeing on Earth. Both the spaceflight application and the terrestrial-health application will need new ways of thinking about human health.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: A Mars mission will be incredibly challenging. We should embrace the challenges, and use the mission not only to develop technology and explore Mars, but also to study how humans cope with demanding environments. This will help all of us.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb 

Q&A with Philippa Dowding

  

 

 

 

Philippa Dowding is the author of the new middle grade novel The War Lantern. Her other books include the Children of Oculum series. She lives in Toronto. 

 

Q: How did your father's experiences in England during World War II inspire you to write The War Lantern?

 

A: On February 27, 1941, WWII was raging in Europe. My father was 15 years old that day, and after school in the morning he took his regular afternoon shift at the local Royal Air Force (RAF) aircraft factory. At 2:30 p.m., the German Luftwaffe bombed the factory, killing 53 people and injuring many more.

 

My father survived by diving under his lathe. While I can’t tell you exactly when I learned that my father survived a bombing as a boy, I can tell you that I somehow always knew. Such is the nature of traumatic family experience.

 

One night, when he was in his 70s, my father told me his whole bombing story while my first child slept nearby. The intergenerational impact was not lost on me: three generations of one family were only together because of my father’s survival on a terrible day.

 

His retelling of that day inspired The War Lantern.

 

Q: How did you create your characters Marcus, Gisele, and Charlie?

 

A: Marcus is as close to the reality of my father as I could make him, at 15 years old. We’re a lot alike, so that helped; I inherited his love of books, music, and storytelling.

 

I knew that he played the drums in an RAF Barrage Balloon swing orchestra (he played drums all his life). He showed War Pictorial News newsreels at the local cinema, attended school in the mornings, and worked the afternoon shift at the RAF aircraft factory.

 

All these real-life elements and more are in the book, so part of the framework for his narrative was already there, I just had to plausibly fill it out.

 

Marcus’s character arc moves from schoolboy to soldier in the 24 hours of the novel; he becomes an adult in a matter of moments, which was very sobering but felt accurate.

 

I wanted to balance my father’s 24-hour narrative with a German girl’s story around the same age, so I invented the character of 14-year-old Gisele. I knew what my father’s life might be like in England in 1941, but what would a German girl be doing? What was family life like for her, what did her parents do, what was a typical evening, and a day at school?

 

My challenge was how to talk to younger readers about Nazi Germany and fascism. My solution was to give Gisele agency: her story takes her to a secret decoy factory, where she discovers that people, including some of her family, are vanishing. She realizes that her government is lying to her about the war, and she chooses truth.

 

Tail End Charlie is the underage rear gunner at the back of an RAF Whitley bomber. He came to life because of a very simple problem: in a story told over 24 hours, what happens when the two main characters are asleep between midnight and 7 a.m.?

 

For the first year of writing this book, I had a character in those hours who entered everyone’s dreams, which was fun but didn’t advance the story.

 

Since the aircraft factory where Marcus worked made rear gunner turrets for RAF bombers, I realized that the best solution was to create a character who was an RAF rear gunner in one of those turrets. So, Tail End Charlie (as rear gunners were called) shares his story as a rear gunner on a terrifying night bombing over Germany.

 

I’d love readers to ask themselves this question: of the three young people, one bombed, one living in a fascist society, and one asked to fight, which character’s life has changed the most by the end of the story?

 

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

 

A: When I began researching this story in 2023, I traveled to England to tour the town, street, and house where my father and grandparents lived in 1941.

 

I visited the Imperial War Museum in London to read an eye-witness account of the bombing, and the Yate Heritage Centre, where I listened to hundreds of hours of oral history recordings from bombing survivors.

 

I visited nearby Bristol (which was bombed repeatedly during the war), the Gloucestershire Archives, and I toured the building in the place of the original WWII aircraft factory. My kind guides and I likely found the very spot where my father dove under his lathe. We also visited the original (and claustrophobic) WWII infirmary and air-raid shelter, untouched and still in place after 80-plus years.

 

I read hundreds of books and articles about WWII, on all sides of the conflict, and used trusted online sources like IWM.org and USHMM.org for video, article, sound, and image reference. I watched a LOT of WWII movies, too!

 

Most moving perhaps (although it was all moving), was visiting the Bomber Command Memorial site in London, UK, where visitors learn that 55,000+ RAF bomber crew died in the conflict, and their average age was 22.

 

There were many surprises during the research for The War Lantern, but one aspect of the story that I really hadn’t considered before I began was the experience of writing about my grandparents. Their generation, often called “The Lost Generation,” lived through WWI as young adults then endured WWII as parents with children old enough to go to war.

 

As I researched and wrote about them, I was surprised by how much their trauma had to be part of the story, too. It took me ages to capture their final act of love at the end of Marcus’s story, and I was rewriting that moment up to the final edits. I hope I got it right.

Q: The Kirkus Review of the book says, “The story vividly captures the devastating impact of a single bombing, not only on those directly involved but also on the town and the next generation left shell-shocked in its wake.” What do you think of that description?

 

A: I’m incredibly honoured by that description, thank you to Kirkus for the stellar review, and thank you for this question, Deborah.

 

Before I began writing The War Lantern, I had no idea it would be so difficult to write my father’s story.

 

I soon realized that to write about family and a real historical event that killed 53 people and injured many more, I had to be as exacting in the facts as possible. It’s fiction, but I had a duty to be responsible with people's lives in that place and at that time, so I had to get it right, or as right as I possibly could.

 

There's no one left in my family to ask about life in 1941 anymore, so that solitary and careful act of being the one to tell the story was a great responsibility.

 

So, if the Kirkus reviewer and others feel the devastation of the bombing, its immediacy, and the universal impact of the trauma of war on an entire population, then I’m truly thankful and honoured.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: To be honest, I’m taking a bit of a break! But soon I’ll be polishing the next draft of the third and final book in my Children of Oculum series, Oculum Scribe.

 

One group of children try to escape a fascist dystopia in a sealed dome, while another group outside the dome set out to find children like them at the ends of the earth. It’s got a robot uprising, peregrine drones, and plenty of young people in a changing and sometimes terrifying world. Wish them luck!

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: Writing The War Lantern has been one of the most challenging projects of my career. It required three years of being immersed in conflict, cruelty, and war, day after day. At times it was just too much war, and too hard to be so much in it.

 

But now it’s finished, I realize that writing The War Lantern has also been one of the most rewarding projects, too. I’m thankful for all the help I’ve had along the way, from museums, to archives, to friends, family, and my amazing publisher at DCB Young Readers.

 

My hope is that the book resonates with the next generation, so they’ll ask questions, do research, and learn to recognize and resist the forces of war.

 

Thank you for these interesting questions, Deborah! 

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Philippa Dowding. 

Oct. 17

 

 

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
Oct. 17, 1903: Nathanael West born.

Q&A with Regina McBride

  

 

 

Regina McBride is the author of the new novel The White Deer, which is based on the life of the Russian writer Anton Chekhov. McBride's other books include the novel Stranger from Across the Sea. Also an educator, she lives in New York City.

 

Q: What inspired you to write The White Deer, and have you always been interested in Anton Chekhov?

 

A: When I was 18 I read Chekhov’s play The Seagull and found myself deeply moved by its world, so different from anything I’d encountered before. I was instantly drawn into its atmospheric setting and in wonder over the characters, who speak so earnestly about what is missing from their lives. The play is a beautiful and painful chain of unrequited love.

 

Two years after discovering The Seagull, I was cast in The Cherry Orchard and my love of Chekhov intensified. Almost 25 years ago, after rereading Chekhov’s story "The Kiss," I decided I wanted to write about Anton Chekhov as a fictional character, and I wanted to write it as an epic novel in the mold of the great Russian novels.

 

Before finding my way to the final book, The White Deer, I wrote five iterations of what I’d refer to as “my Chekhov novel,” each one close to 500 pages. But none of them really worked. I had to put it away many times, each time in despair, and work on another book. But I’d always go back to it.

 

It was while reading one of Chekhov’s letters to his brother, Alexander, that I made a discovery. He was giving his brother writing advice: “Brevity is the sister of talent.” He was urging his brother to be more concise.

 

I had always known Anton was a master of economy, but I had never applied that insight to my own novel. I began to see the folly of trying to write an epic novel involving a writer whose work was the soul of moderation. I reduced the timeline dramatically and focused the action all in one summer.

 

Q: What did you see as the right balance between history and fiction as you wrote this book?

 

A: I read that when Anton was 19 years old and on his way to Moscow to study medicine, he stopped in the Ukrainian countryside a few weeks to relax and visit friends. Not much was written specifically about this so I thought it would be a perfect time and place to create a fictional world.

 

All of Chekhov’s biographical details are respected in my novel. The things he shares with Vera (the narrator of this novel) about his family and his dream of traveling to Siberia to write about the prison conditions are all based on what I learned from reading biographies and Chekhov’s letters.

 

Vera and her family and even Volkhov, Vera’s childhood estate, are all fictional.

 

Q: The Publishers Weekly review of the book says, “McBride evokes a sense of place with lush depictions of birch stands and daisy fields along with a soundtrack of Tchaikovsky and folk tunes, creating a backdrop for Vera’s tender and chaste friendship with Anton.” What do you think of that description, and how would you describe the dynamic between Anton and Vera?

 

A: I’m glad that the reviewer understood how important a sense of place is to this novel. Vera and Anton revel in the beauty of Volkhov’s forests and spend much of their time wandering the acreage in search of a white deer that has been spotted on the property.

 

Seeing a white deer, according to Anton, is a promise of future happiness. We find out later that seeing a white deer has another more specific meaning for Anton.

 

Surreptitiously through Anton, Vera learns that her beloved childhood estate is likely to fall to the axe at the end of the summer. Vera and Anton feel a sense of urgency to relish what Anton has called in a letter to his brother “a beautiful Eden” and to be present in it.

 

Both Vera and Anton face great changes ahead of them in their lives and they fantasize about stopping time and remaining in their idyll together.

 

I appreciate the reviewer’s depiction of Anton and Vera’s connection as “tender.” The word “chaste” is technically true but might give the impression that there is no sexual energy between them, when there is a very strong attraction. I would characterize what is between them as a romantic friendship.

 

Q: What do you hope readers will take from this book?

 

A: I hope readers will fall into the dream of the book, that they will be able to enter the sensory world of Volkhov, of Ukraine in 1879.

 

As with Chekhov’s play The Cherry Orchard, the characters in The White Deer are all, consciously or unconsciously, being carried on a great historical wave as the Russian aristocracy gradually loses its foothold. No one in the novel knows exactly what is ahead as the empire moves slowly toward revolution and earth-shattering change.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I am currently working on a memoir. My first memoir, Ghost Songs, was published in 2016 by Tin House. That focuses on my childhood, young womanhood and my journey to Ireland, where I would live for a year, all while trying to cope with the suicides of my parents (who died when I was a teenager).

 

The memoir ended when, at the age of 22, I was on my way to New York City from Ireland with the dream of becoming an actress.

 

This new memoir begins in New York City when I am 22. Haunted by the violent loss of my parents, I suffer with hallucinations and struggle to support myself as a waitress, while trying to hold onto my dream of becoming an actress.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Regina McBride.