Q&A with John Van Oudenaren

 

 

 

John Van Oudenaren is the author of the new book The Geopolitics of Culture: James Billington, the Library of Congress, and the Failed Quest for a New Russia. It focuses on the role Billington (1929-2018), the former librarian of Congress, played in U.S.-Russian relations. Van Oudenaren's other books include Crisis and Renewal. He is a Global Fellow at the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies, and was director of the World Digital Library and chief of the European Division at the Library of Congress.

 

Q: What inspired you to write The Geopolitics of Culture?

 

A: I thought it was an important story that needed to be told.

 

The Library of Congress did amazing things in and with Russia under [James] Billington’s leadership: helping a major library in St. Petersburg recover from a devasting fire, preserving and making accessible to scholars through digitization and microfilming the records of the Soviet communist party and the international communist movement, launching large-scale exchanges of people and of books, organizing conferences, helping the Russians to create their first digital libraries, and jointly organizing film projects, concerts, exhibitions, and scholarly conferences.

 

These activities reached ordinary Russians and helped the Russian cultural sector get back on its feet after it was decimated by the collapse of the Soviet economy.

 

There was also a political reason for writing the book. Putin has cultivated a myth among the Russian people that in the 1990s the West, led by the United States, set out to destroy Russia and its culture.

 

This is of course not true. Western governments and organizations made enormous efforts in the 1990s and beyond to help Russia create a prosperous market economy and a stable political system. Mistakes were made, to be sure, but the claim that U.S. intentions were malign is a lie.

 

The Library of Congress wasn’t by any means the biggest provider of outside assistance to Russia, but it played an especially important role. It helped to preserve and showed respect for Russian culture at a time when many Russians felt humiliated by their poverty and when Russian economic, political, and military power was at a low point.

 

Gorbachev and Yeltsin both acknowledged what the Library of Congress had done, and Putin seemed to acknowledge it in the early 2000s, when he had several long meetings with Billington and the two men discussed Russian culture and identity.

 

But later, when Putin turned hostile to the West, he developed a mythology about Russia being a 1,000-year-old culture that the West is out to destroy and that Russia needs to “defend,” including through actions like the invasion of Ukraine.

 

I don’t know how and when the truths that I document in the book will make their way into Russia, but I am confident that someday they will, if they haven’t already. But the first step to having the truth known is to document it thoroughly with sources and evidence.  

 

Q: How did you research the book, and did you learn anything that especially intrigued you?

 

A: I started with published sources – newsletters, annual reports, press releases, and so forth, as well as Billington’s own voluminous writings, including his books, op-ed pieces in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and elsewhere, and his speeches, articles, and congressional testimony.

 

I also used a lot of unpublished archival sources – from various offices and divisions in the Library of Congress, the Billington Papers at the Library of Congress, as well as papers at the Reagan and Clinton presidential libraries, and at Harvard, Princeton, and Yale. I did interviews with former and current Library of Congress staff.

 

I was personally involved in much of what is covered in the book, so I drew on my own memory, but I always tried to check against written sources, because memory can play tricks.

 

Lots of things intrigued me. Personal relationships were interesting.

 

For example, the friendship between Billington and the poet Joseph Brodsky. Billington loved poetry, American and Russian, and he selected Brodsky to be poet laureate of the United States at around the time the Soviet Union was collapsing.

 

Billington was by profession a cultural historian, and he had great hopes that once the communists were gone a classical Russian culture would reemerge.

 

He saw Brodsky as the embodiment of this revived Russian culture, not only because of his poetic genius but because in the 1960s Brodsky had been the protégé of the two last great survivors of pre-Bolshevik Russian culture: the poet Anna Akhmatova and the writer Nadezhda Mandelstam, widow of the poet Osip Mandelstam who had died in the gulag.

 

Brodsky was flattered to be cast in this role, but he didn’t believe it for a minute. The correspondence between the men shows that Brodsky thought that post-communist Russia would be dominated by thugs and gangsters of various kinds – “city boys” he called them – rather than a revived Russian Orthodox Church, thriving rural communities, and a Russian cultural renaissance, such as Billington was hoping for. In this, unfortunately, Brodsky was right and Billington wrong.

 

Billington’s relationship with Nancy Reagan was another surprise. They had worked together on the June 1988 Gorbachev-Reagan summit, when he arranged her cultural program in Moscow and St. Petersburg. They kept in touch, and I found in his papers a copy of a long handwritten letter to her.

 

This struck me as a quaint reminder of a lost world: good penmanship. My handwriting is so bad I can barely leave a note for the dry cleaners, let alone write a long letter to a former first lady. But he seemed fine with sending it and she obviously read it and replied!

 

I guess the other surprise was to realize, belatedly, what a coherent world view Billington had – one encompassing culture, religion, politics, international relations.

 

I used to write a lot for him – mostly speeches and letters – and he was generally satisfied with what I wrote, because I understood his world view and could feed it back to him when he didn’t have the time to do the writing himself.

 

But it wasn’t until I sat down, amidst the pandemic, and read through pretty much everything he had ever written that I realized what a consistent, coherent world view he had, one that I guess he developed at Princeton and Oxford in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

 

The experience has made me think more seriously about intellectual biography as a genre and to wonder who else that I know or know of had this kind of unified world view.

Q: How would you describe James Billington’s legacy when it comes to relations between the U.S. and Russia, and what do you think he would say about today's interactions between the two countries?

 

A: Well, he got some things right and some things very wrong. He was obviously correct in warning, as he did in the 1990s and early 2000s, that the heavy focus of Western policymakers on economic reform – shock therapy, rapid privatization, and so forth – was discrediting the United States and dissipating the good will that ordinary Russians felt toward Americans after the fall of communism.

 

He was right to draw attention to neglected psychological and cultural aspects that Putin has since seized upon in a twisted way to stir up Russian hatred toward the West.

 

But he was clearly wrong about Putin. In the early days he argued that Putin was a kind of Charles de Gaulle – a patriot who would use nationalism and mildly authoritarian means to revive Russia and help it recover from national humiliation in the way de Gaulle had helped France after its defeat in World War II.

 

At most he warned that Putin might became (or might be superseded by) a Milosevic – the Serbian leader who exploited Serb nationalism to maintain his power. But as we now know, Putin turned out to be a thousand times worse than Milosevic – in the deaths and destruction he has caused and may yet cause as the war in Ukraine grinds on.

 

Were he alive today, Billington would be appalled by what has happened in Russia and at the state of U.S.-Russia relations.

 

He always saw post-communist Russia as engaged in a struggle between forces of light and forces of darkness, but he was an optimist by nature and believed that the forces of light would prevail.

 

But that clearly has not happened. What has happened – the invasion of Ukraine, the perversion of the Orthodox Church, the war crimes committed in Bucha and elsewhere, the murder of political dissidents and suppression of freedoms – is worse than the worst outcomes that Billington warned about in the 1990s and early 2000s and argued that Western policy needed to work to prevent. He would be very disappointed.

 

The positive legacy of Billington’s work is his teaching and constant reminders that in dealing with foreign countries we need to pay greater attention to cultural and psychological factors and to these countries’ histories and traditions.

 

We can’t just bribe or bomb or badger them into becoming liberal democracies as we tried for the first decades after the collapse of communism. But neither should we give up on trying to have a positive moral and political influence on the rest of the world, as seems to be the approach of the current administration.

 

Billington was always searching for a middle path between these two extremes – between on the one hand expecting everyone would eventually become just like us because of McDonald’s and the internet, and on the other of being indifferent to circumstances in other countries and maybe even preferring autocracies to democracies because they can be easier to deal with.

 

In the book I argue that these are lessons from his work that we need to incorporate into our foreign policy if we are to survive in this increasingly complex and in some ways more hostile world.     

 

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

 

A: Well, there are two parts to it – the “geopolitics” and the “culture.” Billington was part of that generation of American thinkers who had come of age during and just after World War II.

 

They were taught that the United States had fought two wars in the first half of the 20th century to prevent a single hostile power from dominating the Eurasian land mass and its industrial and population resources.

 

Woodrow Wilson had reluctantly entered World War I to prevent a German victory, and Franklin D. Roosevelt was determined to stave off a British defeat at the hands of the Axis.

 

The cold war that began in the late 1940s was yet another struggle to keep a single, hostile power – in this case the Soviet Union allied with China – from dominating Eurasia.

 

The United States won a spectacular victory in 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed and the cold war ended.

 

But Billington always warned that there was nothing permanent about this victory and that the United States needed to head off the emergence of a new coalition of hostile powers, most likely comprising China, Russia, and some of the Islamic states, that would dominate Eurasia and threaten U.S. interests and security.

 

That was one reason why he was so committed to trying to build a democratic Russia friendly to the United States. Well, fast forward to the 2020s, and that’s exactly what has happened.

 

There’s no need to go into the details here, but somehow we have blundered our way from the overwhelmingly favorable position we inherited in 1991 to one in which we are facing what some are calling an “axis of autocracies” comprised of Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea. Billington saw this as a possibility and wanted to head it off.

 

The Trump administration is now trying to pry Russia away from China, much the way Henry Kissinger broke China away from the Soviet Union in the 1970s. In theory there’s nothing wrong with this idea, but I doubt it will work.

 

And if the price of winning over Russia is to sell Ukraine and Europe down the river, then it’s hardly a net gain – indeed it would be a major loss.

 

As for culture: Today’s geopolitical rivalry is mostly about hard economic and military power, but it does have a cultural dimension. The United States and its allies won the Cold War in part because they won the war of ideas.

 

They were able to convince the world’s people that the West stood for cultural and intellectual pluralism – for the free flourishing of different ideas, religions, and art forms – while the communists enforced a bland orthodoxy based on Marxist ideology.

 

Well, that script has now been flipped. Putin, Xi Jinping, and the ayatollahs of Iran have now assumed the mantle of cultural pluralism; they claim to be the protectors of ancient civilizations going back millennia, while the United States leads a decadent West that is trying to wipe out traditional cultures around the world and impose a sameness that flows out of Hollywood and Silicon Valley.

 

This view is of course nonsense – I don’t know enough about Iran and China to judge, but I do know that Putin’s version of Russian culture is a sham that chokes off genuine intellectual, artistic and religious freedom.

 

But there’s a lot of sympathy for this view, in the autocracies themselves, in the Global South, and unfortunately even in the West where some people are willing to overlook Putin’s crimes and see Russia as some kind of model civilization.

 

Billington (and a few other thinkers, for example the great Sam Huntington at Harvard) saw this coming and wanted to head it off.

 

Billington’s approach at the Library of Congress, which I happened to see firsthand, was to demonstrate to other countries and cultures that we respected them – that we were not out to impose a Western monoculture on them and that they did not need to turn to dictators to preserve values that they held dear.

 

It was an uphill battle, but we made a lot of progress in Russia – just not enough.

 

So that – geopolitical rivalry with a cultural dimension – is why I entitled the book the “geopolitics of culture.” In the concluding chapter I draw lessons from Billington’s thinking that we might apply in the future as we try to get out of our current geopolitical predicament.   

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I am writing a history of the Open World program, which is one of the programs discussed in The Geopolitics of Culture. It began as an exchange program that Billington initiated with the support of Congress in 1999, aimed at heading off the deterioration of U.S.-Russia relations that already then was underway.

 

The program ultimately brought 20,000 Russians in leadership positions to the United States. It later expanded to Ukraine and other countries in Eurasia and continues to this day (although without Russian participation) under the auspices of the Congressional Office of International Leadership (COIL).

 

Based on the earlier book, COIL has asked me to write a more detailed history of this exchange program, which I was happy to do.

 

The book will be a history, but I’m also trying to get at some broader, more conceptual questions: what role can people-to-people exchanges play in promoting U.S. interests overseas? What kind of exchanges (youth, professional, cultural) work best? How can we use exchanges to bolster countries such as Ukraine that are under attack by Russia, and what role might such exchanges play in rebuilding, down the road, some kind of relationship with a post-Putin Russia?

 

I’m also putting on my political science hat to do some work on Europe. I’ve written books on the EU in the past. The EU can be bureaucratic and boring, but it’s now getting very interesting as Macron, Merz, Starmer, and a few others are stepping up – working to ensure their security and their prosperity in what many are calling a post-American world.  

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: I would just like to thank this blog and Deborah Kalb for this opportunity to discuss this book. As readers who are book lovers and writers know, the economics of book publishing are pretty daunting these days, and anything that supports independent and academic presses ultimately helps authors.

 

The Geopolitics of Culture is available at Amazon, but a better bet is to purchase directly from Cornell University Press. Here is the link:

 

https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501775765/the-geopolitics-of-culture/#bookTabs=1

 

By typing the discount code 09BCARD in at checkout, you take 30 percent off the price (electronic or print edition).

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

Q&A with Laura Julier

 

 

 

Laura Julier is the author of the new memoir Off Izaak Walton Road: The Grace That Comes Through Loss. Also an educator, editor, and chaplain, she lives in Iowa City.

 

Q: What inspired you to write Off Izaak Walton Road?

 

A: A series of random and serendipitous events unfolded, one after another, almost as if the universe was conspiring to create this opportunity for me to live in this old hunting cabin on a gravel road along a river south of Iowa City.

 

It was a place that grabbed me hard and pulled me in. Pulled at something deep inside me that I did not understand—and in fact, I realized I didn’t want to understand it at the time. I was powerfully swept up by the experience of living in this place.

 

Over the time that I lived there, I found myself attending more and more to the natural world around me, and it happened for some reason that during that particular winter, spring, and summer, conditions both environmental and human-made conspired to bring a surprising number of bird species.

 

I also found myself compelled to keep finding reasons and ways to return to live in this cabin for several months at a time, over six or seven years. I knew I wanted to write about the location, and I began with questions about what it was that called to me, why it felt like home when it bore no resemblance to any place I’d lived before.

 

So I began exploring: What is it that causes a place to grab hold of us? What is it about the places we feel rooted, grounded, nurtured—feel most ourselves or most connected to something larger than ourselves.

 

Over time, again because of both environmental and human forces and events, conditions in this area of land and river changed. Each time I was able to live there, I had to contend with loss and change, and so the heart of the book changed as well.

 

It became a story of confronting and living with losses of all kinds, and grief, and finding our way through that to a different understanding and to healing.

 

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

 

A: I knew from the minute I decided to take on this project that this would be the title. The book is about the time I lived off Izaak Walton Road, about the life that I observed and that I came to understand differently as time went on. It was just an obvious choice to me.

 

What quickly emerged the more I wrote was that this story has a lot to do with what’s hidden, what’s beneath the surfaces all around us. I followed that thread literally. I write about the life that takes place in the marsh and ditches, the unseen places in wild or undeveloped area.

 

There’s also a thread throughout the pieces in the book that has to do with experiences that are unspoken, and the currents of feeling and knowing that are apprehended outside of language.

 

There’s one moment when, as I am ending my stay at this cabin for a second time, I step off the road to allow a motorcycle to pass, and I’m standing in a field, about a foot lower than the road, which affords me a completely different perspective, a different angle to view what I’ve been observing and investigating for the season past.

 

It’s a very simple thing—one step—but a reminder that sometimes we have to put our feet literally in a different place in order to understand.

 

Q: The author Lacy M. Johnson said of the book, “Written with clarity, candor, and a tenderness of attention that is profoundly moving, this book shows the often-transformative power of loss, solace, and joy.” What do you think of that description?

 

A: It’s humbling for me to hear a reader name what they perceive about something I’ve written—what they receive from the experience of sitting with my words and sentences, with the object I’ve shaped and made.

 

 I am very grateful for Lacy Johnson’s words, and I’ve used her phrase—"the transformative power of loss, solace, and joy”—to describe the book to others. It’s somewhat like looking in a mirror: I recognize myself, but there’s some distance as well as recognition.

 

I was drawn to working as a hospital and hospice chaplain because I’m deeply moved by the ways that humans deal with loss and sorrow. It’s a part of the human condition that keeps pulling me. No one gets through life without loss, and the subtraction of a part of our life’s story changes that story.

 

So for me, loss and transformation are integral to the stories we tell about ourselves and our lives.

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

 

A: I carried this project with me for quite a few years, and as I said, in some ways it kept evolving and shifting, although in other ways it had a life of its own. I learned a lot about my own creative process and about being patient.

 

During one part of the process, I only had to sit myself down and the pages emerged; after I had most of it compiled, I had to shift from being immersed in just getting it down on the page to shaping and orchestrating the shifts and focus, what I call the key notes or melodic line in each part, shaping how they unfolded in a sequence that wasn’t linear, was recursive in some ways, yet moved and evolved.

 

I’m not sure I ever thought about what I hoped readers would take away from the book—I was always more concerned about shaping and sculpting this object—but since it’s now out in the world, readers have taught me what they take from it, and that is frankly a part of writing that I didn’t anticipate.

 

Two things I’ve heard repeatedly. Several readers have told me they have to read it slowly, that the language is so dense and lyrical that it slows down reading the way that poetry slows you down. That is probably the highest complement to me, because I pay minute attention to syntax and nuance.

 

A few readers have told me they appreciate that it’s structured as mostly short pieces—two to three pages—so that it lends itself to being read in small bits of time. That’s interesting to me because I write and think with a lot of white space. In fact, people close to me would, I think, say that I live that way—I need a lot of silence and time to process sensory input.

 

The other thing I’ve heard is readers’ own stories about a place that grabbed hold of their hearts, and I appreciate listening to those stories. You live with a story for a long time, and you think you’re the only one who can tell it, explore it, unearth it—but then you pick your head up from the manuscript and discover all the ways that story resonates, and all the ways it’s a fundamentally shared story.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I have several projects gestating right now. The one that’s closest to emerging is another subject I’ve written about, researched, and carried for several years. It too is in some senses about the way stories infuse and are shaped by a particular place.

 

The story of Hannah Duston, a woman who lived 400 years ago in New England, is a traumatic one, but it's not a story she herself ever told. We only know about her through the ways others shaped her story for their own purposes.

 

I’m interested in what emerges when we layer those stories, and in what it means to control the narrative of our own lives—if that’s even possible.

 

A second project I’m working on is inspired by the late writer Judith Kitchen’s Half In Shade, a memoir sparked by the evidence of family photos and her speculation about family relationships.

 

For me, it emerges from the same impulse as the 2022 documentary film Three Minutes: A Lengthening, in which a snippet of a 1938 home movie of a European Jewish village provides the beginning of a search to fill in the gaps of what happened to the people who appear in it.

 

Like many people, my knowledge of my elders and ancestors is very thin. It goes back two generations with a good amount of detail, then drops off precipitously leaving me with scant matter—one photo, a first name, and that’s about it.

 

In my case, I had an uncle who was a photographer in his early life, and he left hundreds of photos, including many of a summer he spent with his father and brother in 1936 in Poland.

 

You can see in both of these projects not only the ways that I’m drawn to examining the particulars of a place and how it impacts a life, as well as looking at silences and white space.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: I’m heading off to the annual AWP conference, this year in Los Angeles, where I’ll be signing and reading from Off Izaak Walton Road, and excited to be reading at Broadway Books in Portland, Oregon, the following week. I’ll be at Schuler Books in Okemos, Michigan, in June.

 

I’m especially interested in how readers from very different parts of the country respond to the Midwestern-ness of the book. More readings and links to interviews will appear at laurajulier.com.

 

There are so many people who have contributed to helping bring this book into being and into readers’ hands, and I’m enormously grateful to all of them.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

Q&A with Stefany Valentine

 

Photo by Dru Valentine

 

Stefany Valentine is the author of the new young adult novel First Love Language. 

 

Q: You've said that First Love Language was partly based on your own experiences--can you say more about that, and about how you created your character Catie?

 

A: Catie and I share many similarities. We are both adoptees, we both grew up Mormon, we both lost our dads to cancer, we both forgot Mandarin with age, and we both have a deep longing to reconnect with culture, heritage, and family. 

 

The differences between me and Catie are that she only has one sister (I grew up with eight siblings), and that she has a Toby. I think her love story is far sweeter and better deserved than my personal love story.

 

Q: What did you see as the right balance between reality and fiction as you worked on the novel?

 

A: Technically, the entire story is a work of fiction. However, I think the best stories come from the heart and while Catie and I have similar backgrounds, what she did with what she was given was different than what I did with it when I was 17. But I also think having a great editor helps with jugging reality and fiction.

 

Q: The writer Anna Gracia said of the book, “The yearning for a language lost or never known tugs at an unspoken sadness familiar to many in the diaspora, but Valentine handles the added complications of religion, grief, and love with a lightness and relatability that will have readers flying through its pages.” What do you think of that description?

 

A: This description hits so hard! When writing First Love Language, I went into a mental headspace of deep shame and embarrassment. Like, how can I be proud to be Taiwanese when I don't even know what that means?

 

But that exact feeling is an experience that's shared in the diaspora because there is so much loss whether it's language, traditions, culture, family, food. It's really nothing to be embarrassed about but rather I think the loss is what brings us together. 

 

And of course, there are always layers to experiences. I'm glad I was able to intersect Catie's diasporic experience with religion, grief, and love because we are all such complicated people. I think the layers are what give us dimension. 

 

Q: What do you see as the role of the Mormon religion in the novel?

 

A: For starters, I grew up Mormon. It felt fitting to write what I know. Additionally, since much of the book surrounds The Five Love Languages by Gary Chapman, I felt that I needed an organic way to address the regressive values from which the love languages were built.

 

For those who don't know, Chapman was a marriage counselor who used Christianity as a basis for perpetuating hetero and patriarchal values. For FLL, I wanted to use the pop culture element of the love languages without claiming its harmful origins. I hope that through Rayleigh's story arc, I accomplished what I set out to do. 

 

Q: What are you working on now? 

 

A: I'm working on going out on submission with my adult romcom. It's a story about a bi ex-Mormon who is haunted by ghosts...and her religious trauma. Growing up Mormon did a number on me. There is a whole community of women deconstructing from religious trauma and I hope to provide a safe and validating space for that experience. 

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: I found my biological mom while First Love Language was being published! I just think the timing of it was so perfect—First Love Language is the story I wrote about how badly I wanted to find her and then poof! Here she is!

 

And now I'm making plans to spend six months in Taiwan reconnecting with her and learning my forgotten first language! I've already gotten accepted to Chung Yaun Uiversity in Taiwan. I'm just in the process of getting my student visa and scholarships!

 

And of course they people who have helped me most along the way are fellow Asian adoptees. It just feels so full circle and in the chaos if the universe, I can't help but feel so lucky!

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

Q&A with Pamela N. Harris

 

 

 

Pamela N. Harris is the author of the young adult novel This Town Is on Fire. She also has written the YA novel When You Look Like Us. She lives in Williamsburg, Virginia.

 

Q: What inspired you to write This Town Is on Fire, and how did you create your character Naomi?

 

A: The idea for This Town is on Fire came to me in the midst of the pandemic. While we were all quarantined, our access to the world was through social media—and a popular trending topic at that time was the rise of the “Karens.”

 

For those unfamiliar with the term, a “Karen” is the name given to white women who overly complained, especially when it came to people of color completing routine tasks such as delivering food, cooking out, or even birdwatching.

 

As I watched these videos, I couldn’t help but wonder what I would do if one of my close friends became a trending Karen. Would our friendship survive the scrutiny? Would I think that she was a racist, or simply misunderstood? Would she understand me?

 

This Town was spawned from those questions. I decided to set the story in a fictional town very similar to the town in which I worked as a school counselor. I wanted to write about a tightknit community, and how the townsfolk might react when a viral video highlighted some of the racial tensions that brewed underneath the surface.

 

Q: How would you describe the dynamic between Naomi and Kylie?

 

A: Naomi and Kylie grew up almost as sisters. They were raised to not necessarily pay much attention to their racial and socioeconomic differences—even though these differences could fill a chasm.

 

However, when Kylie goes viral for threatening to call the police on two Black guys, Naomi has a reckoning. She can’t help but see those differences, and that influences how she sees herself and the choices she’s made, whether it’s her friendship circle or even where she wants to go to college.

 

I really wanted to allow Naomi to come into her Black identity, and I wanted to see how Kylie might cope with this evolution. The resulting dynamic is chaotic, to say the least!

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

 

A: At the time I was thinking of a title for this novel, there were several people online who were describing some of the negative things going on around them as being a “dumpster fire.” That term always stuck with me.

 

Since I wanted to write about small-town life and how it might get upended by pointing out some of the underlying problems, the title just all came together. This never happens so easily for me when it comes time to name my books.

 

Q: The Publishers Weekly review of the book says, “By highlighting issues of economic disparity, racism, and white privilege, Harris weaves a nuanced social narrative in which a Black teenager is forced to reckon with her white best friend’s racist actions. Complex.” What do you think of that description?

 

A: Wow, I think that excerpt accurately depicts my goal of writing this story. I love to write about important social justice issues without necessarily preaching to my readers. In other words, educate, but make it engaging.

 

Young readers should know about power and privilege discrepancies, and if I sprinkle in a mystery and a dead body or two, they might be more likely to read it.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: My third YA novel is coming out this fall and I’m super excited about it. It’s called Through Our Teeth, and it’s a female empowerment story with a high body count.

 

It’s a little different than my first two novels in that it is more of a thriller, but hopefully it will appeal to fans who love Karen McManus and Holly Jackson—two of the queens of this genre.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: One of my favorite parts about writing This Town is on Fire was all the research I had to do on Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and dance teams. I never attended an HBCU even though I was accepted to attend Hampton University, and it’s one of the only regrets I have in life.

 

I loved being able to live vicariously through other college students’ experiences—it almost made up for not deciding to enroll in an HBCU myself.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Pamela N. Harris.

Q&A with Anna Levine

 

 

Anna Levine is the author of the new children's picture book Roadside Seder. Her other books include All Eyes on Alexandra. She lives in Israel.

 

Q: What inspired you to write Roadside Seder?

 

A: Perfect timing for this question since in two weeks I’ll be on the road erev seder driving to my cousin’s up north. For years, I’ve sat in traffic watching as everyone in the north drives south for their seder and everyone in the south drives north.

 

Our cars are packed with family members and food for the seder and I’ve always wondered what other foods people were bringing and what if….what if we all shared our Passover dishes? What if the traffic just stopped and we had no choice but to do Passover seder on the side of the road?

 

Q: What do you think Naama Lahav’s illustrations add to the story?

 

A: I love Naama’s work! I think her beautiful illustrations add joy and energy and curiosity and capture the diversity of all of us who live here.

Q: What do you think the book says about Passover traditions?

 

A: There are so many wonderful Passover traditions. I’d suggest going on over to @diversejewishbooks where the moderator asks readers to chime in with their unique family traditions.

 

Jews come from all over the world, and we bring our old family traditions wherever we go. Our traditions tell our shared stories and our very personal ones.

 

Q: What are some of your own favorite Passover traditions?

 

A: I love the charoset preparation pre-erev seder. We put the nuts in bags and give the kids little hammers so everyone can join in on the preparations. The  walnuts are smashed to bits and come out just the right amount of chunky.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: So glad you asked! Did you know that before Israel became a state, we already had a public library? I’m working on a new picture book on Joseph Chazanovitz who sent over 9,000 books to Jerusalem from Europe in the early 1900s.

 

Chazanovitz’s collection became the foundation for the First National Library. And now we have a new National Library with over 5 million books!

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: With Naama’s permission, an insider’s story. On page 5 of Roadside Seder, you can see a man driving a busload of soldiers. That’s Naama’s uncle Haim Ben Aryeh. Her uncle Haim volunteered on October 7 to drive down south to help evacuate families and children from Kibbutz Beeri. You can Google him for more information.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Anna Levine.

April 10

 

 

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
April 10, 1934: David Halberstam born.

Q&A with Laura Munson

 

 

 

Laura Munson is the author of the new book The Wild Why: Stories and Teachings to Uncover Your Wonder. Her other books include Willa's Grove. She lives in Whitefish, Montana.

 

Q: What inspired you to write The Wild Why?

 

A: As a speaker and writing retreat leader, specializing in self-expression and what gets in the way of it, I have worked with countless people from all over the world.

 

And there are two things that I hear over and over…and it breaks my heart: I don’t have a voice. And I’m not creative. Of course you have a voice. You’re using it to say that you don’t have a voice. And of course we are creative. Every thought we think, everything we do…it’s all an act of creation.

 

But many of us have been wounded in some way when it comes to our self-expression. We were told that we weren’t good or right or interesting. We were told that we aren’t creative. That we don’t have a voice. And it’s just not true.

 

And in so many cases, we took our ball and went home. And we learned to speak in half-truths or clipped sentences: I’m fine, how are you? Enough about me. Long story short.

 

The Wild Why calls us to find the essence of what it is that we have to say.

 

We need to stop and tell each other our stories in the voice that only we have. No one can express themselves the way we can. It’s not possible. We have a story. And it matters. And it’s time to put voice to it. Our true voice.

 

We need to experience the creative beings that we are. Kids aren’t playing in the sandbox wondering about wonder, feeling like they don’t have a voice or that they’re not creative. They ARE wonder. 

 

So one day I was walking in the wood of Montana where I’ve lived for three decades and I thought: the word creativity scares people. What’s behind creativity? And I thought: Wonder. But then I thought: Wonder is a scary word too. What’s behind wonder? And that’s when I landed on curiosity and awe.

 

The more I roamed around in the woods, the more I felt the need to stop. To sit on a stump and really be in awe. Our society is fine on curiosity. We have a question and we Google for the answer. But what about awe? Awe requires stopping and just being. Receiving. Something that we do as children all the time. But so often lose along the way.

 

A great example is a rainbow. When we see a rainbow, we wonder about it. But do we stop in awe of it? We know it’s only a few minute phenomena.

 

So why don’t we stop everything and behold it? Behold the rainbow? Instead of rushing past it, on to the next thing. Or looking at a screen to wonder about what makes a rainbow. Why not just stand there and observe it, in awe?

 

I don’t think that anyone has ever gotten into trouble for being three minutes late for something because they said, “So sorry. I stopped to behold a rainbow.” In fact, I think they’d get respect, smiles, kudos.

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

 

A: I have spent my adult life sitting at the intersection of heart and mind and craft that is the writing life. But before becoming a writer, I was a seeker. A wonder-er. A student of the human being. A student of wonder itself. I had so many questions. I was highly verbal and sometimes it got me into trouble. That’s when I found the written word.

 

I talk too much. I ask too many questions. I cry too easily. I laugh too loud.

I’m too sensitive (I’m not sure what that means). And I feel bad about all of it.

—Laura Munson (fourth-grade journal)

 

So much of my life has been about healing what I call my “wonder wound,” that I spell out in my fourth-grade journal. Finding my way to my true self-expression, despite people’s reactions. Finding the essence of I what I need to, want to, have to say, and not just because I feel that the trajectory needs to land.

 

Not at all. It’s because I come from a deep place of service. I have devoted the last two decades to helping people find their true self-expression and what gets in the way of it, in my writing, in teaching writing, in editing people’s writing, and in my acclaimed Haven Writing Retreats and Programs.

 

And a lot of it starts with asking questions. Wild ones. Hence: The Wild Why.

 

Q: The writer Lee Woodruff said of the book, “The Wild Why is part memoir, part self-exploration, workbook, and tutorial on how we can reach inside and use our own sense of wonder to remove barriers, quiet naysayers, and enrich our lives.” What do you think of that description?

 

A: I love Lee. She is my soul sister in words and has never lost her wonder, which is why I believe we became immediate friends. Her description of the book is spot on.

 

While the book is full of story, it’s also part workbook. Workbook for the soul. Not for writers. This book is for seekers who feel that they’ve lost their seeking spirit. I promise: it’s there.

 

And I offer at each chapter’s end some sort of prompt. Some are writing. Most are about thinking. Wondering. Living in a way that helps you find true connection with yourself.

 

René Descartes wrote, "It appears to me that wonder is the first of all the passions." The Wild Why makes a case against credentials and for what we know innately…and dearly need to uncover. Our wonder.

 

The “naysayers” Lee mentions are likely the ones who have succumbed to hustle culture. But I have found that hustle culture doesn’t work. We’re burned out and we need to return to our wonder. Wonder works.

 

Bullet points and tips and tricks and 10 steps and go go go just don’t work in the end. Story does. Real connection does. Empathy does. Wondering about people and the world. Being in awe of it. Taking time for it.

 

I don’t have letters after my name in the realm of wonder. You don’t need to be a psychologist to find wonder. It lives in you. Innately. It’s just about uncovering your wonder. A return to something that you already know and have inside you. And that longs to come out.

 

Q: What impact did writing this book have on you?

 

A: It took me nine years to write this book because it changed and morphed and became something very surprising to me. The more that I wrote and tuned into wonder, the more I was surprised by how awe came to the forefront of my sense of wonder. Curiosity came second. It started the other way around. I have always asked a lot of questions. 

 

I was shocked by just how many questions were in this book once I gave it my editorial eye. I didn’t mean to do that. I couldn’t believe it: the book was full of one question after the next, deeper and deeper into each question, which then begat another.

 

I embraced it vs. feeling ashamed for it. I was punished as a child for asking too many questions. I think that’s why I am a writer. Early on, I realized that the only truly safe place for my questions was in my writing.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I like to write in different genres. To me it’s all heart language. Fiction has my heart and I’ve been learning my craft since 1988 when I started my first novel. I have many novels that are publishable, and plenty others that are simply exercises in learning. But I’d like to return to several of my novels that I particularly love, and bring them out into the world.

 

I also have a book on writing coming out in 2026. The Wild Why isn’t for writers. It’s for all of us. We need our wonder in our worried world. And many want to translate their wonder into writing. That’s why I wrote two books. The Wild Why for everyone. And my book on writing...for word wanderers. And wonderers.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: Wonder isn’t a frilly concept. It’s vital for our civilization. Without wonder, how are we to have empathy? And without empathy, how are we to understand each other’s differences?

 

The Wild Why is not just a radical call to uncover our wonder. It’s a radical call to tap into our essential empathy. I hope it will land in many hearts.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb