Q&A with Susan Coll

  

 

Susan Coll is the author of the new novel Word Salad. Her other novels include Bookish People. She is an event consultant at Politics & Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C., and is the former president of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation. 

 

Q: Why did you decide to return to your bookstore setting in your new novel, Word Salad?

 

A: Every time I intend to move on to a different landscape, some little incident gets my imagination going, and I’m back to plotting another literary Washington, D.C., novel.

 

In the case of Word Salad, it had to do with the world of public intellectuals, which is a funny concept to begin with. Who is a public intellectual, and what does it take to be labeled as such?

 

As I was thinking about this, I stumbled on a video of a bunch of public intellectuals talking for an hour about…who knows what. It was pure word salad (and I say this as a former student of political theory). I couldn’t quite parse what they were talking about, other than that it was novel-writing gold.

 

Q: Vegetables are a major focus of the book--why did you choose that theme?

 

A: Funny you should ask. In earlier drafts my public intellectual had thought himself a modern-day Nietzsche, but the book was getting a bit too heavy and admittedly incomprehensible.

 

It was itself becoming a bit too word salad-y. I had already quite randomly named my public intellectual Dr. Jordan Rutabaga, so I decided to lean into the root vegetable situation.

 

Q: Your protagonist, Matilda, has synesthesia--how did you research that part of the novel?

 

A: On rare occasions, I see sounds as shapes and colors. While I was working on the novel, I was at a book conference in Atlanta and had a very odd experience.

 

First, an early morning alarm went off in the hotel, and I could see it very clearly as a distinctive yellow squiggly line. Then, later that day, an alarm went off in the airport, and there it was again.

 

I then flew to Vermont that night, and when we pulled into our otherwise quiet condominium complex, a late-night alarm was going off – something to do with the septic tank apparently.

 

It seemed that the sound = color situation was inserting itself into the novel. So, part of Matilda’s experience came from my own observations, but I also read a couple of books on the subject and talked to a friend who is more classically synesthetic in that he sees projected numbers.

 

I didn’t want Matilda’s synesthesia to be central to the story because it is simply part of the way that she perceives the world.

 

Q: How would you describe the relationship between Matilda and her co-worker Sage?

 

A: Haha, I had a lot of fun writing Sage. She is older than most of her colleagues, having gone back to work after her child goes off to college. She views her new job more as a diversion than an obligation and is one of those people who just does whatever she wants -- the opposite of uptight Matilda.

 

Matilda understands that she has no choice but to tolerate Sage---she is a family friend of the bookstore’s owner--- on top of which Matila is kind of fascinated by Sage’s behavior.

 

Sage, for her part, is entirely self-absorbed, so she’s not giving Matilda much thought.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I am gardening three different ideas and I’m not sure which one will emerge, perhaps none of them and perhaps all three.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Susan Coll. 

Q&A with Kristy Woodson Harvey

  

 

 

Kristy Woodson Harvey is the author of the new novel Falling for Peachtree Bluff, the fifth in her Peachtree Bluff series. She lives in North Carolina. 

 

Q: What inspired you to write this new Peachtree Bluff novel?

 

A: It was the strangest thing…Peachtree Bluff was supposed to be a three-book series, and then Christmas in Peachtree Bluff was going to be a bonus book. But the minute I finished writing it, I knew what came next. And I started writing right away! It was absolutely so much fun, just for me, and I never even thought it would be published.

 

Q: Does it help to have read the other books in the series, or can someone enjoy this book on its own?

 

A: There is a secret that unravels in book one that you know from the beginning of Falling for Peachtree Bluff, so I do think it would help to at least read book one to see how that plays out and familiarize yourself with the characters because there are a lot of them! But I try to give enough catch up info that you could start with book five if you wanted to!

 

Q: How do you think your characters have changed over the course of the series?

 

A: They’ve all had really fun character arcs.

 

Ansley begins the series afraid of a secret that could ruin her family, and is living her life fully free of it by book five. Caroline is kind of a pill in the first book. She’s harsh and critical, but, by the end of the series, she’s… happy. Which is not an adjective Caroline would have even cared about in book one! Sloane is so much stronger and more capable of saying what she wants. Emerson has found a balance she couldn’t quite seem to achieve before.

 

I love where I left each of these women in book five. I feel proud of the people they have become!

 

Q: How would you describe the dynamic among the members of the Murphy family?

 

A: Messy but loving. This is a family that fights and forgives and always, always has each other's backs no matter what.

 

Q: What are you working on now? Will you return to these characters again?

 

A: I am working on a fun surprise for 2027 that we haven’t announced yet, but it’s a new location for me. And there’s snow! It’s a little odd to be writing about snow during the summer, but here we are!

 

And… I don’t really know. I have an idea for spinoff series that I’m very excited about. And, if I’m honest, I do have another idea (or two!) for the Murphy family. But I’m also extremely happy with where I left them and feel content if the series is finished. There is so much I want to write!

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: Just how grateful I am to my readers and the wonderful people like you who help spread the word about my books! Thank you, thank you, thank you!

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Kristy Woodson Harvey. 

Q&A with Helene Wecker

  

Photo by Sheldon Wecker

 

 

Helene Wecker is the author of the new novel The Gates of Midnight. It's the third in her The Golem and the Jinni trilogy. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

 

Q: The Gates of Midnight is the third in your The Golem and the Jinni trilogy--how have your characters Chava and Ahmad changed over the course of the series?

 

A: They've changed quite a lot since The Golem and the Jinni! Most of The Gates of Midnight takes place in 1930, which means that Chava and Ahmad have spent 30 years in the human world.

 

They're much better at fitting in, though they still have to deal with the mental and emotional costs of pretending to be something they're not. They've formed friendships and communities, however tenuous at times, and they've both lost people who mattered to them.

 

Chava has learned to control her own instincts to some extent, though often that means isolating herself from society at large. Ahmad is no longer quite so arrogant and self-centered, and he's learned to take the needs of others into account. They're more complicated people now, with conflicting needs and desires.

 

Q: What inspired the plot of this new novel?

 

A: I knew that I had to write a proper ending to Chava and Ahmad's story, one that would do them justice.

 

Since The Golem and the Jinni was about the shock of arriving as an immigrant, and The Hidden Palace explored the subject of assimilation, I decided that The Gates of Midnight had to be about immigration's legacy, the way that one generation's memories and hopes and burdens are handed down to the generations that follow.

 

Once I'd set that as the theme, I knew that the plot had to involve Yehudah Schaalman somehow. That buried flask was just sitting there in the wings, waiting to be found!

 

I also wanted to bring back a few characters who we'd seen as children in the first two books, so I could show how their interactions with Chava and Ahmad had changed the course of their lives. And once I'd decided who and what I wanted to bring back, it was a matter of constructing a plot that would connect them all together.

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

 

A: The Gates of Midnight takes place in a transitional moment in U.S. history: the impending end of Prohibition and the very beginning of the Great Depression. I didn't know much about the era beyond what I'd learned in high school and through popular culture, so it was clear I'd have to do my research.

 

I began with a number of history books, the most important of which was Michael A. Lerner's Dry Manhattan: Prohibition in New York City. Lerner lays out the social movements that led first to Prohibition and then its defeat, all seen through the lens of New York City culture and politics.

 

I'd known about the Temperance movement, but I hadn't realized just how much they relied on nativism and the demonization of immigrants as a tactic -- subtly at first, but then blatantly during the rise of speakeasy culture and organized crime that resulted from Prohibition.

 

Basically, if you were Irish, Italian, or Jewish, you were blamed for infecting upright Americans with your dissolute ways. It was fascinating reading, and chilling too, considering the current rise of anti-immigrant sentiment. History really does move in cycles.

 

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

 

A: Religion and faith are often a huge part of that legacy of expectations I mentioned earlier, especially when the received traditions of the old country run up against the freedoms of the New World.

 

I think the character in The Gates of Midnight who most embodies this tension is Kreindel Altschul, who first appeared in The Hidden Palace. Kreindel is the daughter of a deeply traditional Orthodox Jewish rabbi, but she spent much of her childhood in a Reform Jewish orphanage that "Americanized" its children -- all while she kept her secret golem companion Yossele hidden in the basement!

 

In The Gates of Midnight, Kreindel's now the headmistress of an Orthodox girls' orphanage in Brooklyn. She's unmarried in her 30s and spends her spare hours studying Torah, which makes her a very unconventional woman by the Orthodox standards of the time.

 

The teachings of her faith are precious to her, but those same teachings also say that Torah study is a man's role and that she's sinning in her refusal to marry and have children.

 

On top of all that she knows the secret truth about Chava and Ahmad. These secrets are a gift, but they also isolate her even further from the rest of the world, and the struggle leads her into dangerous territory.

 

Q: What are you working on now? Will you bring these characters back at some point?

 

A: Right now I'm working on a book idea that's more straight-up fantasy (maybe with a little sci-fi thrown in) and set in a totally invented world. Basically I wanted to write something that didn't involve a ton of research for a change!

 

As for coming back to my characters, I think my time with Chava and Ahmad has come to a close, but I might revisit a few of the supporting cast members someday...

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: It's been over 20 years since I wrote the first pages of what would become The Golem and the Jinni. I'm so grateful that my readers were willing to be patient as I laboriously cranked out each volume.

 

It's a relief to finally have the whole trilogy out there, and at the same time it's hard not to feel a little melancholy about it. I'll miss writing Chava and Ahmad -- but I suspect they're too much a part of me now to ever fully leave!

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb 

Q&A with Lee Alan Dugatkin

  

 

 

Lee Alan Dugatkin is the author of the new book Nary a Horse Left Standing: How a Nineteenth-Century Epidemic Transformed Medicine, Animal Welfare, and the Modern City. His other books include How to Tame a Fox (and Build a Dog). He is a professor of biology at the University of Louisville. 

 

Q: What inspired you to write Nary a Horse Left Standing, and how did you first learn of the Great Epizootic?

 

A: As a historian of science, I have a predilection for events which have a profound effect on society, but that over time, fade from the historical record. The Great Epizootic is a perfect example.

 

I first learned about this when I was scanning newspaper articles from the early 1870s. Over and over, I stumbled upon stories about The Great Epizootic. Soon, I realized that there were hundreds upon hundreds of these articles. Then I began digging deeper and was hooked.

 

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

 

A: Researching this book involved a deep dive into the 1,000+ newspaper articles about The Great Epizootic that were published across the United States and Canada in 1872 and 1873.

 

There were also many contemporary medical reports written as The Great Epizootic unfolded and shortly thereafter. Personal diaries, contemporary magazine articles and various items in archives from around the country also played a role.

 

A number of the things I discovered surprised me. For one thing, The Great Epizootic literally shut down metropolises around the United States. Every aspect of city life was disrupted.

 

It was also a revelation to discover that the medical debates associated with The Great Epizootic drove the final nails into the coffin of what was known as the “miasma theory of disease” and began to solidify the medical community around the germ theory of disease that we now take as a given.

 

It was also quite surprising to learn the profound effect The Great Epizootic had on spurring on changes to urban transportation: away from living, breathing transportation systems to mechanized ones.

 

Q: The author and scholar Jonathan Losos said of the book, “Dugatkin’s fascinating account of the long-forgotten horse flu of 1872 remind us that, with animal epidemics increasingly common, we have much to learn from the past.” What do you think of that assessment?

 

A: Yes, I agree completely with Jonathan on this point.  Indeed, at the end of my book, I discuss tantalizing evidence that the equine flu causing The Great Epizootic may have also played an important role in the 1918 influenza epidemic that killed tens of millions of people.

 

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

 

A: I was searching for a way to capture just how devastating The Great Epizootic was and Nary a Horse Left Standing felt right. It also gave off a late 19th century vibe.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: Two books on another passion of mine:  how and why we domesticate, as well as undomesticate, the animals that play such a large role in our lives.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: Hmmm… Well, I’m a passionate collector of antiquarian books, with a penchant for first editions from the 1790s; I’m a lifelong New York Yankees fan (who doesn’t give a hoot about any sport but baseball); and I possess what is, arguably, one of the largest collection of hotel “do not disturb” signs collected from first-hand visits.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb 

Q&A with Brittany Perham

  

Photo by Marco Giugliarelli

 

 

Brittany Perham is the author of the new memoir Executrix. Her other books include the poetry collection Double Portrait. She lives in San Francisco.

 

Q: What inspired you to write Executrix?

 

A: There are two true answers to this question. The first is that I started writing the book at the moment of my father’s death. I wrote notes in the hospital, where my brother and I watched him die after he was removed from life support, and afterwards in the funeral home, in the car, in the lawyer’s office. I wrote the first draft of the first essay for the book, which I didn’t know would be a book, only a few days later.

 

Writing that essay was a way for me to clarify what I’d lived through—in other words, the first day I’d ever lived through that my father hadn’t—and to understand what I was thinking. About him, about our relationship (which, though we’d been estranged for more than a decade, was ongoing and primary), and about childhood and the nature of memory. It wasn’t a feeling of being inspired so much as a recognition of this is what I do.

 

The second answer is that, for years before I started writing, I’d been reading and teaching nonfiction, and memoir and personal essay in particular, at Stanford University. I don’t think I could’ve written Executrix had I not spent years practicing the genre.

 

And by “practicing” I mean a lot of things: Reading widely and anxiously, with a real sense of necessity and responsibility toward my students; having discussions with them; commenting on their work; making up writing exercises and doing them alongside my students; and thinking all the time about memoir as a process, an act, a stance, a way of doing. Memoir should really be a verb—painting, writing, memoiring. That -ing means everything.

 

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

 

A: The long answer: Executrix is a gendered term for the more familiar executor. It’s a legal word; I first heard it from the lawyer I’d hired to help me sort out the business of my father’s estate.

 

As it turned out, I had to act as my father’s executrix for something like six years—a very long time in a probate process—because the estate was in debt and had many financial complications.

 

The fact that executrix is a feminine term is revealed by the -trix suffix, as with so many words we seldom hear: aviatrix, proprietrix. The one word like this that we use in common parlance is dominatrix, a word associated not only with sex but with power dynamics and, also, with roleplay.

 

I was certainly interested in the gender dynamics at work in a father-daughter relationship. I was also interested in power dynamics, and in the roles we choose for ourselves and then must inhabit, consciously and unconsciously: What power/role does a father have? a daughter? an executor? a memory?

 

One interesting thing is that people often mistake the meaning of the word executrix for a female executioner (actually executioneress)—and that’s an apt slippage. My brother and I were the people who gave the doctors the final OK to remove my father from life support.

 

The short answer: It’s a beautiful word.

 

Q: The writer Cheryl Strayed said of the book, “In lean and vivid prose that's at turns comic and devastating, poignant and provocative, the author reckons not only with her late father, but also with memory and the form of memoir itself.” What do you think of that description?

 

A: It was clear to me as soon as I read the blurb that Cheryl truly got the book. I mean, she nailed it. I’m so grateful to her for pulling it out of the pile. It is a book that asks philosophical questions about memoir—that’s one of the things that most interests me.

 

And I’m thrilled that she got the book’s humor. This is a book about death, divorce, estrangement, and griefs of all kinds—all the big miseries. So it had better be funny. I hope people will laugh as they read it.

 

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

 

A: To answer the first part of your question, I want to go back to something I said earlier. I started writing about my father’s death as it was happening. I mean literally. My father was dying, and my brother and I were standing at his bedside in the ICU. I was touching my father’s shoulder. I was talking to him. I was looking at his pulse.

 

And at the same time, I was thinking about the sentences I would need to use to describe what I was seeing. I was putting things in order. So while part of me was in the room, part of me was in my mind, already projecting a second room onto the page.

 

As writers, I think we learn to bisect ourselves this way. And we’re lucky insofar as this is a protective mechanism. But we’re also unlucky because splitting yourself from your lived experience has a lot of consequences, some of them not so great.

 

This is one way that writing the book changed me—the process changed my sense not only of my past and my memories, but my immediate experience in real time.

 

Now to answer the second part of your question. More than anything, I hope people feel pleasure when they read the book. I hope they laugh. I hope they like being in my company, and I hope they feel accompanied.

 

By that I mean, I hope the book offers them a space to think about their own Big Questions, and serves as a kind of companion to that process. Afterwards, I hope each reader tells one of their own stories to a friend or a family member, and that person tells them a story in return.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I’m writing more prose—which is surprising since I still think of myself as a poet. That’s all I can say right now.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: I’m a poet by trade and training and impulse. And I’m a formalist—I think structurally. Executrix, even though it’s prose and nonfiction, is absolutely continuous with my earlier work, especially Double Portrait. In both books, I’m interested in the way formal structures produce distinct brainstates in the reader.

 

When we read memoir, the greatest pleasure is getting to feel as though we are thinking through something with the writer. We feel we know the writer because we’ve gotten not only to witness, but to inhabit, the way their mind works. And this feeling is made possible through the formal patterning of language.

 

All this is to say, we’re frequently taught to demarcate a divide between poetry and prose, but actually I think there’s a great deal that writers and readers of prose can take from poetry, and vice versa. 

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb 

Q&A with Shaun Tan

  

 

 

Shaun Tan is the author and illustrator of the new picture book Hometown. His other books include The Arrival. He lives in Melbourne, Australia. 

 

Q: What inspired you to create Hometown?

 

A: A lot of different, seemingly unrelated things – always the best recipe for a story.

 

Firstly, some idle doodles in my sketchbook, lots of weird creatures, things I’ve been drawing since childhood. Might they all live in the same world, be part of the same family?

 

Secondly, I was travelling with my family some years ago and saw a weird Icelandic children’s TV show dubbed in Spanish on a hotel room TV, as you do.

 

It looked very strange by the standards of any language (it’s children’s TV!) but reminded me of lots of shows I’d seen as a kid in the ‘70s and ‘80s involving humans and puppets casually living together as if this was normal, like Sesame Street and H.R. Pufnstuff.

 

I wondered what it would be like to actually grow up with puppets for family, without another human in sight: at what point would a young person question their reality.

 

A third component involved some articles I read about missionaries cutting down Haida totem poles in the Pacific Northwest a long time ago, and also the constructions of Catholic churches using the stones of demolished Aztec temples.

 

I’ve always been interested in the way that different ideas of belonging and human identity compete with each other (notable in our present, very polarised age, but I would say this has been the case in every age).

 

There were, of course, many other ideas that inspired this book, including a lot of childhood memories to do with fishing along the West Australian coast, but those were the three main “triggers” for the Hometown story: creature doodles, a foreign kids’ TV show, and colonial history.

 

Q: How do you see this new book relating to your book The Arrival, which was first published 20 years ago?

 

A: That’s an interesting question, I only really noticed similarities close to the completion of Hometown. A lot of things are also different.

 

The Arrival is about a man forced to leave home for an unfamiliar country, and we as readers go on that journey with him, encountering all these strange, difficult and surprising things. He is a displaced person trying to find a home.

 

Hometown is about a girl very much at home already, very happy, experiencing no crisis. But one day she realises that she may have another home, elsewhere, and may need to return to it. 

 

The main difference between the two books is that the strangeness of her world – not dissimilar to the strangeness of the world in The Arrival – is not strange at all, at least for her. We readers are surprised by things that to her are very unsurprising, and the “weirdo” visitor who arrives one day is actually more representative of our own culture.

 

The two books work nicely as an inverted pair. Similar themes from very different points of view, both circling this question, “what is a home?” Both also touch on social issues that pervade our current climate if you dig a bit deeper: the complications of migration, and easy dogmatic thinking versus difficult imagination.

 

Q: The Kirkus Review of the book called it a “spectacularly surreal coming-of-age story about choice, family, and the gravitational pull of belonging.” What do you think of that description?

 

A: Well, better than anything I could come up with! It’s interesting to call it a “coming-of-age story”; I realise that’s probably true. There is a scene at the end where the girl is making a large image of herself, and I think that’s a nice metaphor (now that I think about it) for selfhood.

 

She spends a lot of the story asking other people for their opinion of her true identity, and by the end she realises, hey, I’m the only legitimate creator of that definition. I can make my own choices, beyond those already presented to me.

 

I suppose that is what we mean by “coming of age.” It doesn’t mean you have to forsake those other ideas or opinions, it’s not exactly rebellion or rejection (which by itself can be narrow). It’s some way of bringing other people’s ideas into the orbit of your own governing centre, a certain self-confidence and accountability. Making a fine effort to understand others, and then choosing your own path.

 

Q: Did you work on the text and the illustrations simultaneously, or did you focus on one before turning to the other?

 

A: Very much simultaneously, by which I mean something like a ping-pong game. A sketch suggests a caption, that caption suggests a different drawing, with a different interpretation and so on. It’s very trial-and-error, trying out lots of different ideas and seeing which ones work the best.

 

My guiding principle is generally this: what feels both strange and familiar at the same time? That balance approaches a sort of truth or reality. That is, the real world is always this hard-to-define mix of strangeness and familiarity.

 

We know very much about it, through experience and education, but every piece of that knowledge is surrounded by deep mystery… nobody really knows why anything exists, for instance, especially those who insist that they do! We still must navigate this mysterious reality, find meaning, live ethical lives, try to figure it out.

 

I think art and literature are very useful contributors to that private and public conversation, as much as science, religion, and philosophy. That’s a very long-winded way of saying, yes, I work on words and pictures at the same time!

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: Getting this book out in the world ☺ But aside from that, my main duties remain being a house-husband and parent to school-age children, a dog and a parrot, fixing things around the house.

 

In terms of creative work, I recently helped develop a TV adaptation of Tales from Outer Suburbia, which was beautifully animated by teams in Melbourne and Perth, as well as being a US co-production – and remains accessible in the US via BYU (check it out).

 

It’s possible that a follow-on production may gain traction; it’s an interesting universe to revisit, a magic-realist suburbia with a distinctively Australian vibe.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: I’m tempted to insert a political opinion but I’m sure you can use a break from all that! I think it’s enough to say we are all living in very strange times where the fabric of reality seems vulnerable to coming undone.

 

Sometimes I wonder at the significance of making strange, amusing stories set in other worlds when this planet seems to be skirting several human-made, entirely preventable black holes, but I think all artists are responding to contemporary anxieties in some form when they make work. Any creative thinking is beneficial, any attempt to imagine other ways of being.

 

For me, it’s about looking for deeper anchors to human nature, beyond the ebb and flow of daily news, and asking these questions primarily of myself.

 

Why do I believe what I believe, and what would it take to change my mind? Can sincere feelings be wrong? Can good ideas be dangerous? How can we really see another person’s point of view when it is different to our own?

 

These are all basic questions that young people especially have always struggled with, but they are also fun questions to ask. Books are a very entertaining way of addressing them and inviting a larger discussion. I like to think that they make a difference, particularly for young minds that still open to multiple perspectives.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Shaun Tan. 

Sept. 15

 

 

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
Sept. 15, 1789: James Fenimore Cooper born.

Q&A with Sarah L. Kaufman

  

 

 

Sarah L. Kaufman is the author of the new book Verb Your Enthusiasm: How to Master the Art of the Verb and Transform Your Writing. She also has written the book The Art of Grace. The former chief dance critic for The Washington Post, she lives in Asheville, North Carolina. 

 

Q: Why did you decide to write a book about verbs, and how was the book’s title chosen?

 

A: Verbs are the most elegant part of speech—essential, efficient and evocative. They’re truly the secret soul of language. A single strong verb can change a sentence, paint a portrait, express a feeling. All that in a word! For writers—and that’s all of us, writing anything at all—verbs are gold.

 

Take the sentence “Kim walked down the stairs.” Change just one word: “Kim staggered down the stairs.” Now you’ve triggered some tension and curiosity: What’s happened to her? “Walk” is neutral; “stagger” tells a story. Something has knocked Kim sideways and she hasn’t recovered.

 

Making smart verb choices can pump up your writing and make it memorable in so many ways, as I’ve seen in 30 years as a journalist. I wanted to share what I’ve learned, and that’s what sparked Verb Your Enthusiasm.

 

I stumbled on the power of verbs when I was the chief dance critic of The Washington Post. Nailing the action—catching it as it flew by— was my greatest pleasure and greatest challenge. I didn’t want to bore readers with wordy descriptions.

 

So I relied on verbs: With a few crisp verbs I was able to snap a moment into focus and evoke the thrill of dancers sweeping or squiggling across the stage, carving shapes in space, and beckoning with gestures and arcing limbs.

 

I started working that muscle in my mind, firing up my creativity. My fascination with verbs grew, and what I discovered is that vivid, precise verbs can make any writing sing, whether it’s fiction, nonfiction, a blogpost or email.

 

Interiority, physical action, the atmosphere of a place—anything we write about grows more alive and dramatic with well-chosen verbs.

 

Here’s an example: Margaret Atwood, in The Handmaid’s Tale, uses dynamic verbs to fill the Commander’s sitting room with a sense of menace. “It’s one of the shapes money takes when it freezes,” she writes. “Money has trickled through this room for years and years … crusting and hardening like stalactites into these forms.” (I love her choices: the blunt takes, instead, say, of adopts; the deliberate drip, drip of trickled, instead of poured.)

 

This is what excites me about verbs. These little fireballs possess so many mysterious and poetic powers. Exploring them in this book opened my eyes not only to verbs—but to overall excellence in writing.

 

About the title: A dear friend and former Washington Post colleague came up with it. It works on a few levels, turning “verb” into a verb, and also expressing the theme of my book. It’s all about enthusiasm. For action, for life, for words and writing—and most of all, for creativity.

 

Q: The author Benjamin Dreyer said of the book, “Sarah L. Kaufman’s Verb Your Enthusiasm is, at first glance, a primer on the effective use of what we were raised as young folk to think of as action words, but like all first-rate writing on language, it’s also a meditation on existence.” What do you think of that description?

 

A: I’m so grateful for Benjamin Dreyer’s endorsement and his support of this book. When I first read that beautiful comment in particular, I immediately thought: He nailed it. A meditation on existence is exactly where this book led me. I reflect on that in several places, the idea that verbs, boundless and new-forming, give you the means to grapple with this world of change and call it forth. They give you the power to hold what vanishes.

 

Q: One of the first examples you cite in the book is from F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby--and you note in the acknowledgments that your house has a Fitzgerald connection. Can you say more about that?

 

A: That was an incredible twist of fate. Soon after relocating to Asheville, N.C., we jumped from a cozy apartment to renting a big 1920s house in a hurry; my elderly father needed our care and the house had room for all of us. After we settled in, our landlord told us a story he’d heard about Zelda Fitzgerald once living in the house.

 

She and her husband had landed in Asheville in the 1930s—he hoped to reinvigorate his writing in these mountains, and she started treatment for schizophrenia. He stayed a couple summers  and moved to Hollywood, where he later died.

 

Zelda never left. For 12 years she cycled in and out of a psychiatric hospital, finally dying there in a fire. During her long years of treatment, so we were told, she also stayed in the brick Colonial we were renting. It had once been a rooming house, and Zelda apparently lived in the smallest upstairs bedroom. You could still see holes in the floor for plumbing, and scars on the door from locks.

 

By the time I heard that story, I’d already set up my office in that same bedroom and was busy writing Verb Your Enthusiasm, with Fitzgerald’s work running through it. Who knows if the tale is true, but it makes some sense: The house sits near one of the few main roads, and it’s not far from the hospital’s former site.

 

We’ve since moved to another house, but the mystery ties me even more deeply to Asheville, Fitzgerald’s work, and Zelda’s wild, creative life.

 

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

 

A: The research astonished me. I loved poring over books to find great verb examples—from Toni Morrison, Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, Zadie Smith, James Joyce, Sally Rooney, and so many others.

 

I dug into the science of verbs, and spoke with linguists and neuroscientists about the power verbs exert on our minds and bodies. A memory psychologist has tested how the verbs “hit” or “smashed together” affect the way witnesses remember car crashes. A cognitive scientist told me about testing how we process verbs when we read, the emotional reactions they trigger.

 

The science points to the immense power these words have in the hands of writers who choose them with care.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: A new book I’ve been messing around with for a few years in the margins of everything else—now it’s central. I also teach writing here and there, which I enjoy. And I write on occasion for The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and other publications.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: I have a few words about AI. It looms over all creativity, but we must forge ahead. We’re born with creative abilities. The more we create and express ourselves, the more we nurture our humanity, by connecting to our deepest selves and to those around us.

 

I hope, with my book, to inspire readers to play with language, enjoy their imaginations, feel confident in their creativity. To release their gifts and share them.

 

Speaking of gifts, Deborah, your books and lifelong work to support authors amazes and inspires me. Thank you for your interest and for our years (so many years!) of friendship.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Sarah L. Kaufman.