Q&A with Fred Bowen

Fred Bowen is the author of the new children's picture book Gridiron: Stories from 100 Years of the National Football League. His many other books include Speed Demon and Lucky Enough. He writes about sports for The Washington Post's KidsPost section, and he lives in the Washington, D.C., area.

Q: How did you come up with the idea for Gridiron, and how did you choose the stories you include in the book?

A: Actually, the idea for Gridiron: Stories From 100 Years of the National Football League came from the illustrator, James Ransome. 

James approached me about five or six years ago at a conference after he heard about my books and my weekly kids sports column.  He told me about his idea to write a history of the National Football League (NFL) for young readers that would be something like what Kadir Nelson did for the Negro Baseball Leagues in We Are the Ship. 

I loved the idea and was excited about the thought of working with James.  I have admired his art for years.

James and I discussed what stories should be in the book. James is a HUGE football fan. We had a list of about 30 possible chapters that would tell the story of how the NFL started as almost nothing and grew into the most popular sports league in America. We settled on the twenty in the book after some trial and error.

James also came up with the idea of dividing the book into four quarters, just as an NFL game is divided into four quarters. That helped a lot with the organization of the writing.

Q: You've written about football before--how did you research this book, and did you learn anything that especially surprised you?

A: I read a LOT about football and the NFL. The bibliography of Gridiron lists about 30 books as well as numerous articles and websites. I actually read more. My editor asked me to cut down the bibliography because of space considerations.

What surprised me the most in my research was how small-time and disorganized the NFL was during its early years. 

For example, teams made their own schedules and so teams would play a different number of games during the season. The league did not have a championship game until 1932, 12 years after the founding of the NFL. That first championship game was played in a Chicago ice rink! The NFL didn’t even keep statistics for the first 10 seasons or more.

Another thing that surprised me were all the rule changes. 

In the early days of football, for example, if a runner ran out of bounds the next play would begin at the sideline. So all the players on offense and defense would line up on one side of the ball. They didn’t start to begin all offensive plays near the middle of the field until 1933.

Q: What do you think James Ransome's illustrations add to the book?

A: The illustrations are essential to allow a young reader who may only know the NFL as they see it today to visualize how the players and games looked 40, 60, or 80 years ago. 

I love the illustrations that James did at the beginning of each quarter. They go from the player of the 1920s with a leather helmet, no facemask and minimal padding to the modern player who wears so much equipment that he looks like he stepped out a science fiction movie or a video game.

Frankly, I am in awe of James’s achievement in this book. He produced something like 70 to 80 separate illustrations. Portraits, action pictures, old-time players, modern stars. 

I expected his illustrations would be terrific, having admired his art for many years. But I think James really outdid himself in this book.

Q: What do you hope readers take away from Gridiron?

A: I want our readers to realize the NFL was not always the wildly popular sports enterprise they see today. During those early years, pro football was not very popular and the players were not the rich superstars we see on television or read about in the newspapers. 

For example, only 31 of the 81 college players selected in the first NFL player draft chose to play in the NFL. The others went into other, better-paying careers. The first player selected became a sportswriter (!) and later a businessman. That is unthinkable today.

I think sports history is a great way for young readers to get interested in history in general. The great lesson of reading any kind of history is that things were not always as you see them today. But if you understand and know something about the past it helps you understand and make sense of the present.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: James and I are teaming up on another sports history book that is scheduled to be published in 2022. I have pretty much finished the text and James is beginning to work on the art. I am very excited about that project. It should be a great follow up to Gridiron.

I also have sent off a manuscript to my editor at Peachtree Publishers in Atlanta. It is the latest book (the 24th!) in my Fred Bowen Sportstory series that combines sports fiction and sports history. 

The tentative title is Soccer Trophy Mystery and is about a soccer trophy that disappeared from the town library years ago. My characters try to solve the mystery. The history in the back of the book is about a very famous soccer trophy that disappeared years ago and has never been recovered…the original World Cup trophy! The book is scheduled to be published in 2021.

Finally, I have started researching and writing another sports history book similar to Gridiron. I hope to keep writing sports history books as well as my series books for years to come.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: I am still writing my weekly kids sports column for the KidsPost page of The Washington Post. It has been more challenging because the crisis caused by the novel coronavirus stopped almost all sports. 

Still, I have been writing the column for 20 years. That means I have written more than one thousand columns. So I am confident that I will think of something to write each week.

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Fred Bowen.

July 28

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
July 28, 1866: Beatrix Potter born.

Q&A with Brian Castleberry

Brian Castleberry is the author of the new novel Nine Shiny Objects. His work has appeared in a variety of publications, including The Southern Review and Day One. He teaches literature and writing at the College of William & Mary, and he lives in Virginia.

Q: How did you come up with the idea for Nine Shiny Objects?

A: The general idea for the book began forming after the 2016 election. I was thinking about how we as a culture came to this place of radical division, and as the following year got going, the trauma of what happened in Charlottesville got me thinking even more about these issues--how at every turn of progress, there's some regression and reaction as well.

I'm very interested in 20th century culture--I mean, in some ways it still feels like my century, though we're 20 years out with all the technological change, etc. And a story arc started to form for me that was about this group of characters who tried to make a better world in the middle of the century, were put down, and then fragmented, their ideas turned in different directions.

So in other words I wanted to tell a big story about something I felt was defining in the American character, in our culture--to use fiction to better understand the world. In a way, the culture fragmented during this same period, and sort of turned away from progress, or pretended its problems with racism and other things were resolved.

Oddly enough, I started to think of UFOs as a way into these themes. Early on they were a source of fantasy for people, but by the 1970s they were wrapped up in paranoia, in conspiracies, in a world of dark secrets. That's sort of what happens in the book. It's not at all a UFO book, but UFOs are sort of an inciting incident.

Q: The novel is told in nine chapters, each set five years apart, from 1947 to 1987. How did you decide on the book's structure?

A: I wanted to cover a lot of time and I wanted to show the story from many different angles--to let the reader participate in putting it all together and making sense of the connections; to show that no one individual ever knows the whole story of their lives or time.

I had the "nine shiny objects" from the first newspaper reports of flying saucers in 1947, and had always loved that for a title (in fact I worked on something years ago using that same title, but scrapped it), and it was an easy leap of the imagination to imagine nine chapters with a different character at the helm of each.

Easy to imagine, sure, but then the challenge became making real and believable characters with their own plots for each chapter. One way to make this more doable was to block out the time between events at the same intervals, so that I could basically be "checking in" on this year, and then that year, etc.

Then it was all about discovering each character and how they connect, what they know about the larger story as well as what's at stake for them on the particular day we get to see them.

Q: What kind of research did you do to write the novel, and did you learn anything especially surprising?

A: I guess the research for the book took place on different levels and at different times. I'm really into history, so do a lot of general reading about the periods I'm writing about: biographies, old movies, books from the period, historical texts. So some of this research is just all around me all the time, stuff that's on my mind and helped to inspire a character or event.

Then there's more directed research on the particular year, setting, and other things as I'm writing. Thank god for the internet when it comes to this sort of "on the fly" research. Still, sometimes I would get stuck on some detail or other and not be able to move ahead until I figured out an answer.

One of the coolest things that happened during the process is related to the chapter about Debbie Vasquez. For that chapter, I knew I wanted to write about Max Felt's daughter as a teenager, in the 1980s, and I randomly chose Waterbury, Connecticut, for the setting because it's just a pretty town with a nice-sounding name. I knew nothing specific about it.

Here's where we're lucky to be writers with an internet. When I went  looking for videos of what 1980s arcades looked like (I'm old enough to have gone to them but wanted some good imagery to help my imagination), the first video I ran into was about a place called Crazy Eight, in Waterbury, in the ‘80s!

The setting and so much of that chapter just sort of unfolded from there because I could look directly at this place where she would be hanging out with her friends.  

Q: The Kirkus Review of the book says, "Memorable characters inhabit a surprising, engaging story of American idealism and its dark opposite." What do you think of that description?

A: I think it's spot-on. I was pleased by that description because in a way it defined what I was aiming for in the beginning. The book is focused on these individual characters in each chapter, but looming over them is a bigger-picture story--and that is exactly that bigger-picture story, of idealism and its dark opposite, always in conflict. 

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I'm cleaning up a collection of stories, but I've also recently discovered how to write an essay. It's funny, I teach essay-writing and nonfiction, but I think I've been afraid to personally try out this alien genre. Now I love it. We'll see where that goes. Maybe there's a nonfiction book somewhere down the line.

As for novels, I'm unsettled. I've been working on several projects back and forth, all of them quite different, waiting for one to really "click" for me. 

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: I'm originally from a very small town in Oklahoma, or rather from down a dirt road several miles outside that small town. I was a college dropout and an addict before I even knew I wanted to write. It took me a long time to get to this point in life, with a published book and all that. It's dizzying.

I hope that people who don't come from a place of privilege--who have to fight hard to get to a place where they can write or do whatever thing they really love--will take some energy from my experience. I hope they'll keep at it in spite of what's thrown in their way. 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

Q&A with Flora Thomson-DeVeaux

Flora Thomson-DeVeaux is the translator of a new version of the Brazilian writer Joachim Maria Machado de Assis's classic work The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas. Machado de Assis lived from 1839 to 1908. Thomson-DeVeaux is based in Rio de Janeiro.

Q: How did you first get interested in Machado de Assis's work, and in the field of translation?

A: I got into Latin American literature in high school, but I hadn't heard of Machado de Assis until college. Translation came before Machado, actually.

Through a convoluted series of events, I wound up translating a biography of Carmen Miranda (if the name doesn't ring a bell, think "fruit hat") in my freshman year, after just a semester of advanced Portuguese. When I took the job, I saw it as an interesting linguistic challenge and a way to make some pocket money.

Before I knew it, I was working obsessively into the night, lovingly crafting sentences in English. When I got to the passage where Carmen died, I found myself crying at 3 in the morning as I typed the words out, feeling as though I was killing her with my own hands.

The experience gave me a powerful connection with Brazilian culture and left me thoroughly hooked on translation. Those two factors weighed heavily on my decision to major in Spanish and Portuguese – and that's how I met Machado.

There's a story that I like about William Grossman, the first translator of Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas. He moved to Brazil in the late 1940s to teach at a college – nothing to do with literature, he specialized in the economics of air transportation – and wanted to improve his Portuguese for his lectures.

So he went to his Brazilian colleagues and asked: "Who is your greatest writer?" And the answer was: "Machado de Assis." At that point, only a few of Machado's stories and none of his novels had been brought into English.

Grossman devoured the novels, was enchanted by The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, and translated it as a labor of love. (The eventual publisher, Noonday, transmogrified the title into the spoiler-y Epitaph of a Small Winner.) 

Machado de Assis

My encounter with the novel wasn't too dissimilar. By my sophomore year of college, I'd decided that I wanted to study Brazil, and if you want to study Brazil, you can't ignore Machado.

He's this tremendous looming figure, the founder of the Brazilian Academy of Letters, the patriarch of the nation's literature – which is all the more impressive given that he was completely self-taught, came from a poor family, and was a mixed-race man in a country that only abolished slavery in 1888.

So at some point in sophomore fall, I sat down to read one of his novels on my own, and that happened to be Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas. I was blown away, just as Grossman had been: the structure is wild, the images are remarkable, and it's as if the book's constantly catching you off-guard and thumbing its nose at you.

It's one of those classics that makes it very clear from the get-go why it's stuck around so long – and I remember feeling some wondering indignation that Machado de Assis wasn't better known in English. 

Q: How did you end up translating this new edition of The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas?

A: I didn't set out to translate Machado de Assis from the get-go – I sort of backed into the project unawares. Just before I started grad school, I'd signed on to translate Machado de Assis: Toward a Poetics of Emulation, which is a critical study of his works by João Cezar de Castro Rocha.

At that point, all of his novels had been translated into English, so I figured I'd just have the trouble of hunting down the appropriate quotes whenever the critic cited them.

But something strange happened when I copied and pasted: often the translated bits just didn't "fit" with the close reading. It wasn't the fault of the critic or the translator, just a simple demonstration of the fact that translation isn't a linear process but a profoundly interpretive one.

Translators and critics alike are close readers, and in this case some of the translators' readings didn't coincide with the interpretations of the author I was working on. So to make sure the book made sense, I had to retranslate snippets of Machado's works to fit with Castro Rocha's analysis.

I'd been working as a translator for several years at that point, and had since studied Machado more thoroughly as an undergrad, but working with this prose – all due respect to the other authors I'd worked on – was something else entirely. There's a rush that comes from handling such magnificently calibrated sentences, it's hard to describe. 

Anyway, I finished that project just as I was entering my Ph.D. program at Brown, and I'd already been thinking about dedicating my dissertation to a single literary translation. Translators dream of having more time to dedicate to their work, and a Ph.D. program offers nothing if not time and obsessive scrutiny of a single object, so it felt like the obvious choice.

That's how I spent the better part of five years researching, preparing, and revising a new English-language translation of The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas. Publication was an afterthought. I wanted it to see the light of day, of course, but I didn't want to contact publishers prematurely and be forced to turn in the work before I felt it was absolutely ready.

Right as I was sending my dissertation over to my committee, I reached out to Penguin, and the rest is history. 

Q: What do you see as Machado de Assis's legacy today?

A: Machado de Assis's legacy in Brazil is monumental and has never been in question; the story of literature in the country is almost built around him.

That's why it's all the more jarring for Brazilians – and non-Brazilians who "discover" him – to realize how little he's known outside Brazil. That's due in part to the fact that his novels only began to be translated into English nearly a half-century after his death, in the 1950s.

Right now, his legacy in the English-speaking world is a small but meaningful footprint on what I've referred to as a very exclusive fan club, which includes Susan Sontag, John Updike, Salman Rushdie, Harold Bloom, Philip Roth, Allen Ginsberg, Lydia Davis – and now Dave Eggers, who wrote a beautiful preface for my translation.

With every fresh translation, Machado seems to reach out and touch people who are profoundly passionate about the craft of writing and who immediately recognize how special his work is. And with every fresh translation, the translators hope that that fan club will get bigger and bigger.

Q: As a translator, what impact do you hope your work has on readers?

A: Translation is an act of love – I would never have been able to spend five years staring at a novel I wasn't besotted with – and so I think that the most basic hope is to make that love contagious.

This is also the first annotated translation of the novel in English. I included dozens of endnotes on the social, historical, cultural, and literary allusions that are sewn into the text, the idea being that readers can enjoy the book first, hopefully have their interest piqued, and then revisit it with the notes for greater context.

Machado has often been misunderstood as nothing more than a belated imitator of Laurence Sterne, and that misreading stems from a lack of knowledge about Brazilian history and the ways he's weaving terrifically cutting and subtle critiques into this light, sarcastic prose.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: Right after I submitted to Penguin, I started working at Rádio Novelo, a podcast production company in Rio, and we're launching two narrative podcasts in the next few months – only in Portuguese, though.

On the translation front, I'm now in the strange position of thinking first about publication strategy and second about literature, which has paralyzed me a bit.

I've been slowly working on the travel diaries of Mário de Andrade, a modernist poet who traveled up and down the Amazon in the late 1920s. His masterpiece, Macunaíma, was translated abysmally in the '80s and is about to get a new translation by Katrina Dodson next year, so maybe the Machado moment can be followed by a Mário moment.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: There's been tremendous enthusiasm in Brazil about the acclaim for the translation and Machado, which I can attribute in part to people's being desperate to get the word out that Brazil is about so much more than Bolsonaro. Being reminded of the brilliance of Machado de Assis is like a national pick-me-up, one that's sorely needed right now. 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

Q&A with Allison Crotzer Kimmel

Allison Crotzer Kimmel is the author of the new children's picture book Unbeatable Betty: Betty Robinson, the First Female Olympic Track & Field Gold Medalist. Her other books include The Eternal Soldier and The Montgomery Bus Boycott. A high school English teacher, she lives in Bakersfield, California.

Q: Why did you decide to write a children's picture book about Olympic runner Betty Robinson?

A: I discovered Betty’s story while watching a television show called Mysteries at the Museum with my daughter, who was 4 at the time.

I was struck not only by Betty’s grit - certainly the “coming back from the dead” angle is compelling - but looking at her track shoes the museum on the show displayed, I realized she accomplished everything without professional trainers, physical therapists, or even a comfortable-looking pair of shoes.  

I also felt Betty’s story was just the kind of story I wanted to tell for my daughter and other young readers. She believed in herself even when others didn’t. She fought for everyone’s right to play. She lived her whole life like a champion. My greatest goal is for everyone to know and celebrate Betty, and my greatest hope is that we can all be a little bit more like her.

Q: How did you research Betty's life, and what did you learn that especially surprised you?

A: I used a variety of sources, biographies that had already been written on her and other early women’s track stars, I also watched video of her running, and I had the wonderful opportunity to talk to her granddaughter many times to confirm things - large and small - to make sure I got it right.

I am so lucky because in researching Betty, I found a great friend in her granddaughter Brook. A writer doesn’t get any luckier than that.  

As far as what surprised me, I just cannot get over the idea that literally she was a high school student catching a train one day and within months an Olympic champion. And the first female gold medal winner in track and field to boot! I would love to be a fly on the wall to see Betty return with that medal. 

Q: What do you think Joanie Stone's illustrations add to the book?

A: Again, I am one lucky writer. Joanie’s vision for Betty was perfect. I cried the first time I saw her illustrations. The adorable picture in the cloche hat just got me - she captured her spirit, her sweetness, a teenager’s wonder and Betty’s famous smile all at once. I was just amazed.

And when Brook asked how she could get her great-grandparents to look just like them, I had tears in my eyes again. I am so proud of this book we did together, and I can only say I am beyond lucky to have Joanie illustrate this book.

Q: Can you say more about what you see as Betty's legacy, and what you hope kids take away from her story?

A: Her legacy for girls and boys and for parents, teachers, and librarians reading it to them is to never give up, always believing in yourself and your abilities no matter what others might say.

I hope all readers follow Betty’s examples of hard work, determination, and standing up for themselves and others. And of course I want them to know nothing limits us - gender, age, weaknesses - if we don’t let them.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: Right now I am creating curriculum tied to Unbeatable Betty because as a teacher, I know the year ahead is going to be a difficult one in the classroom - be it virtual or traditional - and I want to give my fellow teachers a little present so they can confidently share Betty’s story.

As far as new picture books go, I am working on a project near and dear to my heart about a woman who I was fortunate to know. Her name (to all her kids and fortunately for me and for my children) is Mama Vene, and she has an extraordinary story of immigration to tell. She recently passed.  

Her daughter and I are collaborating to tell Mama Vene’s story in both English and Spanish, so it’s a great challenge for me, but it is a labor of absolute love.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: I’d just love to invite teachers and librarians to reach out to me - www.allisoncrotzerkimmel.com - because this time of social distancing has actually opened the world in some ways. I can now do Zoom and Meets visits anywhere at (almost) any time.

It’s kind of wonderful to know that as we may feel distanced we are finding new ways to stay connected and to reach young readers. I’d love to be able to do that for other teachers who might be looking at different ways to engage their kiddos at this time.

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

July 27

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
July 27, 1916: Elizabeth Hardwick born.

Q&A with Jessica Pearce Rotondi

Photo by Beowulf Sheehan

Jessica Pearce Rotondi is the author of the new book What We Inherit: A Secret War and a Family's Search for Answers. It focuses on her family's search to find out what happened to her uncle Jack, who disappeared in Laos during the Vietnam War. Rotondi's work has appeared in a variety of publications, including The History Channel and Time. She lives in Brooklyn.

Q: You write, “To find out what happened to Jack was to find out why we don’t talk about death in the Pearce family, why we cling to hope past its expiration date. I wanted to know Jack so I could understand her [your late mother]." Can you say more about why you decided to write this book?

A: I lost my mother when I was 23 and was desperate for some sort of message from her, a directive about how to live my life without her. The day she died, I found myself staring into her closet. She had been sick for so long, most of her clothes were still hanging in clear sheets of dry cleaner’s plastic.

I remember the odd sensation of the sleeves of her coats clinging to my arms like I’d clung to her hours earlier. When I moved them aside, I found boxes and boxes of letters, declassified CIA documents, and letters about her brother Jack, who went missing during the Vietnam War.

Her obsessive hunt for him spanned almost 40 years and forced me to reexamine a great deal about my childhood and my mother. While she was teaching me to walk, then drive, she was carrying this unresolved grief—and holding onto hope that Jack would still be found.

I was shocked that she could keep such a huge part of her life from me. Finding those newspaper headlines was the bolded message I had been looking for, and I knew instantly that I would do everything in my power to complete her search.

It was finding Mom’s own book a few months later that made me decide to write What We Inherit. I was home for Christmas and uncovered an unpublished children’s book manuscript that Mom had written back in the early ‘90s. She had sent it to exactly one publisher and gotten rejected, so she never sent it anywhere else.

Getting her words published became a personal goal for me and finding that manuscript felt like the permission I needed to put her story out into the world.

Q: The book includes sections that take place in 2013, interspersed with chapters that take place earlier. How did you decide on the book's structure, and did you write it in the order in which it appears?

A: What We Inherit follows three generations of my family as we search for the truth about what happened to my uncle Jack, whose plane disappeared over Laos on March 29, 1972.

The book is told from two perspectives: My own, beginning with the day my mother died and going across modern-day Laos and Thailand; and my grandfather’s, beginning with the morning he learns his son has been shot down and going until his death.

I’m a journalist by training and the book was originally a first-person reported narrative, but that all changed when I came across a personal artifact that changed everything: Jack’s dog tags. They slid out from the file I was holding and quite literally fell into my lap.

I knew that they had touched Jack, that my grandfather and mother had held them, and felt in my bones what that experience must have meant to them. I knew then that to tell the story of Jack, I had to tell the story of a father who had been a prisoner of war, then lost a son in another, very different war. I needed to show my mother losing Jack at the same age I lost her.

Throughout the book, I include found objects like Grandpa Ed’s prisoner of war identification card from Stalag 17 and my mother’s passport photo because I want the reader to discover them when the characters do. Their search becomes yours.

I originally wrote the present-day narrative from start to finish, then I wrote my grandfather’s arc. The final, most difficult part was weaving them together and maintaining that suspense. The structure was the most challenging part of this book, but it’s now the element I’m the most excited for readers to experience.

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

A: This book brought me closer to my mother and grandfather. In some ways, my research into the moments that defined them gave me the chance to “meet” them at my age. I understand more about where I come from and the people who raised me.

I also learned more about Laos and the CIA-led war that left Laos the most heavily bombed country in the world. I’m a contributing editor at The History Channel, and the revelations I uncovered about the war have deeply informed how I approach writing about history. So much of history is left out of history books, and I hope we see even more stories about Laos in the days to come.

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

A: The title of What We Inherit reflects a major theme of the book: How our family’s past influences who we become. It’s taken from Lord Byron’s poem “Prometheus,” which opens the book:

“…A mighty lesson we inherit:

Thou art a symbol and a sign

                  To Mortals of their fate and force;

Like thee, Man is in part divine,

                A troubled stream from a pure source;

And Man in portions can foresee

His own funereal destiny;

His wretchedness, and his resistance,

And his sad unallied existence:

To which his Spirit may oppose

Itself—and equal to all woes,

                  And a firm will, and a deep sense,

Which even in torture can descry

                  Its own concenter'd recompense,

Triumphant where it dares defy…”

Jack was shot down in a plane named “Prometheus” after the Greek Titan who stole fire from the gods to bring to man. In the myth, Zeus punishes Prometheus by strapping him to a stake on Mount Kaukasos as an eagle feeds on his liver—or, according to some accounts, his heart.

But Prometheus can never die; his body regenerates night after night. He’s forced to linger in his suffering, not really living and not quite dead.

For years, Air Force documents about Jack sealed with eagles tormented my grandparents, throwing them wildly from hope to despair. This in-between place of frozen grief was a place my family lived in again after my mother’s cancer diagnosis, essentially repeating the past.

I hope that readers come away from the book inspired to examine how their own families have shaped their narratives but also with the knowledge that we don’t have to be defined by the people who raised us; it’s up to us to take those lessons and decide what to do with them.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: A novel that I’m excited to reveal more about soon!

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: If you’d like to learn more about What We Inherit or the Secret War in Laos, visit http://www.jessicapearcerotondi.com/.

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. This interview also appears on www.hauntinglegacy.com.