Nov. 3

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
Nov. 3, 1901: André Malraux born.

Q&A with Georgia Hunter

Georgia Hunter is the author of the novel We Were the Lucky Ones, which is based on her family's experiences during World War II. Her work has appeared in a variety of publications, including The New York Times and travelgirl magazine. She lives in Connecticut.

Q: This novel was based on your own family’s story, which you only found out about as a teenager. Can you describe how you learned about it, and the impact it had on you?

A: I was very close with my grandfather and my grandmother. When I was growing up, we lived a mile apart, and spent a lot of time together. He died when I was 14. He was very sick the last few years of his life. I look back on, how did I miss the little signs [about his background]?

At 15, my English teacher assigned us a research project. We were tasked with interviewing a relative to learn about our roots. The goal was to learn something about ourselves. With my grandfather’s memory so fresh, I sat down with my grandmother and in that interview I learned he was not born in America but in Poland, and he was from a family of Holocaust survivors.

[I didn’t know] the Jewish piece of my history. It was a piece of his past—he wanted to fit into his neighborhood; he was the only Jew in the neighborhood. My grandmother was a Presbyterian from the South. He would coordinate trips to Brazil [to see his family] with Passover, but he wouldn’t make a big deal of it.

I’ll never forget that hourlong interview…it sparked a lot of curiosity and questions. I was not feeling defensive. It was shocking, but not in a negative way, but in a way of wanting to know more. There were only so many questions my grandmother was able to answer.

That was the very first seed of inspiration. There was a family reunion six years later, which solidified the notion that somebody needs to write our story.

Q: Why did you decide to write it as a novel rather than as nonfiction?

A: Especially with the amount of research! It was a nine-year labor of love, interviewing people around the world. It’s amazing what kind of information I was able to find. I had a timeline I color-coded by sibling.

It was also a refresher for me, a lesson in history. Their story is so global. This was five continents over six years. I had to do a lot of research. In the end, the historical pieces were so helpful for me, I decided to keep them in the book [as introductions to various chapters]. That grounded the book in history—it was a nice way to not have to force that into the story itself.

I wanted the story to read like a novel, like we were there for them, especially for my kids. That was the reason I decided to give myself the creative license to fictionalize some details—what they were thinking, wearing, feeling, the dialogue. I had no access to the survivors, except Felicia [a cousin]…I hope I brought the story closer to the truth…

Q: What did you learn that especially surprised you?

A: Some of the records I was able to find blew my mind. One cousin was born in Siberia, and he didn’t know why his parents were sent there. He would wake up as a baby with his eyes frozen shut and his mother would use breast milk to open his eyes.

Thank god for the web—I was connected to these specialized groups…The Hoover Institute at Stanford had a document written by my great-uncle Genek that explained why he was arrested, why he was sent east, the name of the camp, the day his son was born, the journey to join the army a year later. That document was a big surprise. It was very moving to be able to pass the document on to his children.

I went into the research thinking it would be my grandfather’s piece—France, Dakar, Brazil, and Poland. But I was amazed to realize his four siblings, his parents, his niece all had separate paths to survive. I realized this was going to take a lot more research, and it helped me make the decision to write the book from multiple perspectives. Their mission was not to die, and second, to keep hope alive that [they would] see each other.

Q: The book’s title came from something one of your cousins said. How did you choose that for the title, and what does it signify for you?

A: It was at a family reunion back in 2000 when I was 21 where I was first exposed to the greater story. The story was told with levity, “I was born in a Siberian winter…”

Except [cousin] Felicia. When she spoke, she was the only one who had first-hand memory. She said it was a miracle we are all here. She was raising a glass…she said we need to be grateful for the miracle, we are the lucky ones.

That stuck with me…it was incredible. They were making decisions all the time, what to say, what was the right decision. A lot were split-second decisions…

Thank god for the ending—to ask readers, in a market saturated with World War II and Holocaust books, to take another one [is a lot, but this] will not be as depressing…

Q: What do your family members think of the book?

A: They liked it! I sent them galleys early on and held my breath! I interviewed everybody, but I didn’t have them read the drafts. I didn’t want ten rounds of feedback, and if I was fictionalizing it, I wanted to have some say! I’m thankful they all loved it.

From the first day, they were all so excited. They were grateful. At my New York City launch event in February, I had a talk in Manhattan at a Barnes and Noble—over 20 relatives flew in from Brazil, France, California, and Florida. It was so special, so moving. It turned into a family reunion. It meant the world to me.

Of the five siblings, four were represented by children, grandchildren, or great-grandchildren. I feel closer to all of them. The process was special. I spent weeks in their homes, their cities…This is my mom’s generation. Through getting to know them better, I was able to channel their parents, through them.

Q: What are you working on next?

A: I’m just getting back into it. I gave myself maternity leave—I was pregnant through the book tour, and [my son] ended up coming five days after my last stop on the tour! It was a whirlwind of a year! I went straight into the fun of a newborn. I’m coming up for air in time for the book festivals.

I love the historical fiction genre. I have exhausted my family stories, so the next one will probably not be as personal, but I have a list of stories I come across. I love the theme of protagonists up against the odds. I love reading about time and place through novels.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: I do get asked about ancestry, how to research it. I have a page on my website under the book tab with ancestry search tips. I would encourage people to look there. There are some great resources.

From my own experience, this process of unearthing, digging, recording my past—the findings were the most rewarding part. When I would reach out to a relative, spend time in their home, reach out to archives in Russia, Poland, France, and get a letter back, the feeling of understanding why we are the way we are is so rewarding.

You can create a document for future generations…People who lived through those times will soon be lost. It’s more important now than ever.

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Georgia Hunter will be speaking on Friday, Nov. 3, as part of the Lessans Family Literary Series at the Bender JCC of Greater Washington.

Q&A with Karen Shepard

Karen Shepard is the author of the new story collection Kiss Me Someone. Her other books include The Celestials and An Empire of Women, and her work has appeared in a variety of publications, including USA Today and The Boston Globe, and she teaches writing and literature at Williams College. She lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts.

Q: In the acknowledgments, you note, “These stories cover over thirty years of writing.” How do you think your writing has changed over this period?

A: Wow, way to start with the easy ones! I am probably the least-qualified person to answer this question. It’s hard to get outside of your own work and see it with that kind of critical eye.  

My obsessions are still my obsessions, I think: the value of mysteries, of not knowing even those we’re supposed to know best; the power dynamics of social relationships: friends, families, towns, races, ethnicities, spouses, children; the possibilities of taking responsibility for the role we all play in the situations in which we find ourselves.  

What’s changed the most is probably the way I explore those issues. My early stories were almost exclusively first-person, somewhat autobiographical.  

I’ve become more interested in exploring other stylistic tools: different points of view, a narrative voice that can move through time and space in extreme ways, different settings, different time periods. I’ve become more dedicated to expanding the worlds and the characters that I can try to empathize with since that seems like the central reason I write: to expand my empathetic ground.

Q: How did you choose the title for the collection (also the title of one of the stories), and which themes do you see running through the book?

A: For a long time, I thought when I eventually had a story collection I’d call it Girls Against Boys. Then, once I started accumulating the actual stories, started seeing some of the recurring themes, I started joking that I should call it Sad, Angry People Having Creepy Sex.

Then, I was rereading Paula Fox’s brilliant novel, Desperate Characters. There’s a moment when one of her characters sees some graffiti on the side of a phone booth, and there was my title: Kiss Me Someone.

The phrase seemed like an interesting mix of demand and plea, and seemed to encapsulate something about the ways that sadness and anger combine to produce self-destructive behavior in so many of my characters.

My characters are often extraordinarily self-aware, they know their own worst instincts, yet they are unwilling or unable to resist those instincts.

Often, it’s sadness and anger that contribute to that inability. But, paradoxically, it’s also that self-awareness that often allows them to offer compassion to those they care about, and sometimes, even themselves.

Q: How did you decide on the order in which the stories would appear in the collection?

A: That was hard! As you point out, some of these stories are over thirty years old, and the most recent one was written just this year. How do you take a lifetime of work and order it into a relatively coherent whole?  

What I tried to do was organize them by age of protagonists. My thinking was that I was interested in these same pressures--sadness, anger, compassion, self-destruction, self-preservation—at different ages. What do those pressures produce in a tenth-grader? What do they produce in an 80-year-old man?  

But the problem was that so many of my stories are told from weirdo points of view: multiple third-person, omniscient, first person plural, so it become sort of impossible to organize them that way. All this to say that there’s probably no method to my madness at all.

Q: As someone who writes short stories and novels, do you have a preference?

A: I tend towards novels, which is sort of odd given that I’m often interested in microscopic looks at hermetically-sealed worlds—a marriage, a parent-child relationship, a small town. I suppose the novel allows me the room to examine those worlds, to discover the ways that even the most sealed-up worlds are like tightly-packed universes.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: Grading student papers! I teach at Williams College, usually one semester a year, and in my teaching semester, I get very little writing done.

Come spring, I’ll have less teaching and, hopefully, more writing. I’m trying to get going on a new novel about the first Westerner to bring a live panda back to the States, but I am a genius at procrastination, so probably, I’ll spend the spring reorganizing my sweaters.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: Well, only that the holidays are coming, and Kiss Me Someone makes an excellent gift for pretty much everyone. Multiple copies, even better. Think of it as putting food on my children’s table.

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Karen Shepard can be reached on Twitter @karenlshepard.

Q&A with Renu Persaud

Renu Persaud is the author of the new book The Mastery of You. She is a lecturing professor at the University of Windsor and is based in Ontario, Canada.

Q: You write, “Having knowledge of self is not the same as self-mastery.” How would you differentiate the two, and how do you define self-mastery?

A: Indeed, knowledge of self and self-mastery are different. Think of knowledge on a continuum, on one end is basic knowledge and the other end is in-depth knowledge.

We all have basic knowledge about many things, many aspects of our lives are filled with basic surface-oriented experiences, such as knowledge of how to cook, how to garden, how to draw. 

The better we become, that is more knowledgeable, we move along the continuum from being a mere cook to a chef, from a gardener to a landscaper, from someone who draws to an artist and so on. 

When we hold in-depth knowledge, we become experts, we reach the other end of the continuum. Our knowledge basis moves from basic to in-depth/specialized.

Self-mastery enacts this way in a similar vein. We all carry basic self-knowledge but self-mastery takes us from basic to in-depth self knowledge. We know our likes and dislikes, our triggers, and learn about ourself.

This is important for managing circumstances. If we fail to accumulate in depth self knowledge, we remain with a surface-oriented self. With SM you not only know your positive and negative attributes but you know why.

We focus on strengths, we master those and at the same time confront and are aware of our weaknesses. We all have weaknesses. SM builds strength for managing weakness; it is a preparatory process and helps to transcend fears. SM is knowledge of your being which transcends to a deep understanding of self.

We create our own destination. We know the "me" so that "I" could accept the "you" in others.

Q: How did you come up with the idea for this book?

A: The idea for the book was a natural progression, a conflation of things in my life. My interest in formulations of the self came early on as a young girl. This intensified as I matured. I was fortunate that I was able to pursue my passion academically at University of Toronto.

As I researched and wrote on self-awareness my attempts to articulate my ideas seemed to lack objectivity and precision for scientific inquiry and social science measures. However, I was given an opportunity to demonstrate that self-worth can be understood scientifically.

I have been able to touch lives not only from a subjective stance but also objectively with scholarly inquiry. Thus, The Mastery of You is a progression of my passions into my research and then the data into practice and application to our lives.

My ideas were unique and almost foreign, but I relentlessly pursued my passion, and my peers and professors supported me. Never let anyone say you cannot, believe in yourself above all. This is self-mastery.

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

A: I hope that readers understand that prosperity and success begins and ends with our own action. We must act with regard for ourself and this is the only way we can hold regard for others and humanity.

To treat others with kindness says I have an elevated sense of self, this makes me capable of treating you well. Anything else is counter-intuitive. However, this process is a difficult one because we have been taught otherwise. SM requires a remarkable rewiring of our thought processes, which will then translate to action.

Q: Who are some of your favorite writers?

A: My favourite writers would depend on the genre. For poetry, it’s the masterful Jalāl ad-Dīn Rūmī. The expressions of love, feeling and emotions scintillate the senses in a mysterious yet shockingly quiet way. I quite love Shakespeare's sonnets too.

DaVinci is a favourite of mine for both his artistic and poetic works about self-mastery. He says, "Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen." I love the way he bridges art in all its forms with the pursuit of science.

For fiction, I go back to the classics, the poignant stories such as Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles or Great Expectations by Charles Dickens.

I love to read rare, banned or controversial books such as Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh or The Marquis de Sade or James Joyce's Ulysses.  I read these with an analytical and social science perspective. Through these writings we can learn much about social change and conflict through historical epoch and time and the resulting effect on our collective human nature.

Q: What reactions have you had to your book so far?

A: I did not expect that people would connect with my book, in the ways that they have. However, this also speaks to the fact that when we do anything with our hearts, we can make a difference.

I think The Mastery of You resonates and is timely because we all need to treat each other well. Seeing that my book is now available worldwide shows that the subject matter appeals to everyone regardless of culture. It speaks to the universal will for kindness that we all share.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: The Mastery of You brand has really caught on and there is a demand for inspiration centred on teaching and learning that stems from self-mastery. I am working on a few projects based on the feedback and all the positive energy I have received.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: It is very nice to be acknowledged. I am grateful, for this journey has been successful because of my amazing students, colleagues and well wishers.

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous version of this Q&A.

Q&A with Nigel Cliff

Nigel Cliff is the author of Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story--How One Man and his Piano Transformed the Cold War, now available in paperback. His other books include The Last Crusade and a translation of Marco Polo's Travels. His work has appeared in a variety of publications, including The Times and The Economist, and he lives in London.

Q: Why did you decide to write about Van Cliburn and the 1958 piano competition in Moscow?

A: I couldn’t resist it; the story grabbed hold of me from the moment I came across it. For one thing, it’s so deliciously improbable. A young Texan pianist on his first overseas trip conquers Cold War Moscow, returns home to rock-star fame, and becomes an unofficial ambassador between hostile superpowers.

I wanted to write about the Cold War, and here was a way to put a human face on a rather ponderous subject. Van Cliburn is a touching and unusual character who saw no difficulty in being friends with Soviet and American leaders and was a hero to people on both sides of the divide; crucially, that gave me an entrée into everyday lives as well as intimate glimpses of the political elites.

A good story needs to put its hero in danger, and its writer, too. Finding the language to describe a piano concerto to non-specialists, like myself, was my biggest challenge.

Yet the deeper I went, the more I found myself on familiar ground. I like writing about the unpredictable—the comedy of life in the broadest sense.

Each of my books has featured characters who are thrust on a world stage they haven’t sought: the actors in my first book The Shakespeare Riots, the explorers Vasco da Gama and Marco Polo, or in this case an unworldly, overgrown kid who becomes the most unlikely Cold War celebrity.

All leave their native society for an alien culture, where they either discover a great deal about themselves and the world they came from or conspicuously fail to do so. Van’s upset victory in the Tchaikovsky Competition challenges him to ask who he is and what he stands for: to reach deep down and discover if he can live up to the moment.

Like the feuding actors in The Shakespeare Riots, who indirectly cause the deaths of 30 people, Van also reminds us that art and artists don’t exist in a protective bubble: that all art is political, albeit rarely in such a spectacular way.

I’m certainly not suggesting that there was some kind of cosmic connection between Van and the great events of the time, though to him it must have felt just like that – or, when things went wrong, like a cosmic collision. On the contrary, the book is a character study of a tender young artist caught amid forces that first exalt and then nearly destroy him.

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

A: I began by listening to Van’s recordings and watching his videos, and I kept returning to them to remind myself of the essential simplicity at the heart of the story.

What first struck me, even on film, was the immensely touching way Van had of seemingly baring his soul at the piano. It’s riveting now, and it must have been spellbinding to Soviet audiences unused to seeing Americans like this.

As I began working in archives in Russia and the U.S. and interviewing everyone I could in both countries, the story inevitably became more complex and layered. Van was not always what he seemed: the squeaky-clean Southern Baptist and mama’s boy was also a closeted gay man who developed a drinking problem and was watched by both the FBI and the KGB.

So he was human after all, you might say; yet what surprised me most, and took the story in a different direction, was the unexpectedly high price he paid for his youthful victory and fame.

The other extraordinary discovery was the bottomless well of love that countless Russians harbored for Van – and still do. The mountains of fan mail contain some heartbreaking items: one Russian fan sent him a delicate love letter every few weeks for most of her life.

That encouraged me to give full voice to the sheer extravagant unlikeliness of it all, and the stunned euphoria that greeted Van’s victory in the U.S. and USSR alike. If there’s one thing you learn from studying in the archives, it’s that history only seems inevitable in retrospect; at the time, no one ever really has a clue what’s going to happen.

Q: How significant was the piano competition in the Cold War context, and what impact do you think it had on U.S.-Soviet relations at the time?

A: The first Tchaikovsky Competition was a rather obscure event till news spread that Van might win; it certainly was not discussed internationally at anywhere near world-leader level, despite the conspiracy theories spread by jealous rivals that Van’s victory was some kind of unprecedented Kremlin-White House stitch-up.

Like everything else in Khrushchev’s Soviet Union, though, the competition was political, in the sense that it was intended to showcase the brilliance of Soviet musicians. As much as the fact that Van played best, it was the fact that the Soviets let him win that stunned the world.

The result boosted Americans, who were terrified that the Soviets were outstripping them in technology after the previous year’s launch of Sputnik, the first satellite. It gave Russians an American who loved them and whom they could safely love, which softened feelings toward the capitalist enemy. And it made Khrushchev look human for the first time.

It certainly didn’t have a direct impact on the progress of the Cold War, but it undoubtedly changed the temperature of U.S.- Soviet relations. The glow persisted for years, through Van’s repeated visits to the Soviet Union and all the way to 1987, when he came out of retirement to play a stunning role in the decisive Reagan-Gorbachev summit.

Q: What do you see as Cliburn's legacy today?

A: As a young man handed a great opportunity and a heavy responsibility, Van stands as both an example and a warning. His response was to become a kind of missionary for classical music, playing his greatest hits to packed stadiums and screaming teens, many of whom had never listened to Tchaikovsky or Rachmaninoff.

Eventually he burned out from a toxic combination of excessive exposure, impossible expectations, and weak nerves. His influence has dimmed (though Vladimir Ashkenazy still rates his performance of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3 as the best he’s ever heard), and his clearest musical legacy is the quadrennial Cliburn Competition, which started in 1962 in an attempt to emulate—or rival—the Soviets.

Yet Van’s story was never just about the music. It remains the definitive instance of an artist’s ability to speak across divides of language, nationality and ideology. Today, when the concept of soft power and diplomacy in all its forms is under siege, it’s more important than ever to remember the unpredictable yet potentially spectacular dividends that people-to-people exchanges can reap.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: Lots of different things – including teaching at university for the first time – that are distracting me from getting on with my next book. I’m hoping to make a start very soon.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: Among the distractions, I’m currently building a robot for my son and producing a ballet with my wife. Also, I recently returned from China, where I signed a Great Wall of Books – 430 of them – in an hour. I’m wondering if there’s a record for this kind of thing.

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

Q&A with Dian Curtis Regan

Dian Curtis Regan is the author of the new kids' picture book Space Boy and the Snow Monster, the third in a series. Her many other books include Space Boy and the Space Pirate and Space Boy and his Dog. She lives in Colorado.

Q: How did you come up with the idea for this new Space Boy book?

A: I wanted book #3 to be different from the first two titles, so I changed the season to winter. As Space Boy and the Snow Monster opens, Niko finds his spaceship buried in snow—and Radar, his robot copilot, missing!

So of course a Snow Monster captured Radar and took him home to Planet Ice. Thus Niko’s newest space mission blasts off . . . .

Q: Did you know when you wrote the first one that you'd end up writing a series?

A: Not at all.  I thought Space Boy and his Dog would be a stand-alone picture book. But the publisher asked me to come up with more story ideas, which resulted in my being asked to write two additional books about Space Boy and his crew.

Q: What do you think Robert Neubecker's illustrations add to the book?

A: Robert’s humor and enthusiasm shine through his energetic illustrations. The comic book layout has received lots of positive attention from reviewers.  And the kid appeal is obvious. Mothers have told me that their kids don’t just read the books, they act out the stories. Love that.

Q: Who are some of your favorite authors?

A: I was heavily influenced by Lloyd Alexander and C.S. Lewis. Wanting to create my own “Prydain” or “Narnia” led to the publication of Princess Nevermore and its sequel, Cam’s Quest.

One of the best current children’s book authors, in my opinion, is Patricia MacLachlan. She has the magic. Period.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I’ve just finished a young science fiction middle grade novel. And I’m working with Curtis Brown Digital to bring back previous titles as ebooks and print-on-demand softcovers.  It’s nice to always have books available, especially if you do school visits.

Coming out this fall are the first four titles in the Ghost Twins series, with awesome new covers by Doug Cushman. Also out will be an updated edition of The World According to Kaley.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: I have a cat, Gracie, and a dog, Nelly.  I like to read stories-in-progress to them. The dog is the best audience because she listens to everything with ears perked. 

The cat, however, often leaves the room--sometimes at a dead run. I try not to let it hurt my writerly feelings.

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

Nov. 1

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
Nov. 1, 1930: A.R. Gurney born.