Q&A with Sue William Silverman

Sue William Silverman is the author most recently of The Pat Boone Fan Club: My Life as a White Anglo-Saxon Jew. Her other books include the memoirs Love Sick and Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You. She teaches at the Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Q: What role did Pat Boone play for you, and why did you decide to focus at least in part on him in your most recent book, The Pat Boone Fan Club: My Life as a White Anglo-Saxon Jew?

A: Right: so why would a Jewish girl have a life-long crush on the very Christian Pat Boone? For those unfamiliar with Pat Boone (how can that be?!), he’s a 1960s pop-music idol.

As much as Elvis was the “bad boy” of that era, Pat Boone was the all-American, wholesome family man with four daughters. And this was the attraction.

Growing up, I liked his music, but, more than anything, I wanted him to adopt me, save me from my Jewish father who sexually molested me. Pat Boone was the polar opposite of my scary father.

This memoir is about a search for identity, specifically a spiritual identity, compounded by my ambiguous feelings toward Judaism while growing up.

Pat Boone is a metaphor for my childhood belief (whether it be magical thinking or not) that if he were my safe Christian father, I’d have a perfect family. What better metaphor for “my life as a white Anglo-Saxon Jew,” the book’s subtitle?

At the same time, the voice of the book is ironic, in that my liberal Democratic leanings are antithetical to Pat Boone’s conservative Republicanism. The book is not a tribute to him. It’s an exploration of what he meant to me.

Q: Another theme running through the book, as you’ve mentioned, is religion, and your relationship to Judaism. How would you describe the impact of religion on your life?

A: Growing up, the impact of feeling spiritual-less caused severe confusion about identity and a profound sense of loss. Who was I? How could I discover a spiritual “me” when my Jewish father misloved me and no one in my Jewish tribe protected me? Then there’s the terrible history of anti-Semitism.

Since bad things happened to Jewish girls, I wanted to be part of the dominant American culture and religion. Yet I am Jewish. So what to do?

Although there are no easy answers, I ultimately learned, through experience and by the writing of this book, to become more comfortable in my own Jewish skin.

Q: Over how long a period did you write The Pat Boone Fan Club, and how did you decide on the organization of the chapters?

A: It took at least five years to write. Initially, however, there was no book: I wrote one stand-alone essay about Pat Boone, prompted by a 2003 concert of his I attended, after which I barged backstage to meet him.

After I published that piece, I continued to write essays about various other obsessions: Charlie Chaplin; a high school boyfriend who resembled Pat Boone; picking apricots in Israel and falling in love with a paratrooper, etc.

I’d written about six or so essays when I realized that in each—albeit approached from different angles—I was writing thematically linked essays about a life-long spiritual crisis.

Subsequently, in order to form a congruent whole, I revised the existing essays and wrote new ones to fill in the gaps. I knew the book had to begin and end with Pat Boone. In between, the other essays follow a very loose chronological order whose narrative arc explores this theme throughout my life.

Let me hasten to add that the book wouldn’t exist if I hadn’t met Pat Boone in person, twice, during the writing process, and had a correspondence with him. Because of this personal connection, I was able to significantly deepen not just the essays about the singer, but the entire book.

Q: You also have written the book Love Sick, a memoir about sexual addiction. What do you hope people take away from your story?

A: I hope readers who struggle with an addiction (or with any form of loss, depression, alienation, or grief) know they aren’t alone. The memoir focuses on the recovery process, so I hope to show there is a way out of whatever darkness is consuming you.

Additionally, of all the addictions, it’s the least understood. I hope to shed light on it, particularly so the term isn’t thrown around to include, say, sexual perpetrators or pedophiles.

At the same time, women sex addicts are not “sluts.” We’re women struggling not to mistake sex for love. Sex was my drug of choice used to numb emotional and psychic pain—pain caused by my father having hurt me as a child.

Literary memoirs strive to portray the human condition in all its facets. I hope Love Sick gets at that common humanity.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: A lot! I’m working on a fourth memoir, my first novel, and a second poetry collection. I didn’t plan it this way, but once an idea for a book takes hold, it won’t let go. For updates, you can visit me here. 

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: I teach creative nonfiction at the low-residency MFA in Writing Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts. As much as I love to write, I equally love to teach. Everyone has a story to tell. All our narratives are important. I love being a guide in this way, watching other writers’ stories blossom on the page.

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

Dec. 3

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
Dec. 3, 1857: Joseph Conrad born.

Q&A with Stephen R. Bown

Stephen R. Bown is the author of the new book Island of the Blue Foxes: Disaster and Triumph in the World's Greatest Scientific Expedition. It focuses on the Great Northern Expedition, an 18th century project that stretched from St. Petersburg to Siberia to the North American coast. His other books include The Last Viking and White Eskimo. He lives near Banff, in the Canadian Rockies.

Q: Why did you decide to write about the Great Northern Expedition?

A: I’ve had the idea to tell this story for over 15 years now, but I just didn’t think there was quite enough information to truly bring it alive. It was only in the last several years that additional information about the expedition has been uncovered in Russian archives and translated into English.

But the reason that I was initially interested in the story for so long is that it is simply the most incredible exploration story that I have ever read about.

It involves fascinating personalities such as Peter the Great, the famous naturalist Georg Steller (Steller Jay and Steller Sea Lion) and the legendary commander Vitus Bering (the Bering Strait). The expedition explored Siberia and pioneered the Russian discovery of Alaska. And that is just the background.

The real story, the human element, involves storms, scurvy and shipwreck on an uncharted, uninhabited island in the North Pacific. Then they survived a winter, spring and summer on a tiny island – building shelter and hunting for food even though their gunpowder had been ruined in the wreck.

What is fascinating to me is how they changed their social hierarchy – from a rigid, naval structure to a democratic system where input was and a show of hands was required before any major decision was made. This prevented mutiny and infighting and ensured their survival.

Incredibly, by August, they had built a smaller ship from the wreck that lay offshore and sailed back home to Kamchatka. It is simply an amazing story with an unusually interesting historical context.

Q: What role did Peter the Great play in the expedition, and what did the expedition accomplish for Russia?

A: Peter the Great isn’t known for being great by accident. His dream was to transform Russia from a medieval cultural backwater hamstrung by religious orthodoxy into a vibrant pre-eminent European nation.

He wanted to improve the economy, the political institutions, the culture and scientific achievement all at once. He also founded a Baltic based Russian Imperial Navy, after conquering from Sweden the territory surrounding St. Petersburg and founding the city.

The Great Northern Expedition was his grand dream to show Europe how a new vibrant Russia was contributing to global science and geography. Now he also wanted to consolidate Russian political claims to the farthest flung regions of his vast and sprawling empire.

His great plan was supported and financed by his successors, Empress Catherine and Empress Anna. They hoped to establish trade routes to the Pacific and perhaps to Japan, support Russian towns and industry in Siberia and perhaps claim new territory for the Russian Empire in western North America.

The Great Northern Expedition lasted a decade, involved at times up to 3,000 scientists, laborers and naval personnel. It was a staggering undertaking.

Here is just a brief list of the most important accomplishments of the expedition: Scientifically it collected information on Siberia, previously a vast but sparsely populated and little known region of the world, from climate, plants and animals, minerals, geology.

Politically it consolidated Russian control over an enormous swath of the globe’s geography, the value of which increased over time as Siberia became more than a place for political exiles once the mineral and oil and gas wealth was discovered and exploited.

And in America, which was also conquered and claimed by Russia, the German naturalist Georg Steller, gave Europe its first scientific description of Pacific America’s flora and fauna, including the Steller’s sea lion, Steller’s sea cow, and Steller’s jay.

Q: How was the book’s title chosen, and what was the significance of the blue foxes? 

A: I encourage you to Google “arctic blue foxes.” They look cute and friendly in photos. But in November of 1741, never having encountered humans before, they were vicious and feral.

The shipwrecked mariners located their beach camp near a clear stream and a series of sand dunes. These dunes were the abode of the foxes, and so the two species were fighting over the same territory.

The foxes swarmed from the hills by the hundreds, descending upon the ragged makeshift encampment of tattered tents, snarling and biting and eating the dead and immobilized men who were stricken with scurvy and unable to defend themselves, gnawing on their hands and feet.

They ran through the camp heedless of being caught, urinating and defecating on clothing, food and sleeping men. They attacked at all hours and tore at clothing and dragged away utensils, tools, shoes, blankets. The dying mariners stabbed and kicked the foxes, killing hundreds, and then used their frozen bodies to plug gaps in the sailcloth tents.

The battle of the species dragged on for months into the winter when they finally retreated into the hills. The blue foxes were the defining aspect of life on the island and it seemed appropriate to name the book after them since I’ve never read anything like it happening on any other expedition.

Q: How did you research the book, and what did you find especially surprising in your research? 

A: The most surprising thing to me was that no one had ever told the story before in the manner it deserves – with the full historical context of the ambitious dreams of Peter the Great, and his fellow Romanov Empresses and successors Catherine and Anna Ivanovna, to extend the Russian Empire to decisively include Siberia and to lay claim to Pacific America, what they called Alaska – the Great Land.

Russia of course famously sold its colony to the U.S. in 1867 for $7.2 million once the sea otters, and their valuable pelts, were depleted – but before the oil was discovered.

As I mentioned earlier, it was only in the last few years that some of the material became available to me. This new information included a collection of letters between Bering and his wife Anna and their children.

She accompanied him on the years-long expedition with their younger children but left the older two living with family friends in St. Petersburg. They worried about them, naturally.

I was also amazed at the luxury goods the Berings brought across Siberia – the fancy clothing, furs, silks, shoes – that would have been totally out of place in the rough-and-tumble towns and on the trail.

They even carried a clavichord, strapped to a poor horse’s back, over the thousands of miles of roadless overland travel. They lived like royalty amidst the Siberian wilderness. Amazing.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I’m just putting together a proposal tentatively titled The Curse of the Wager – about another 18th century shipwreck that had a very different outcome.

The 28-gun supply ship Wager, with a crew of 120, ran aground on a jagged rock outcropping of a desolate island in Patagonia in 1741. The survivors set up a chaotic camp of tattered lean-tos on the beach beneath what they aptly named Mount Misery.

In the freezing rain and winds of the following weeks all order disintegrated and the men degenerated into a mob of drunken fighting and starvation.

Faced with the grim spectacle of their predicament, many of the mariners cast their eyes about and settled on the captain as the cause of their horrifying fate. Why obey the captain when they no longer had a ship?

There was mutiny and murder and the survivors split into three separate groups and worked to return home to England. What happened to the disparate parties over the next several years is so fantastical, involving such outrageous adventures as they each wended their way back home, as to be scarcely creditable.

When these various groups arrived in London, it was not to a hero’s welcome but to be placed on trial for mutiny.

The legal aspect of the story is also fascinating and has never yet been fully explored. What technically is a mutiny? And can marooned sailors mutiny against their captain and the power of the crown after their ship has been destroyed?

During the public court martial in London, lawyers for the survivors argued that while abandoning the captain and some of his loyalists was in poor form, it could not be considered a mutiny – a hanging offence – since the mariners’ pay had been cut with the destruction of the ship.

Rather than have this become known and contribute to future mutinies, the navy quietly abandoned the trial. None of the mutineers were charged with murder, mutiny or any other crime, and the following year the Royal Navy quietly changed its mutiny laws. It was a significant point in legal history. But it’s also an incredible tale of adventure and survival in South America.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: Of course!  One interesting question is why we know so little about this globally significant expedition. It was hushed up by the Russian government.

Contrary to what Peter the Great envisioned – a publicity stunt to raise Russia’s status as a global power – by the time the expedition was finished politics had shifted and secrecy was supreme. Empress Elizabeth wanted to keep the discovery secret so that only Russians could profit from the new and lucrative fur trade.

Also because it was a shipwreck they thought it might not reflect positively on Russia – the opposite of the British approach, which was to publicise and celebrate all of their achievements, even the disasters, so that we all know about Cook’s voyages but few have head of the Great Northern Expedition.

Because the expedition was never made famous during its era it has remained little known. When one of the main journal accounts was made public in the 1950s, few in the English world were interested in celebrating a Russian expedition. 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Stephen R. Bown.

Dec. 2

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
Dec. 2, 1958: George Saunders born.

Q&A with Attica Locke

Attica Locke, photo by Mel Melcon, Los Angeles Times

Attica Locke is the author of the new novel Bluebird, Bluebird. Her other books include the novels Pleasantville and Black Water Rising, and she has been a writer and producer for the TV series Empire. She is a native of Houston, and she now lives in Los Angeles.

Q: How did you come up with the idea for Bluebird, Bluebird, and for your character Darren Mathews?

A: I grew up in East Texas and all of my family roots can be traced to towns along Highway 59, and I wanted to start a book series that is steeped in that world. Imagining small town secrets was half the fun.

Darren came to me as a character when I realized I would need a character who could confront mysteries up and down Highway 59. Texas Rangers have wide jurisdiction and so it seemed like a fit.

Also, writing about a black law enforcement officer who is ambivalent about the badge seemed interesting to me and a perfect character for our time.

Q: How important is setting to you in your work, and could this book have been set in another place besides East Texas?

A: Absolutely not. Setting is everything to me in all of my books.

Q: What do you think the story you tell says about race relations in the United States today?

A: I think it explores the ways in which black folks are often ambivalent about the places we call home. How do we love a country that so often shows disdain for our very existence? And what are the ways to make that better? Can we look to the law to help us? Or is the law the thing we need to help from?

I also hope the book hints that the ways that hatred is rarely as simple as it looks on the surface. Beneath it can be (and often is) feelings of envy, obsession, and even sometimes unconscious love.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: Book two and a pilot script for a TV version of Darren Matthews. Plus other stuff.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: The title is taken from a John Lee Hooker song: "Bluebird, bluebird, take this letter down south for me."

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Attica Locke.

Q&A with Jonathan Catherman

Jonathan Catherman is the author of The Manual to Middle School: The "Do This, Not That" Survival Guide for Guys. His sons Reed and Cole also contributed to the book. Catherman also has written The Manual to Manhood. He is an educational consultant, and he lives in North Carolina.

Q: How did you come up with the idea for The Manual to Middle School, and why did you focus on boys?

A: I wrote The Manual to Manhood book for my teenage sons, but they were 7 and 10 when I started. I walked away from a car accident [and thought], “If anything ever happens to me...” It turned into the manuscript. A friend said this is far more than a letter to my boys.

Then they came of age. Reed was in 8^th grade and Cole was in 5^th and was moving to middle school. One night Cole started asking Reed questions about middle school…I said, This could be another book! I said, What if we work on the project together? It was literally dinner conversation for us!

I was speaking on the road, and got to ask middle school educators what are the top topics. I’d run them by the boys.

Q: Yes, I was going to ask you about their role in helping with the book.

A: I’d work on the project and try to capture the voice received by a 5^th grader. [They’d say,] it’s dumb, or nobody talks like that any more. They’d be my filter. I’d say, tell me about the media center, or tell me about fights at school. I’d get their perspective and go back to my career as a sociologist, and that’s how we compiled the book!

They did have assignments. We had a grid board in my office. They worked through much of the jokes [in the book].

Q: What are some of the most common perceptions and misperceptions about boys in middle school?

A: The common perception is that they’re not prepared. Academically I believe they are, but socially and emotionally, when compared to girls, they run about two years behind. Especially with [kids today] being more connected to the digital and virtual.

Girls are better at communications. Boys communicate differently. That’s often not what the school is needing of them. The accuracies would be that boys are entering middle school a little on the lagging side.

But the misperception is that they don’t care. I believe they really do. Boys put up a bit of a front. No one wants to have B.O., or have acne, or stumble through talking to a girl. When you boil it down, they have feelings too!

Q: As you noted, you’ve also written The Manual to Manhood. What age group is this geared toward?

A: It’s geared for about 5^th grade through high school. I wrote it with middle school in mind. I knew they’d be that age. If you get on Amazon or Facebook, there are a lot of messages with references to as young as 5^th grade…

Q: You’ve mentioned you’re working on a project for girls now?

A: There are two books. One will be out May 1, The Girls’ Guide to Conquering Life. My wife, Erica, co-authored it. The Manual to Manhood’s topics are pretty much gender-neutral, but she recalibrated it for girls.

The book I’m staring at, at the computer now, is the middle school version. Almost all the topics are the same [as the boys’ book], except it’s perfume vs. cologne…

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: The focal point of all these books is really about skills and character. We’re trying to get readers to develop and practice skills and develop and practice character, so they can gain respect and avoid embarrassment.

I’m 100 percent convinced…if we can get them to practice levels of success with the small, they can [have the same experience] with much bigger [things]. With book reports, you learn to write a book report for school so you can write a report for work…with pop quizzes, they’re every day in life…

This is the process of practicing. You practice well now with the little things so you can gain experience with things seen as mattering more. Any great job interview starts with a great handshake.

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

Dec. 1

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
Dec. 1, 1886: Rex Stout born.