March 7

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
March 7, 1952: William Boyd born.

Q&A with Elizabeth Acevedo

Elizabeth Acevedo, photo by Bethany Thomas

Elizabeth Acevedo is the author of the new young adult novel in verse The Poet X. Her other work includes the poetry collection Beastgirl & Other Origin Myths. She lives in Washington, D.C.

Q: How did you come up with the idea for The Poet X and for your character Xiomara? 

A: When I was a teenager, I participated in youth poetry slams and I loved how freeing it felt to write poems and then perform them on stage. My weekly poetry club meetings were such an empowering space and I wanted to capture some of that on these pages.

Xiomara is a very different kind of poet and young person than I was, but I came up with her by thinking of what it means for a young girl of color, who is struggling with silence, to have to learn how to speak up in every aspect of her life.

Q: What impact has poetry had on your own life, and what do you hope readers take away from the story? 

A: I’ve been a poet for many years and have been lucky enough to bring poetry to different classrooms and universities throughout the country. I hope readers take away a message of empathy and love and the power of language to encourage both. 

Q: Did you know how the book would end before you started writing it, or did you make many changes along the way? 

A: I always knew where the novel was going in terms of the final scenes, but not how I would get there. So, the destination was always clear but the GPS route was a turn-by-turn decision.

In general, I don’t outline even if I do have a general sense of where the story needs to go. This kind of writing allowed for a lot of surprising moments, which is one of the things I look forward to when I write: the moments of creative delight at solving a problem of my own making. 

Q: Have you been influenced by any particular poets? 

A: One of my favorite poets is Lucille Clifton; her spare but poignant language has been a huge influence. A contemporary poet I am a big fan of is Natalie Diaz. Her work was a huge inspiration for my own first poetry manuscript.

Q: What are you working on now? 

A: My second novel! It’s in prose and we are aiming to release it in 2019. I can’t wait for folks to dig into this new story! 

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: I have more information about my writing and upcoming events and projects on my website.

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

Q&A with Alison Gaylin

Alison Gaylin is the author of the new novel If I Die Tonight. Her other books include the novels Hide Your Eyes and Stay With Me. She lives in Woodstock, New York.

Q: How did you come up with the idea for If I Die Tonight?

A: Two events involving social media inspired me. The first happened a few years ago, when my daughter was 13. There was a hit-and-run incident in a nearby town, involving two teenage boys from rival high schools.

What I found so remarkable about the incident was the way in which the story got spun, particularly by the kids, into something that it wasn't. Through small-town gossip and the use of social media, the narrative became something completely removed from the real story, something much bigger and elaborate and clear-cut.

One of the boys also had a 13-year-old brother, and I found myself wondering what he was going through...

The other thing that inspired me was when Sinead O'Connor posted a suicide note on Facebook. She was obviously very troubled, and being an old fan of her music I found it heartbreaking.

But the thing that I noticed most about her suicide note was that it had over 2,000 likes on it. That callousness that social media brings out in people -- I find that so scary, and so that too was something that inspired the idea.

Q: You tell the story from several characters' perspectives. How did you choose your point-of-view characters?

A: I often write from many points of view, and in choosing those POVs, I try to figure out who can tell the story in the most dynamic way.

Connor and Jackie seemed natural points of view to tell the story from, because they're the two people who care most about Wade and who have the most stake in the idea of him having committed this awful crime.

Pearl was a character I thought of before I wrote this book. She was sort of a character in search of a story, and I thought that her own backstory could make her uniquely suited to solve this crime -- to see it from a different perspective, knowing that people often get judged by others who don't know the whole story.

Also, she seemed like, given her unusual background, she'd be more willing to risk her life in order to get to the truth.

Aimee En was another character I kept thinking about -- someone who was famous once, a long time ago. That type of fame fascinates me. She also seemed, like Wade, to be such an outsider in this town that her perspective of it would be different and interesting.

Q: Do you usually plot out your novels before you start writing, or make changes along the way?

A: I make changes along the way, which is often terrifying! But I tried outlining in the past and I never really stuck to it. What I like to know before I start writing is what everybody's secret is. Then, while I'm writing, I figure out ways for those secrets to come out.

Q: The novel takes place in a town in New York State's Hudson Valley. How important is setting in your work, and could this have been set elsewhere?

A: There's something really interesting about the historic towns in the Hudson Valley, which, by the way, is where I live! It's really not that far from New York City, but the towns tend to be so sheltered and insular, you may as well be in the middle of nowhere.

They're also picturesque in a very specific way -- window boxes everywhere, even on the police station! The feeling of safety, that colonial charm.... All of that was very important to me in telling this specific story, which deals a lot in appearances versus reality.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I'm currently writing a book called Closure, about a true crime podcast, a home invasion, and a woman whose beloved mother may or may not have been a mass murderer in the 1970s.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: I don't think so! Thanks so much for these questions. They're great, and it's been a pleasure.

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

March 6

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
March 6, 1927: Gabriel García Márquez born.

Q&A with Linda Gordon

Linda Gordon is the author of the new book The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition. Her other books include Dorothea Lange and Impounded. She is the Florence Kelley Professor of History at New York University, and she lives in New York and Madison, Wisconsin.

Q: You’ve noted that this book was originally a chapter in a larger book about 20^th century social movements in the United States. How much was the 2016 election an impetus for you to write this book?

A: The impetus to expand the chapter into a book was that [factor], but I had already written the chapter in the larger book, so it was a little of both.

Q: What accounted for the Klan’s rise in the 1920s, and how strong was its influence during that decade?

A; There are two factors. First is the rise in the volume of immigration starting in the 1880s. They were not mainly Protestants—you have all these Catholics, Jews, Greek and Russian Orthodox people, who were made to seem like a threat.

The second happened directly after World War I—a real rise in prosecution and persecution of dissenters with many deportations. It set a precedent for the idea that dissent should be repressed. That is a lot of what the Klan is about—the notion that we should all be alike. It was very uncomfortable with diversity….

Q: How does it compare with other movements of the time?

A: The film Birth of a Nation premiered in 1915. The Klan used that as an enormous tool in recruitment…It was oriented toward the South and toward scurrilous stigmatizing of African Americans. One of the things I felt from writing about this was that one kind of bigotry builds another.

Q: Did you need to do a lot more research for this book, and did you learn anything that particularly surprised you?

A: I had to do a lot more. There is no central archive of Klan material in this country. I was benefiting from previous articles that were very specific about the Klan in various locations.

From the beginning, what was clear to me was that I wanted to do a general survey, but I [did focus on particular locations; for example,] Oregon; there’s no way someone could travel all over.

Q: What did you see in terms of regional differences or similarities?

A: The Klan was extremely flexible and opportunistic. In the West, they went after Mexican Americans in California and Japanese Americans in the Upper Pacific states.

Also, they were completely unprincipled. In California, they cooperated with the Irish Catholic Church against the Mexican Catholics, despite the Klan’s general anti-Catholicism.

In one of the Klan manuals, directed to small chapters, one of the first instructions is to research your region and see what issues and grievances are in your region. These were very sophisticated people.

Q: In Clay Risen’s review of the book in The New York Times, he says, “It’s hard to finish a single page in Gordon’s book without a slight tingle of fearful familiarity, of reverberations in rhetoric and public opinion—a recognition that, maybe, it has always been thus.” What do you think of that comment?

A: I have no particular expertise on the hate groups of today. I know what I read in the newspapers and from the Southern Poverty Law Center.

In terms of the Klan today, there are some Klan groups but they’re very small, a tiny part of the growth of white nationalism and the alt-right. We can’t judge it by asking how many people are in the Klan. That was true in the ‘20s as well. People were not members, but shared the Klan’s values.

The Klan today and white nationalist groups have no central leader; no Imperial Wizard gives directions to all these groups. That is both good news and bad.

Good because they don’t have the strength a central organization might give, and bad because there’s no control over them. My sense is a lot of white nationalist groups are appealing to young men. That was not true of the Klan. These young guys are just itching for a physical fight, and that’s dangerous, that lack of any central control.

Q: Where do you see the movement going in the future?

A: I wish I could say I hope they’re going to decline, but they have a bully pulpit from the president. In one way, the president does what the Imperial Wizard did in the 1920s. Dogwhistling. He’s constantly putting out messages that encourage racism, xenophobia, anti-immigrant [sentiments].

I don’t want to have to write a book like that again. It gets you down.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: The book engendered a lot of publicity for all the bad reasons. I’m doing lectures, publicity, op-eds.

Q: Anything else we should know about the book?

A: One of the things that’s most controversial is about the role of women in the Klan. I gave a talk [recently] and a young person asked, How can you call these women feminists?

A lot of people want to assume that to be a feminist you have to be relatively liberal or progressive. I know the way I wrote that chapter would evoke controversy, but we need to understand that no particular tendency owns feminism.

There are certain versions of feminism that are compatible with this kind of bigotry. When I was doing the research, I found not the slightest indication that any of the women were critical of what the male Klan [members were] doing.

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

March 5

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
March 5, 1870: Frank Norris born.

Q&A with Barbara Claypole White

Barbara Claypole White is the author of the new novel The Promise Between Us. Her other novels include The Unfinished Garden and Echoes of Family. She is originally from England and now lives in North Carolina.

Q: This is the second book you've written that deals with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), an issue that affects your family, and you've noted that your "learning curve continues." Why did you choose to focus on OCD in this novel?

A: I've wanted to write more OCD since creating James Nealy, the hero of my debut, The Unfinished Garden.

However, I didn’t find the right story until a heartbreaking incident rippled through the OCD community. A teacher was brave enough to post in one of our closed—supposedly confidential—support groups about her battles with unwanted thoughts of harming children. Her comments were leaked to her employer, and she was fired.

I was mad, I was upset, and I decided to channel my emotions into a story that would illuminate a corner of OCD that carries unbearable shame.

Most people assume OCD is about compulsive behaviors, such as hand washing. For some people, it is. For many others, however, the anxiety OCD generates is purely mental and easily hidden.

OCD is an allergy to life that creates irrational fear in the absence of true threat. That fear is generated through repetitive, intrusive, obsessive thoughts and images.

A horrible thought—I could drop my baby—isn’t a fact. It doesn’t make you dangerous, but it will torment you, especially if it morphs in a fear that whispers, “What if I want to drop my baby?” And that is the postpartum OCD voice.

I was already messing around with the story of a mother who’d run away because of undiagnosed mental illness, when I realized my heroine was trapped in postpartum OCD. I welded the ideas together and found my premise: Can you be a good mother if you abandon your baby?

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

A: I had various working titles, none of them memorable, and kept circling the word “promise” because much of the story grew out of a childhood promise.

Then I asked: What’s this story really about? A small group of good people who make bad decisions for the best reason: to protect a child. Once they get beyond the baggage of the nightmare situation they’ve created, they discover that between them, they’ve got loads and loads of potential—or promise.

Q: You tell the story from various characters' perspectives. Did you write the novel in the order in which it appears, or did you move things around as you wrote?

A: I write chronologically, but I'm a big re-writer and end up cutting and adding scenes. Originally, I had three POVs: from Katie, Callum, and Lilah. Then it became obvious that Maisie needed a few chapters, and once I released Jake on the page, he took over. I love that readers watch the same story unfold from multiple angles, each with a different perspective.

Q: Why did you choose to make your character Katie a metal artist?

A: I found Katie at the hair salon, while admiring a piece of metal art from local artist Jackie MacLeod. Once I’d interviewed Jackie and learned about welding, I understood how the process quietened the noise in Katie's head.

It was important to me that readers understand Katie’s bravery. Fear of a Winnie the Pooh lamp shorting out set the story in motion. Learning to tackle fire was the ultimate exposure to that fear. It proved Katie’s a fighter.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: A story based around the idea that family never forgets, and not in a good way.

Maggie King, 10 years clean and sober, is on an impossible mission to erase the shame she heaped on her prominent North Carolina family. Committed to becoming a forgettable nonentity, Maggie has no social life and finds joy in her job as the social director of a memory care home.

At night, she posts reviews to her anonymous book blog and keeps a scrapbook dedicated to celebrities who’ve committed suicide. She calls them “the fallen.”

But when she connects with a tortured teen through work, Maggie stumbles into the world of cyber bullying. And discovers her spectacular history of failure has the power to change lives…if she takes it public.

Did I mention the hero runs a craft gin distillery? As you can image, the field research continues to be tough for a gin-lover.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: Check out my website for my social media links and information about my books. Thank you, Deborah!

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Barbara Claypole White.