Q&A with John Vialet

John Vialet is the author of the new novel Grafton House. He lives in the Washington, D.C., area.

Q: How did you come up with the idea for your novel Grafton House?

A: I wanted to write a novel about Newport. I began visiting Newport in the ‘70s when my wife’s family bought a house there. One of the things tourists do in Newport is visit the enormous mansions the super-rich built at the end of the 19th century. I wanted to write something about the mansions.

I remembered that when we were first married, my wife had a summer job as a secretary at an MIT conference center called Endicott House in Dedham, Mass.

Endicott House is an enormous mansion built by a multimillionaire named Henry Bradford Endicott, who grew up poor and then made a fortune in the 19th Century. The Endicott family gave the mansion to MIT in the 1950s.

So I decided that I could write about an imaginary Newport mansion built by a multimillionaire, donated to Harvard, and used by Harvard to house a think tank and a conference center. I named it Grafton House after the street behind our house in Chevy Chase, Md.

Q: You have a huge cast of characters. What was your writing process like? Did you jump from one character to another as you wrote, or did you focus on one character’s story at a time?

A: A few years before I started thinking about my novel, my wife had started writing a murder mystery about a research lab in Washington. She dropped the project after a few chapters but they included a scene in Newport and an interesting young woman investigator.

I didn’t really have a plot in mind but I had to start somewhere. So I decided to begin by describing an interesting young woman who is being sent by Harvard to Newport to follow up on reports of problems at the research center. 

I envisioned a woman looking (and feeling) like the character Wendy Hiller played in Michael Powell’s 1945 film I Know Where I’m Going (which of course Phoebe has never heard of).

In the first scene I wrote (and later dropped), I described Phoebe Snow arriving at the Amtrak station in Kingston, R.I. I had in mind a picture of Wendy Hiller’s film character on board a train to Scotland and a remote island in the Hebrides.

When Phoebe arrives in Kingston, she is met by the Grafton House groundskeeper who is carrying a sign that says “Dr. Snow.” He doesn’t realize that Dr. Snow is a woman, which amuses Phoebe.

As they drive to Grafton House they ask each other questions about who they are and what they do. Answering those questions is the way I began creating them as real people. And as I did this they came alive and started to behave independently. I sort of channeled what they were thinking and what they would do in various situations.

And that’s how I came up with the other characters in the book. I would come to a place where I needed someone to do something and their character would come to life.

Once I had a story going well, I would come up with anther story and get that underway. I would go back and forth among the stories, keeping more or less within the fourth of July weekend time frame. And I would periodically pause and have an overview chapter, which briefed the reader on what was going on with everyone in the book.

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

A: I had no idea how the book would end when I started. I was making up the plot as I went along. It took me some time to figure out how to come to an acceptable end.

Q: Who are some of your favorite writers?

A: I like David Lodge a lot. If I can find his mailing address, I’m going to send him a copy of Grafton House because I think he would enjoy it. I also like Eudora Welty, Walker Percy, Muriel Spark, and Mario Vargas Llosa.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I’ve started a novel that may be about growing up in Louisiana and/or may be about getting old. I’m not far enough along to say which (or both).

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: Writing Grafton House was one of the most satisfying things I’ve ever done. I spent six months in the Army after my freshman year at Harvard. When I got back to Cambridge, I started writing short stories about Louisiana and the Army.

I won the Kirkland House short story prize my sophomore year, and I did well in various creative writing courses. I tried writing fiction after I graduated, but I didn’t really have much that I wanted to say. One of the few advantages of growing old is that I definitely have things I want to say.

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

March 10

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
March 10, 1867: Lillian Wald born.

Q&A with Agnès Poirier

Agnès Poirier is the author of the new book Left Bank: Art, Passion, and the Rebirth of Paris, 1940-50. Her other books include Touché: A French Woman's Take on the English, and her work has appeared in a variety of publications, including The Guardian, The Observer, and The Nation. She lives in Paris and London.

Q: Why did you decide to focus on the literary world in Paris in the 1940s in your new book?

A: Very good question! Originally, I had planned to study 1944-1954, the immediate post-war, and I did research this period for 18 months, but then, when I started to write, I found myself in front of a dilemma: how can one start in 1944 without evoking at length the four previous years! Impossible.

I had to start in fact in 1939. All my "characters" would not have become who they are without those crucial four years. Also, when I reached 1950, I had already written around 800 pages, i.e. twice what my publisher had in mind, so we thought, let's keep it to a decade: 1940-1950. And I cut the manuscript down to a dense 350-400 pages (the UK edition is 400 pages long).

Q: The book includes a huge cast of characters. How did you choose which ones to focus on most prominently?

A: There were far more characters in the original and too long version of the book! So I had to lose some very colorful ones. However, there were some I couldn't part with, among them, Jacques Jaujard who opens the book, the saviour of the Louvre Museum, and Irwin Shaw, the writer and screenwriter.

I wanted a mélange of well-known figures I couldn't ignore (Sartre, Beauvoir, Camus, for instance) with forgotten figures such as Janet Flanner, Art Buchwald, Theodore H. White, and unknown ones such as Edith Thomas. And of course I couldn't do without Miles Davis, Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, Saul Bellow, Arthur Koestler, Richard Wright.

It is an eclectic mix which mirrors my inter-disciplinary taste. I was charmed by every one of them, sometimes surprised and irritated, in different ways, (Saul Bellow is a very contrarian character, for instance). I had their pictures pinned on my wall while I wrote the book. I felt their presence, or their spirit.

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

A: That memory and truth are decidedly a murky business! And that talking to survivors and getting their testimonies is not a guarantee of historical accuracy. Facts only are reliable but then every one has a different take on them, a different interpretation. Truth is somewhere in the mist. This is why I wrote that "Left Bank" is a historical reconstruction based on facts.

Q: Is there a modern-day equivalent to Paris’s cultural life during this period?

A: Yes, there is but then it is to be found a little everywhere in Paris and in its suburbs too. It is not as geographically intense and focused as it was then. This is why postwar Paris's Left Bank was such a remarkable place to live in. So many Nobel and Pulitzer prizes concentrated on just a few streets!

Q: What are you working on now?

A: Am back to writing about and commenting the news (Mostly European news, political and cultural) in print and for radio and television. Am waiting to see if Left Bank finds a readership before embarking on a similar adventure. It is a lot of work but a wonderful journey, one which I'd love to repeat.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: (That I think Brexit is madness !)

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

March 9

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
March 9, 1947: Keri Hulme born.

Q&A with Edward Dolnick

Edward Dolnick is the author of the new book The Seeds of Life: From Aristotle to da Vinci, from Sharks' Teeth to Frogs' Pants, the Long and Strange Quest to Discover Where Babies Come From. His other books include The Clockwork Universe and The Forger's Spell, and his work has appeared in a variety of publications, including The Boston Globe and The Atlantic. He lives in Virginia and New York City. 

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

A: It is a curious one. I had written a previous book, The Clockwork Universe, about planets and stars and such. It dawned on me that people figured out those questions before they figured out life on earth.

This should be easy, but it came 200 years later! How come the hard questions were the easy ones and the easy questions were the hard ones? How come Newton was before Darwin?

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

A: It was lots of research, and to my surprise, mostly unfamiliar territory, not just to me but to general readers. There was a lot in textbooks on embryology, but it had seldom been told as a story. The research was odd, esoteric, in bits and pieces. I was probably on some watch list for sex manuals from the 1600s!

Q: Of all the scientists whose work you examined, were there some whom you found particularly fascinating, either in terms of their discoveries or their methodology?

A: I did come to like some better than others. One favorite was Leeuwenhoek, the Dutch microscope man. He was so fascinated by everything. At the time, religion was terribly important, the notion that God created everything, so why would he create things that were difficult to see?

Now [Leeuwenhoek] does look, and is thrilled! He sees every drop of water, he’s making his wife open her mouth so he can look at her gums—nothing is beneath his notice.

Q: Were there any scientists you came to dislike?

A: The peculiar thing was since the book was about men, women, sex, and babies, sexism--or presuming men were great and women were not up to much--was an important part of the story.

There were lots of men thumping themselves on the chest, not looking around at all. There were too many villains to name in that regard.

Q: Looking at the subtitle, what role do sharks’ teeth and frogs’ pants play?

A: Part of the reason for such a long subtitle is that I wanted to convey that [the book] would be fun to read. It attempts to be serious but won’t be homework to read.

With the sharks’ teeth, the scientists were into everything in the 1600s and 1700s, nearly any question you could ask. There was a fellow who found sharks’ teeth far from the ocean. He was a geologist. That mystery led him on a path to how all sorts of mysteries came to be. I was intrigued that the same fellow would find himself veering into biology.

With the frogs’ pants, that [involves] one of my favorite characters, Spallanzani, at a time when they were trying to figure out how the sperm and the egg unite. The prevailing notion was that semen played a key role, but the role was mysterious—it somehow sparked the egg to life.

Spallanzani found a way to test that question. He wanted to see if you needed the sperm and the egg to touch. He would make full-body condoms for his frogs. He was sewing away at these boxers and trying to wrestle the frogs into them. Picture him—you’d have to make a lot of them. I loved the whole image of it.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: Something completely different—the Rosetta Stone and the race to decipher it. It’s Ancient Egypt, one of the greatest deciphering contests ever. No one knew what was going on in Egypt, and then in 1800 someone found the Rosetta Stone, with hieroglyphs no one could read. [They thought,] If only we could break the code. It took 20 years. It’s great fun.

Q: Anything else we should know about the book?

A: The key to it is to try to place yourself in the position of someone who didn’t know where life came from, or where babies came from, and [thought], Gee, that is a hard question. This was a basic question and a really hard question. That’s part of the fun of the book.

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Edward Dolnick.

March 8

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
March 8, 1960: Jeffrey Eugenides born.

Q&A with Jeanne Walker Harvey

Jeanne Walker Harvey is the author of the children's picture book Maya Lin: Artist-Architect of Light and Lines. Her other books include Honey Girl and My Hands Sing the Blues. She lives in the San Francisco Bay area.

Q: Why did you decide to focus on artist-architect Maya Lin in your new children's picture book?

A: My connection to this story began in college. When I was a senior in college in 1981 at Stanford, Maya Lin was a senior at Yale.  I read in the San Francisco newspaper about the exciting news that her design of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial had won the national contest that drew over 1,400 entries.

I was amazed to learn that a woman, my age, had won this contest. And I’ve always loved modern art so I thought her design, which was simple yet so powerful, was inspired. 

I closely followed the news of the many governmental hearings in Washington, D.C., and challenges that followed the announcement that Maya Lin’s design had won.

I was so impressed that she stood up to the vehement attacks on her design. It was called “a black gash of shame and sorrow” and “a ditch” and “a hole.” They wanted to add to the design, a flag at the apex where the two walls connect.

She stood by her conviction. And I wanted to share this inspirational story with children, and give them opportunity to learn about Maya Lin and her childhood and background.

Q: What do you hope kids take away from her story?

A:  I hope that children will be inspired by learning how Maya Lin stood up for what she believed and didn’t back down despite criticism. And, I hope they also want to reach for the stars – try for things that others might say are unattainable.

Q: What do you think Dow Phumiruk's illustrations add to the book?

A: Oh! Dow’s illustrations are truly amazing. I think she is incredibly talented. She truly portrayed Maya Lin’s story perfectly with a sense of beauty and simplicity that reflects Maya Lin’s style and views of art and architecture. 

Dow and I are both represented by the same amazing agent, Deborah Warren of East West Literary Agency, which makes it even more special to have done this book together. 

And we greatly benefitted from the incredible insights and editing talent of Christie Ottaviano, publisher of Christy Ottaviano Books (Henry Holt/Macmillan). Writing a children’s book is truly a collaborative process.

Q: What age group do you think would especially appreciate the book?

A: I’ve shared this book with a wide range of ages at schools, bookstores, book festivals, public community libraries, and the Library of Congress (a dream come true!). And I’m always amazed by the sensitivity and perceptions and understanding of even the younger children. 

So I would say 5 to 10 year olds. But I’ve also used this book in middle school classes as it works well to begin a discussion of the Vietnam War.

I was pleased that our book was recently given the distinction of being named a NCSS Notable Social Studies Trade Book for Young People in the picture book category.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I’m working on developing several other picture book biographies of creative people, and I’m always hopeful we’ll find a home for them.

And I’m very excited that my next picture book will be published in the fall—Boats on the Bay, illustrated by the talented Grady McFerrin and published by the wonderful Cameron + Company.

I was inspired to write the book because I spend a lot of time walking by the San Francisco Bay and looking out my window, always enchanted by the wide array of boats.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: My muse is my cat (or at least she likes to think that’s what she is). Right now she’s perched in my lap (which is better than on the keyboard which wreaks havoc).

When I visit schools and libraries, I always share photos of her and show the children some of the mischief she causes when I don’t pay enough attention to her. But then I figure it’s always good to take a break from writing and play with her – it clears my thoughts and keeps her from pulling the flowers out of the vase!

--Interview with Deborah Kalb