Q&A with Anita Hughes

Anita Hughes, photo by Sheri Geoffreys

Anita Hughes is the author of the new novel California Summer. Her other novels include Monarch Beach and Market Street. She lives in Dana Point, California.

Q: How did you come up with the idea for California Summer, and for your character Rosie?

A: I came up with the idea for California Summer remembering a bad break-up with a boyfriend. You can put your whole heart and soul into a relationship and then it's over and you have nothing. It's a frightening feeling. I wanted to make Rosie grow from the experience, and become much more confident.

Q: The book sets up a contrast between Rosie's life in Los Angeles and the new community she builds for herself in Montecito. What made you choose those two locations?

A: I spent a few days in Montecito and fell in love with it. It's so close to Los Angeles - and people from LA are frequent visitors - but the pace of life is different, there's a real small-town feeling. And it's one of the prettiest places I've ever visited!

Q: What do you think the book says about summertime, and possibilities that might occur then?

A: I think the book says that summertime is a period for re-invention. You can take a deep breath and see what is making you happy and what isn't working and make changes accordingly.

Q: Who are some of your favorite authors?

A: I love Elin Hildebrand, Mary Kay Andrews, Jane Green and Liane Moriarty.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I just finished edits on Christmas at the Chalet, which is set in St. Moritz and comes out in October. I love Christmas books and this one was a joy to write.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: Thank you for having me! Connecting with readers is my favorite part of writing.

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Anita Hughes.

July 27

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

Q&A with Joseph Crespino

Joseph Crespino is the author of the new book Atticus Finch: The Biography, which focuses on the character in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. Crespino also has written In Search of Another Country and Strom Thurmond's America. He is the Jimmy Carter Professor of History at Emory University, and he lives in Decatur, Georgia.

Q: What inspired you to write this book about the character Atticus Finch?

A: I’ve been fascinated by To Kill a Mockingbird and the character of Atticus Finch for a long time. 

Part of it is that I grew up in a small town in the Deep South that is very much like the fictional town of Maycomb, and Harper Lee’s hometown of Monroeville, Alabama. My mother’s side of the family has lived there—Macon, Mississippi—since the 1830s. 

Another part of it is that as a historian I have specialized in the history of the 20th century American South, and, in particular, the period when the region transformed from the Jim Crow era into the modern era, so roughly from the 1930s through the end of the 20th century. 

When you think about the cultural productions that came out of the South in that period, To Kill a Mockingbird is fairly unique. It not only influenced the way that people thought about the South in the era it was published; it continues to do so today, as the book remains so widely read. 

Q: In the book, you describe the contrasts between the character Atticus in To Kill a Mockingbird and his portrayal in Lee's other novel, Go Set a Watchman. What accounts for the different portrayals, and how do each of them compare with Harper Lee's father, A.C. Lee, the model for Atticus?

A: The different presentations of Atticus were dictated first and foremost by the fact that Harper Lee’s story changed. 

In Go Set a Watchman, the central drama is the adult Jean Louise coming to terms with her sense of outrage and disillusionment over discovering that her beloved father, a man so kind that he wouldn’t hurt a ground squirrel, has fallen in with the small-minded, racist reactionaries in the Citizens’ Council. 

In To Kill a Mockingbird, however, the reader sees Atticus largely, though not entirely, through the eyes of the adolescent Scout, who views her father in the limited way that adolescent children typically do. In my book, I consider how this literary decision might also have been informed by the shifting politics of the late 1950s South.

Both versions of Atticus that Harper Lee constructed – both the idealized figure from Mockingbird and the racist, reactionary figure from Watchman – were drawn, in part, from her father, A. C. Lee, who, like Atticus, was a small-town lawyer and state legislator, but who, unlike Atticus, was also the co-owner and sole editor of the local weekly newspaper, the Monroe Journal. 

A.C. edited the paper from 1929 to 1947, and maintained an active and ambitious editorial page where he wrote about not only local and state politics, but national and even international issues. 

The idealistic Atticus can be seen in A.C.’s principled stand against demagoguery in southern politics in the 1930s, or his denunciation of mob rule. 

The Atticus of Watchman can be seen in his editorials that, beginning in the late 1930s and extending through the World War II years, resented the growing influence of liberal labor and civil rights groups in national Democratic Party politics, groups that Lee felt were threatening the southern way of life.

Q: What accounts for the ongoing fascination with To Kill a Mockingbird, and what lessons do you draw from the book given today's racial climate?

A: When I give talks in front of student groups, I often ask the audience, “If you have read To Kill a Mockingbird or seen the movie, stand up.”  Invariably, it seems, roughly 80 percent of the audience stands up. Then I say, “If you read the book simply because you’re a curious person who loves to read, sit down.” Hardly anyone sits down. The point is that people have read the book typically because they have been assigned it.

And why do teachers assign it so often? Partly because it’s such a beautiful book – a wonderfully told story with vivid characters and language – but partly because the book conveys fundamental lessons about the importance of tolerance, empathy, and understanding, values that are essential in the multiracial, democratic society that we live in.

Those are critical lessons that all of us need to learn and re-learn, and I hope the book continues to be taught for many years to come. But I hope that my book – by providing a history of the struggles that Harper Lee herself went through in trying to write that book and construct the character of Atticus Finch – can help puncture some of the myths that have grown up around the novel and the character.

In terms of our racial and political climate today, I think there are some real similarities between the period when Harper Lee was writing her two novels and our own political moment. 

In the late 1950s South, right-wing reactionaries who only a few years earlier were considered jokes or nobodies in southern politics rode to power on the backs of demagogic appeals to the worst instincts of white southern voters.

Harper Lee was struggling to make sense of her own father’s principled, conservative politics in a moment when the reactionaries had pushed the conservatives aside. 

I believe she wrote the Atticus of Mockingbird in part as an appeal to white southerners who in other contexts she knew to be decent-minded, reasonable people but who had been caught up in the madness of southern massive resistance. She wrote to remind them of their best impulses, of the nobler traditions of which they were a part.    

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

A: I use a variety of historical sources that have either been previously ignored – like A. C. Lee’s editorials, as well as issues of the Monroe Journal from the 1930s through the 1960s – or that previous scholars have not had access to, like files from Harper Lee’s longtime publisher, HarperCollins, as well as letters that Harper Lee wrote in the late 1950s and early 1960s that until recently were privately held. 

Lots of things were surprising as I did my research: the fact that A. C. Lee, who had a distinguished career in law, politics, and journalism, had only an 8th grade education; finding college writings of Harper Lee’s that, placed alongside her father’s editorials from the same time, allow us to imagine the kinds of arguments and debates about big issues of race and politics that father and daughter might have been having around the dinner table in the late 1940s; discovering evidence that Harper Lee always imagined Watchman and Mockingbird as part of the same larger narrative arc; finding evidence from papers of Horton Foote, the Academy Award-winning screenwriter who adapted the novel for film, and Gregory Peck, who, of course, famously played Atticus in the Hollywood adaptation, that show how the filmmakers were debating among themselves how Atticus should be portrayed on screen.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: My current book takes as its starting point the passage that occurs in the gospels of Mark and Luke where Christ observes that a prophet is not welcome in his hometown. I’m interested in debates and struggles over race and religion in Atlanta during the period when Martin Luther King moves back to his hometown from Montgomery, Alabama.   

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: There’s lots more to say about the book, but nothing that isn’t better understood by reading the book itself. Thanks for the questions, and for your interest in my work.

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

Q&A with Stephanie Dray and Laura Kamoie

Laura Kamoie and Stephanie Dray

Stephanie Dray and Laura Kamoie are the authors of the new novel My Dear Hamilton: A Novel of Eliza Schuyler Hamilton. They also have written America's First Daughter. Dray lives near Washington, D.C., and Kamoie lives in Annapolis, Maryland.

Q: Why did you decide to focus on Eliza Schuyler Hamilton in your new book?

A: Our new My Dear Hamilton was in part inspired by the musical--I doubt this is any surprise! Laura happened to see it during its first week on Broadway, and the very next morning we talked about Eliza and decided to make her our next heroine. And we pitched the idea to our editor that very afternoon--that’s how sure we were!

Now, we had already been searching for the perfect historical figure after writing about Patsy Jefferson in our first novel, America’s First Daughter, and we loved the idea of writing next about a founding mother of the north and offering readers of both a comparative perspective on how women from various parts of the new nation experienced the birth of the country.

We also wanted to tell Eliza’s story because as far as we are aware, no one else had told the whole of it--in either fiction or non-fiction, and so My Dear Hamilton covers nearly the whole of her 97-year-long life.

Q: How did you research her life, and what did you learn that especially surprised you?

A: Since Eliza appears to have destroyed most of her own letters, we had to pull resources from everywhere we could find them. That involved significant usage of the Founders Online website via the National Archives, as well as archival research in New York and Albany.

We also used a wide variety of papers from other people and institutions of the era, including, for example, Tench Tilghman’s journal, the papers of other members of the Schuyler family, papers of an investigation from the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the Orphan Asylum Society papers at the New York Historical Society, and the published recollections of the Washington National Monument Society.

That’s just the basics of what you have to do when you choose to write about a real person, though I’m not sure either of us would characterize the research work as having been quick! What really surprised us was just how rich, active, and significant Eliza’s life was after Alexander’s death by duel.

We also visited a number of historical sites related to the story. I think our favorite--in that it was so impactful to us and on a particular scene in the book--was the Trinity Church graveyard. First of all, we found some humor in the fact that there’s a check cashing business on the other side of the street directly opposite Alexander’s tomb. And that seemed...oddly appropriate in some way!

But more seriously, when we visited the graveyard for the first time, the Trinity Root sculpture was still there--a huge 9/11 memorial of the trunk and root system of a tree that’d been knocked down on that terrible day.

The sculpture was both sad and haunting and powerful and hopeful--because the roots show all the things beneath the surface that you don’t normally see, but which are vital to sustenance and stability.

And that made us think a lot about Eliza Hamilton’s character. It felt, at least in part--in both its sadness and its strength--like an analogy for our book. And that sculpture absolutely influenced the tone of the scene we wrote in My Dear Hamilton that takes place in that graveyard.

Q: Most accounts of the Hamiltons, including the famous musical, focus on Alexander rather than Eliza. How would you describe their marriage, and why do you think there's such a fascination with them?

A: And that’s a big part of the reason why we were determined to write Eliza’s story rather than a story about their marriage or about Alexander through Eliza’s eyes.

We feel strongly that their marriage became a collaborative partnership. Some of Hamilton’s writings are in Eliza’s handwriting and Eliza frequently recounted later in her life about how she’d been Hamilton’s sounding board and muse for some of his most important writings (like Washington’s Farewell Address).

It’s important to realize that Eliza was a 23-year-old patriot in her own right when she married Alexander. Her father was the commanding officer of the whole Northern Continental Army, and she’d accompanied him to things like treaty conferences with the Iroquois Confederacy.

There are a number of instances early in their relationship that make it clear she voiced her opinion, sought to influence Alexander, and was involved in his work.

As far as why there’s such such interest in them, clearly Lin-Manuel Miranda’s masterful Hamilton: An American Musical opened the floodgates to restoring the Hamiltons to their rightful place in the pantheon of celebrated Founding Fathers (and Mothers!).

But early American history also seems to be having a bit of a cultural “moment.”

In addition to Hamilton, there’s been the Outlander TV series, and the recent AMC series, TURN: Washington’s Spies, just to name a few. Really, historical TV series from all eras seem to be doing really well. Think of The Crown, Victoria, Downton Abbey, the White Princess/White Queen series, The Last Kingdom, or even the new The Terror.

Clearly, popular culture is opening some doors where historical stories are concerned. 

Q: What do you think Eliza's experiences say about women in the 18th and 19th centuries?

A: In both of our co-authored novels, we saw how much Patsy Jefferson and Eliza Hamilton did to make possible the work and contributions of the important men in their lives. Neither Thomas Jefferson nor Alexander Hamilton would’ve been able to achieve all they did without the assistance and contributions of these women.

But what’s remembered and widely known about these women is so little compared to what they actually did and achieved. Our research proves that women were actively engaged in building, protecting, and defending our new nation in ways both large and small.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: We just finished a novel on the women of the French Revolution - and had so much fun collaborating on America’s sister revolution! We can’t wait to share more about this amazing story!

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: We feel strongly that centering historical women in their own stories is an important enterprise that makes a real contribution--because stories like ours make it clear that the Revolutionary War wasn’t won by white men alone, and the new nation wasn’t built by white men alone, either.

All groups in society--enslaved persons, free black people, Native Americans, and women--played important roles in, made sacrifices for, defended, and contributed to the founding of the United States. Those are all stories that deserve to be told.

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

July 26

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
July 26, 1856: George Bernard Shaw born.

Q&A with Emily Arsenault

Emily Arsenault is the author of the new novel The Last Thing I Told You. Her other novels include The Evening Spider and The Leaf Reader. She lives in Massachusetts.

Q: How did you come up with the idea for The Last Thing I Told You, and for your characters Nadine and Henry?

A: I really wanted to write about a teenage girl who does something shockingly, unexpectedly violent—and then revisit her as an adult.

Nadine’s personality and inner conflicts were clear to me very early on in the writing process. It was important to me to give readers an intimate look into her psyche, so that’s why there’s such a focus on her therapy sessions and even her therapist’s files.

I wanted to give readers glimpses of Nadine from different angles. I didn’t want it to be easy to decide if she was likeable or forgivable. And I hoped this would become a question readers would be asking themselves throughout the story—alongside the more factual investigative questions of the murder mystery.

But I felt I needed a counterpoint to Nadine’s psychological turmoil—as well as someone to perform the investigation. That’s when I started developing the detective character, Henry.

Although he’s more relatable than Nadine, I found him more difficult to flesh out. He is as complex as Nadine, but his inner conflicts are more subtle. It took me a while to get them right.

Q: You alternate between Nadine's and Henry's points of view. Did you write the book in the order in which it appears, or did you focus more on one character before turning to the other?

A: I didn’t write the book in order. I wrote about half of Nadine’s portion while I was still struggling with Henry’s opening scenes. With Henry, I had to do a lot more research—on police procedure, primarily.

Also, his voice was not as clear to me in the beginning. I had to do a lot of thinking and revising to make his story feel genuine to both me and my editor. Male narrators always take me longer to develop. I’m constantly second guessing myself about what a guy—and in this case a cop—would say or do in the situations I’ve set up.

Q: The novel takes place in a small town in Connecticut. How important is setting to you in your writing?

A: It depends on the novel. I think that Connecticut itself isn’t so important to this story as the idea of a small, suburban town—the kind that’s supposed to be ideal for raising kids.

Both Nadine and Henry grew up there, and feel defined by their impression of how the town perceives them. I think this is a common experience, and wanted to explore how people can get caught up in that kind of thinking—even in adulthood.

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

A: I knew what the biggest reveals were going to be from the beginning. This isn’t always the case for me—sometimes I change my mind half or three-quarters of the way through and have to rewrite large portions of the book. I got lucky this time.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I’m working on a novel about a group of parents in an isolated Vermont town. It’s about tensions between families whose kids are classmates. There’s a lot of seething resentment, and then there’s an untimely death. That’s about all I should say.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: This book is pretty different from my previous ones. It’s maybe a little less quirky, a little darker psychologically. I hope readers enjoy the departure!

Thanks for the opportunity to discuss my book!

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

Q&A with Maya Alexandri

Maya Alexandri is the author of the new story collection The Plague Cycle. She also has written the novel The Celebration Husband, and her work has appeared in a variety of publications, including Scarlet Leaf Review and Dime Show Review.

Q: What was the inspiration for your story collection The Plague Cycle?

A: I like to run. When I run, I often listen to music and allow my imagination to conjure fantastical montages. 

Years ago, when running on a treadmill, listening to something—I don’t remember what—I imagined a group of people traversing an impenetrable landscape, running from something, to something—it was a montage, the narrative was not defined—and using a hologram of a massive monster to protect themselves. 

The idea was that they were vulnerable, on foot, running through this inhospitable, stark landscape, and armed only with this capacity to unleash a horror to scare anyone who might intend to harm them. 

Much later, when I was writing the first story in The Plague Cycle, “The Sudd,” I was again running on a treadmill, and I remembered my fantasy. 

By then, that fantasy montage had been hobnobbing in my brain with Tayeb Salih’s brilliant novel, Season of Migration to the North, which I first read in 1993 and have read repeatedly ever since; Helen Epstein’s keen reporting on the 2014 Ebola outbreak in The New York Review of Books; Richard Preston’s excellent account of Ebola in Sierre Leone in The New Yorker; my own experiences living and working in Kenya; and undoubtedly many other images, imaginations, experiences, and works of art. 

And from that multi-dimensional seed, The Plague Cycle grew.

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

A: This is a tough question!  I do not know how the book’s title was chosen: the title came to me; maybe it chose me. When I realized that the stories I had written were a collection, I found the name in my head: The Plague Cycle.  It felt right.

The title signifies to me Greek drama, epic stories—stories that unfold across successive generations, recounting actions that reverberate, their consequences rattling down the spine of human history.

Q: You’ve written a novel as well as stories—do you have a preference?

A: I love the novel as a form. The novel can distill the epic poem and its successor, the play—both communal, publicly-performed art forms—into a private experience; what incredible power! 

And life is long. Life stories are long, misshapen, inconsistent, immersive, and persevering. Long attention spans are the most comprehensively and deeply rewarded. Novels tell the story of a life.

But short stories are very satisfying to write. And—I think—to read. Also, in The Plague Cycle, I surprised myself by using the short form to producing something that feels, to me, like it delivers what I always hope a novel will achieve.

So, in conclusion, if I have a preference, it is not very well rationalized. 

Q: Which authors do you particularly admire?

A: The older I get, the more I am overwhelmed by Shakespeare, his breadth, imagination, and humor. I have been going through a period of obsession with Homer’s The Iliad, which is a follow-up to my earlier obsession with Ovid’s The Art of Love.  

I am smitten by poets. Mary Ruefle’s poem “Blood Soup” is one of many poems to which I return to drink the rejuvenating waters; Louis MacNeice’s “Thalassa” is another such poem that has eased my agitation in agitating times. 

The novelists who transfix me are too numerous—we are a species blessed by an extraordinary number of superb novelists!—a smattering of my favorites include Jane Austen, George Eliot, P.G. Wodehouse, Henry James, J.G. Ballard, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Javier Marias. 

And George Orwell. He is dead, but maybe I am in love with him anyway.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I am writing a dark, narratively-lavish short story inspired by a similar conceit that apparently fascinated Henry James and led him to write The Turn of the Screw: a ghost that haunts an adult woman by appearing to her child.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: That we live in a society where professional writing is so frequently incompatible with economic self-sufficiency is grievous. 

I have so much admiration for the courage, perseverance, and kindness of writers who continue to contribute their gifts for the benefit of readers despite the inadequacy of economic incentive. 

The writer’s struggle is predictable; one aspect of being a writer that has surprised me with its tremendous rewards has been interacting with, reading, mentoring, and learning from younger writers. 

I am in a Skype creative writing group with an incredibly wonderful group of writers who studied at Goucher College.

Fellowship and friendship, giving and receiving, on this writerly path, is a buoyant and (for me) unexpected parallel to communing with other writers through their works (for example, dead writers, or writers inaccessible because of geography or fame).  

--Interview with Deborah Kalb