March 25, 1881: Mary Webb born.
Monday, March 25, 2019
Sunday, March 24, 2019
Q&A with Patricia Harman
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| Patricia Harman, photo by Bob Kosturko |
Patricia Harman is the author of the new novel Once a Midwife, part of her Hope River series, which also includes The Midwife of Hope River and The Reluctant Midwife. She worked as a midwife for more than 30 years, and she lives in Morgantown, West Virginia.
Q:
Why did you decide to return to your character Patience Hester and the
community of Hope River in your new novel?
A:
When I wrote my first novel featuring Patience Hester, I didn’t know it would
become a series. I just wanted to write about a midwife set in the Great
Depression because it was the beginning of the Great Recession we recently
lived through.
Interestingly,
when I finished the book, I found I didn’t want to leave Patience or her
fictional community. They had become real to me and I wanted to know what would
happen to them next.
Q:
How do you think Patience has changed over the course of the time you've been
writing about her?
A:
Patience was a radical in her youth. She was a suffragette and worked for the
woman’s right to vote; she passed out birth control information on the streets
of Pittsburgh. She was a socialist and marched with the United Mine
Workers.
In
the new book, Once a Midwife, she is a mother of four, a midwife who does home
births, a wife. She has settled down, but she still cares passionately about
the world.
Q:
The novel focuses in part on World War II-era conscientious objectors. Why did
you choose that as one of the themes in the book?
A:
Daniel Hester, Patience’s husband, fought in the First World War. In previous
books he spoke of “war as hell.” My husband was a conscientious objector during
the war in Vietnam.
When
I began the book, I thought to myself, what if Daniel refused to co-operate
with the draft? What if he was an objector during World War II? This was a
different war than the war in Vietnam. The USA and the Allies were fighting
against Hitler.
How
would Dan’s objections be received by the community? How would they affect his
marriage if he and Patience didn’t agree? The questions fascinated me…so I
wrote the book.
Q:
What kind of research did you do to write the book, and did you learn anything
that particularly surprised you?
A:
All my historical fiction books are extensively researched. Fortunately, you
can Google anything, and I did (on almost every page).
One
thing I didn’t realize is that up until the attack on Pearl Harbor most
Americans felt it was Europe’s war, something we didn’t need to get involved
in. I had never heard of the America First Committee, an organization with
chapters in every state that lobbied the government to STAY OUT. It all changed
after the attack on our naval base in Hawaii.
Q:
What are you working on now?
A:
I’m back to writing about our friends in the Hope River Valley. The new novel,
A Midwife’s Song, is set in 1956, as the civil rights struggle begins in the
U.S. Patience and her friend and fellow midwife, Bitsy, are actively
involved.
Patience
is having trouble with her grown kids. Bitsy’s adopted son, Willie, has
returned from the Korean War with a terrible wound.
Meanwhile,
someone is leaving the journals of old Mrs. Potts, a former slave, on
Patience’s porch. The journals tell her story of escape to Canada. Who’s leaving the
journals on the porch and why? It’s a mystery.
As
usual the book follows the story line of many characters besides Patience, but
I can’t tell you more. You have to read the book!
Q:
Anything else we should know?
A:
Here’s a trailer for Once A Midwife. I had fun making it and you might enjoy it.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
Saturday, March 23, 2019
Q&A with Camille Acker
Camille Acker is the author of the short story collection Training School for Negro Girls. She also co-edited the book Dismantle: An Anthology of Writing from the VONA/Voices Writing Workshop, and her work has appeared in a variety of publications, including The New York Times Book Review and Electric Literature. She is a visiting assistant professor in the creative writing program at New Mexico State University.
Q:
Over how long a period did you write the stories in Training School for Negro
Girls, and do you see common themes running through the collection?
A:
I wrote the initial draft of the book over the course of about a year at the
end of my MFA program in New Mexico. The revisions, however, were over about
five years. I certainly wasn't revising all of those five years but I would
leave the stories and come back to them to redraft.
I
was in a writing group when I lived in Chicago (where I moved after the MFA)
and every couple of months I would be next up to be workshopped and would often
turn in one of my stories to get fresh eyes on them. That was instrumental in
motivating me to revise them.
Eventually,
I did one last push to revise them before I sent the stories off to The
Feminist Press, which became my publisher.
I
think thematically, self-discovery and self-revelation are important in the
book. The characters are a range of ages across different decades but they are
each searching for a way to understand themselves and the world they inhabit,
whether that's grappling with family issues or economic issues or for every one
of them, as with us all, figuring out what they are meant to do in the world.
Q:
The stories are divided in two sections, The Lower School and The Upper School.
How did you decide on the organization of the collection?
A:
I didn't know initially that I was writing a short story collection until maybe
the third story I wrote. Then, I realized that all these characters might be in
the same universe. So, when I started thinking about titles and got very
connected to "Training School for Negro Girls," I thought having two schools
might work to organize this universe.
It
was also very important to me to represent both black women and black girls, to
really concern myself with the scope of the black female experience. It felt
natural to me then to also think about how at the core many of the issues these
characters face are similar but to also acknowledge difference by having two
sections.
Doing
that too also gave me a kind of guideline as I wrote more stories to think
about both the black women and the black girls who would be the focal
characters.
Q:
The stories are set in Washington, D.C., where you grew up. How important is setting to you in your
writing?
A:
Setting wasn't always important in my writing. Character always seemed to come
first and then I would have them meander the streets of a kind of no name
place.
As
a younger writer, I was still unsure about what and who I really wanted to
write about. I had to get clearer about my own voice and bringing my unique
perspective to the page. I see some of my writing students write about big
cities they don't live in rather than thinking about what's interesting about
the place from which they come.
Likewise,
I really had to ask myself, why aren't you writing about D.C.? Edward P.
Jones's short story collection Lost in the City, which is set in D.C., was
hugely influential for me when I was a teenager and so as an adult, I returned
to that feeling of seeing the place I grew up in represented on the page and
started to write my stories about D.C.
Q:
How was the book's title (also the title of one of the stories) chosen, and
what does it signify for you?
A:
I was in a Black and Chicana Feminism class in grad school and reading work by
radical women of color set me down this road of discovery of other voices
including Nannie Helen Burroughs. She was an educator with a school in
Northeast D.C., the section of D.C. where I grew up, but I hadn't known more
than her name really when I lived in D.C.
I
read her work and learned more about training schools, where in the early 1900s
black people tried to educate our own but that education was often inclined
toward training for domestic work. That's the role black people were still cast
into even more than 40 years after the Emancipation Proclamation.
I
started to think about how we all get trained to occupy particular roles often
according to how society views us through our race, gender, and class and how
we can internalize those roles, play them out even if that's not who we are.
All of these characters are trying to break out of something in their lives and
sometimes they succeed and sometimes they have to find the courage to keep
trying.
Q:
What are you working on now?
A:
I'm at work on a novel and also incubating a couple of other projects.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
Friday, March 22, 2019
Q&A with Jonathan Roth
Jonathan Roth is the author and illustrator of the Beep and Bob series for kids. He is an elementary school art teacher, and he lives in Maryland.
Q: How did you come up with the idea for the Beep and
Bob books?
A: I was working on a middle grade novel with a
character named Bob, but it was being a struggle. One day after school (I’m a
teacher by day) I went to hear author-illustrator Dav Pilkey speak at my local
Barnes & Noble. I’ve always admired his work, and even use some of his
picture books as motivators in my art classroom.
I’m not sure why, but during his presentation it hit
me that I wasn’t tapping enough into that kind of silly, zany energy that he
does so well. So I went home, kicked Bob up to school in space and gave him a
cute little friend named Beep.
I let myself go and wrote only to have fun, taking a
break from writing something “publishable.” Inexplicably, it then became my
first children’s book series to make it on the shelves.
Q: Did you know from the beginning that you'd be doing
a series?
A: I had plenty more story ideas popping into my head
and loved the idea of ongoing adventures. But it wasn’t until my agent took it
on and told me to include some future story outlines with the submission that I
realized it was going to be bought by a publisher either as a series or
nothing.
Q: As a writer and illustrator, do you focus more on
text or illustrations (or both together) when starting a project?
A: I do all the writing first. For me, the writing is
where the characters and situations come alive, especially in the dialogue. Then
I develop them visually and it all comes together.
Q: What do you hope kids take away from the books?
A: The two most important elements in my work are
humor and heart. Humor because I want my books to be fun and entertaining, and
I have a good sense of what makes kids laugh (am I still a kid deep down?). And
heart because I want kids to know that they can find hope and strength in
difficult times and that they’re not alone.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I’m developing a graphic novel (series) for early
elementary readers. Like Beep and Bob, it has a space focus and a fun buddy
relationship. But it doesn’t have a school setting and is different in many
ways. I hope kids will get to see it someday!
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Because only one or two names end up on the cover,
kids (and adults) often don’t realize that it takes a village to make a book.
From critique partners to professional organizations
like SCBWI, to agents, editors, copy editors and art directors, to reviewers,
bloggers, teachers and librarians, each book in a child’s hand is due to a
large, dedicated and generous community. Thanks for being part of mine!
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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