Q&A with Meghan Cox Gurdon

  

Photo by Michael Kress

 

 

Meghan Cox Gurdon is the author of the new memoir Free Range Girl. She also has written the book The Enchanted Hour, and she writes for The Wall Street Journal. She lives in Maine.

 

Q: What inspired you to write this memoir?

 

A: My parents were leaving the world just as my grandchildren started coming into it, all of which made the past suddenly seem vivid, ineffably precious – and gone.

 

That whole world has vanished. The free-range life before screens, the hippie-adjacency of going back-to-the-land, even the idea of Maine as a backwater.

 

I thought: if I don’t write down how it was, my grandchildren will never know anything about it. No one’s grandchildren will know anything about it. All the quirky 1970s details, the assumptions people lived under – it’ll all be gone.  

 

So I started writing. No, that’s not true. I didn’t start writing until about a year into the process. First I had to decide what story to tell, and *how* to tell it (First person or third?  Present tense or past? Gory details or no?).  

 

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

 

A: The title was a gift! I was groping around, coming up with one long, preposterous title after another. 

 

So I threw the problem to my agent, Stephen Barbara, who raised it at a work meeting: “Anyone have an idea for a title about a memoir of free-range girlhood in the woods of Maine in the 1970’s?”  

 

A colleague of his, Gideon Pine, said: “How about Free Range Girl?” The second I heard it I felt a ping of happy recognition: Yes!  

 

Q: Did you need to do additional research to write the book, or did you rely primarily on memories?

 

A: My memories of that time are exceptionally vivid; or they were, anyway, until I wrote them down. As you know, putting anything into print has a way of crystallizing it.

 

I checked as many details as I could with others and read up a little on the history of Maine, but my goal here was not to write a meticulous factual account, but to try to capture what it felt like to be on the cusp of adolescence at such a place, in such a time. 

 

Just putting memories in order was instructive. The arc of a story began to emerge. At the beginning of the book, the girl (who was me) is very much a child and morally rather lost. After a year in the Maine woods, she – that is I – was less of a child and had a rudimentary moral compass.

 

Q: What impact did it have on you to write the book, and what do you hope readers take away from it?

 

A: The main thing I hope readers will take away is enjoyment! I hope it’s fun to travel back in time and read about how it felt to be young and unsupervised almost to the point of neglect. 

 

It was a joy to me to go back, in my mind, to experiences that were tactile and intense, and I loved writing Free Range Girl. The girl in the story isn’t always happy, and she makes some big mistakes, but I hope overall the reader takes pleasure in her company.

 

Writing the memoir was profoundly meaningful for me. I suspect that many memoirists go through periods, as I did, where they are dogged by invisible critics: “Who are you to write about your life?  You’re not famous.  Who cares?”  

 

I’m so glad I pushed past those disembodied meanies, because writing about my girlhood meant going back to it, at least in imagination, so that – again, in my head – I got to meet my long-ago self and spend time with people I loved who are no longer here.

 

One consequence of coming to the story in my sixth decade is that I found I could enjoy the past without rancor. I kept thinking that, had I written the book 15 years ago, I might have been sour and even bitter about some of the decisions made by the adults in my life back then.  

 

Today, as a mother of five adult children and (so far) three grandchildren, I find it hard to look back at my parents with anything but tenderness. In 1976, my mother was half the age I am now and she was going through life for the first time, too.  

 

I was a little startled by some of the answers I found when I began to ask questions about the past, but I came away with a feeling of warm reconciliation.  

 

You know, Proust says something about this, along the lines that we all writhe at memories of past mistakes, but that we would be wiser to accept them in the understanding that, without them, we would not have developed into the people we became. I’m no Proust, but I second that emotion. 

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: Right now, I’m working on getting Free Range Girl out into the world while meeting my deadlines for The Wall Street Journal, where I’m a weekly contributor to the books pages and a fortnightly columnist for WSJ Free Expression.  

 

I’m also toying with the idea of writing about the early 1990s, when my husband and I worked and traveled together as foreign correspondents in Asia. If something develops, I’ll let you know!

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: Yes! Free Range Girl was written without an iota of AI. You can tell because, as I only discovered when as I was recording the audiobook, when it was too late to make changes, in at least two places I inadvertently used a wonky phrase that an LLM would have flagged.  

 

Many pairs of eyes had combed the manuscript, and all of them, including mine, had missed the wonkiness. So readers can trust that what they’re reading is 100 percent the product of human intelligence.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb 

Q&A with Leslie Gentile

  

 

Leslie Gentile is the author of the new middle grade novel The Total Eclipse of Me. Her other books include Elvis, Me, and the Lemonade Stand Summer. She is also a musician, and she lives on Vancouver Island. 

 

Q: What inspired you to write The Total Eclipse of Me, and how did you create your character Halley? 

 

A: I live in a house with five telescopes (my husband’s) six guitars (mine), so it was just a matter of time till I wrote a book that included astronomy and music. Of course, this one also contains bats and a forest fire . . .

 

Really it started with the title, which popped into my head during the solar eclipse in 2024. Then, as I played around with of the word eclipse, the story began to form. I decided to make it a lunar eclipse since that worked better in this case.

 

I knew that Halley needed to feel “eclipsed” so once I started to create problems in her life, her character began to emerge.

 

Q: How would you describe the dynamic between Halley and her family?

 

A: Halley knows she’s loved, but with all of the rapid-fire changes coming at her, she begins to doubt that and feels her family is falling apart. She feels forgotten and in everyone’s way, which leads her to come up with Operation Stargazer, and her big plan to move in with her dad. 

 

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 started with a rough plan for the ending when I began to write, but I find that once my characters develop they tend to tell me where things are really going. There’s always the unexpected “Oh, hey . . . what if?” and you head off in another direction. Those detours always make for a better story. And, yes, more work! 

 

Q: What do you hope readers take away from the book?

 

A: I hope that readers see the value in being open-minded and accepting of others. Whether it’s being less squeamish about critters like bats, to being inclusive with neurodivergent people, it’s important that we be willing to be open to learning more. Everyone needs to feel they belong.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: Oh, right now I’m busy but having fun! I’m a singer songwriter, so always write songs to accompany my readings, so I am working on Eclipse songs. In the book Halley’s Auntie Lynn is a blues musician, so I know that at least one song will need to be on my slide guitar.

 

I’m plotting out a new middle grade mystery, with the working title The Secret of Dead Man’s Cove. This one will involve finding an old diary filled with secrets and a mystery from the past to solve.

 

I’m also in the recording studio, finishing a fourth episode of my kids’ podcast series The Agatha Crispy Detective Agency. This series involves two friends who form a detective agency to solve mysteries in their neighbourhood.

 

Agatha is big on enthusiasm, but it’s her wheel-chairbound sidekick Wheels who actually solves their cases. I have the scripts written for the first season, and as the series progresses, the cases are getting more involved. 

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: As a writer with Indigenous heritage, it’s always been important for me to have Indigenous characters in my books.

 

In Eclipse it was really important for me to include a neurodivergent character in this book, not just as “my life with autism” but as simply one of the regular characters. We need more representation in fiction, and I wanted Leo to have his time to shine!

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb 

Oct. 24

 

 

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY

Oct. 24, 1923: Denise Levertov born. 

Q&A with Jane Hamilton

  

 

 

Jane Hamilton is the author of the novel The Phoebe Variations, now available in paperback. Her other books include the novel A Map of the World. She lives in Wisconsin. 

 

Q: What inspired you to write The Phoebe Variations, and how did you create your character Phoebe Hudson?

 

A: I went to see Twelfth Night with the great Mark Rylance. In the middle of the play, he asks the question of the boy in drag, “What is your parentage?” 

 

I got home, and that question was vibrating in my mind. I don’t have any doubt about who my parents were—they were terrific parents—but, I started to think about how complicated the question can actually be. (For many people now especially exploring their gene pool!) 

 

I lived with Phoebe for 10 years. (On and off.) A book starts with a voice, and hers was with me right away as I thought about a teenager who has a shattering experience with her birth family. 

 

Q: How would you describe the dynamic between Phoebe and her friend Luna?

 

A: Complicated!  But, when they are girls, Phoebe considers the relationship pure, one of pure love and friendship. She doesn’t think about the fact that there might be a power dynamic at work. Luna is from a wealthy family; Phoebe lives across the tracks with a single mother in a time when in the suburbs single mothers were rare. 

 

What does Phoebe get from Luna? What does Luna get from Phoebe? Those are some of the questions the book explores.

 

Q: The writer Stephen McCauley called the book a “wildly original story about every kind of love imaginable.” What do you think of that description?

 

A: Oh, what a lovely man Stephen McCauley is! I am terrible at describing my own work, so I think this is a perfectly wonderful elevator pitch. 

 

Q: Music is an important theme in the novel--why did you decide to include that?

 

A: For one thing, including music in a novel means you should listen to the music at hand. So, that’s a perk of the job. 

 

As for Phoebe: Phoebe is a person who is very alone. She is a talented pianist. Not at the concert pianist level, but still, she has a life in music. Music is the thing for her, besides the love of her son, that makes life bearable. That gives meaning to life: this mysterious beautiful creation.

 

I have a friend who says, “I don’t believe in God, but…when I listen to music, I start to think, hmmm, maybe there is a god.” So, I wanted to give a slice of god to Phoebe, a great portion of beauty, and a reason to love the world. 

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: A book about two sisters. It’s short. I took something I’d written before and compressed it. Will it be published? Who knows? I loved writing it very much. I love the sisters more than I can say. 

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: There’s a great coffee shop in my town. Rochester, WI. Come to DW COFFEE!!! (It’s closed on Mondays.)

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb 

Q&A with Anna Maloney

  

Photo by Ted Allen

 

 

Anna Maloney is the author of the new novel The 10:12. She also has worked in television, film, and radio, and she lives in London. 

 

Q: You’ve said that a dream provided the initial inspiration for The 10:12--can you say more about that?

 

A: A few years ago, travelling by train between London and Manchester visiting family reminded me that trains can still be romantic and interesting even when they’re crowded. And they are great locations for people watching/listening.

 

So train travel must have been on my mind when I woke up from dream about a hijack. I’d just given up a paid job to concentrate on writing and discovered that a major crime writing competition for new authors was closing in a couple of weeks. The hijack was ready and waiting to go.

 

I needed to provide the first few chapters and a synopsis. The dream had given me the set up, but unfortunately neither a middle or an end. However, I managed to come up with what I needed to enter with a day to spare, and to my great surprise, I won the competition.

 

Q: How did you create your character Claire?

 

A: I used to have an elderly neighbour called Marian. One day she mentioned that her husband was annoyed with her and revealed it was because she’d tackled a young man waving a gun around on the top floor of a local bus. She had approached him with the words that he’d “get no cred for shooting a granny.”  He put the gun down.

 

We’ve probably all met Marians. Claire was based around those who step up, not back, in a crisis. And don’t just film it on their phones.

Q: Do you have any other favorite novels set on a train?

 

A: Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith evolves from a conversation between two passengers on a train. It captures those strange moments we sometimes have with people in close proximity on a journey and turns into a great story full of menace and jeopardy.

 

Agatha Christie loved trains but rather than The Orient Express, I’d choose The Lady Vanishes, which became a famous Hitchcock film based on the novel written by Ethel Lina White in 1938.

 

A young woman befriends an older woman on a long intercontinental train journey, and then falls asleep. When she wakes up the older woman is gone and other passengers claim she was never there. The young woman won’t back down and eventually… No spoilers!  

 

The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins also features a great starting point with a commuter seeing something from the window that doesn’t look right.

 

Q: The Guardian’s review of the book says, “Gripping and immersive, this salutary tale of how we stereotype and underestimate others is a white-knuckle read that also gives food for thought.” What do you think of that description?

 

A: Simply delighted! I particularly like the conjunction of “white-knuckle read” and “food for thought.” My favourite books tend to engage me when I read them but also leave me with something to think about. In a broader sense, it is great when a reader understands what you are trying to do as a writer.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I can’t say too much yet about the next novel but it involves a past tragedy on the River Thames and a present-day threat, plus another older woman who finds herself caught up in the middle of it all. My dad worked in the docks and I live a walk away from the river, so it feels like I’m going with the flow!

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb 

Q&A with Alan Dean Foster

  

 

 

 

Alan Dean Foster is the author of the new novel Lost on Paradise. His many other books include The Mocking Program.

 

Q: What inspired you to write Lost on Paradise, and how did you create your characters Jonos and Liina?

 

A: The idea was to write a story about people in difficult circumstances who strive to better those circumstances, succeed in doing so, and then are forced to confront an entirely new and unexpected set of difficulties. It is also, at heart, a story about how people cope with loss. Some manage to do so, and some do not.  

 

Q: What research and planning went into creating the fantastical world in which the novel is set?

 

A: No research, really, as much as thinking. What would happen if two very different cultures were compelled to live side by side, and then a third was unexpectedly introduced into the mix. Would it affect the original two cultures and if so, how? Positively, negatively, or not at all. What if one of the two cultures was superior to the one newly arrived?

 

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 did know how the novel would end, but not how. As is so often (and delightfully) the case, as the characters progressed within the story, they themselves changed numerous aspects of its progression. 

 

Writing in this way is very much like traveling to a known destination, but without a map or GPS. You know where you're going, but the roads you take may be different from those you begin with.

 

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

 

A: Paradise is a concept as much if not more than it is an actual destination. Not everyone's idea of Paradise is the same: many if not most are very different. 

 

The comedian Jim Jeffries speaks of arriving in Heaven only to realize that he's going to be there, with it unchanging, and that he'll be bored for all Eternity. Along with relatives he may not like. 

 

One might arrive in one's notion of Paradise only to find that it's not as anticipated, and then disconcerting things may--happen.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: A couple of short stories. Ideas for a new novel. The monthly column I do for a local paper that focuses on art and science (5enses, if anyone is curious, and it can be found online), and a 10th symphony.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: I'm not yet tired of telling stories.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb 

Q&A with Blair Fell

  

Photo by Fitzcreative

 

 

 

Blair Fell is the author of the new novel The Two Wills. His other books include Disco Witches of Fire Island. He is also a playwright, an actor, a producer, and a sign language interpreter, and he lives in New York City.

 

Q: In your new novel’s Author’s Note, you write, “I owe most of the inspiration for this book to Oscar Wilde.” Can you say more about that?

 

A: When I was in my late 20s, near the time I began writing plays, I was introduced to Oscar Wilde’s story “The Portrait of W.H.” The short story is really an essay by Wilde hidden in the guise of a short story.

 

It espouses a theory as to the identity of the male “beloved” in Shakespeare’s sonnets. Wilde argues that the main beloved person written to and about in the sonnets is a young male actor in Shakespeare’s company who created the great female roles in his plays.

 

Remember, at the time I read the essay, the early ‘90s, there was almost zero queer representation in the mainstream culture, and the word gay was synonymous with AIDS.

 

Learning that there were classical writers like Wilde who were (fairly) openly gay and arguing that Shakespeare, arguably the greatest writer in the English language, was also queer, was astounding to me. As a young gay man I really had no “gay heroes” to whom I could revere.

 

Why had I never learned of this question about Shakespeare’s sexuality in any college class? It’s not like this wasn’t a question scholars hadn’t discussed (at least in secret) for 400 years, and yet no one in my academic life had ever mentioned it.

 

I became enraptured with the theory, and eventually wrote a play that was an adaptation of Wilde’s essay called Naked Will.

 

The action of Wilde’s story is basically an argument between covertly queer 19th century intellectuals about the sonnets, and doesn’t actually bring to life the actual love story to which it refers.

 

In my play, however, I had all these moments where Shakespeare, the boy actor and the Dark Lady come to life in unfinished snippets, hinting at the action of the possible love story. This is where the characters started to form for me.

 

The play was eventually nominated for an LA GLAAD award, and had some nice small productions. Thought, to be honest, because they were small limited productions, I felt it never actually got a production it deserved. This was actually part of the reason I eventually stopped writing plays all together.

 

While great actors can take your material and make it soar beyond anything you can imagine, an actor who isn’t fit for a role can utterly destroy a play or at least not live up to what the writer had in mind. While there were some decent productions, none ever matched the story in my head. This is why I write novels now instead.

 

Decades later, when I turned to novels late in life, I knew I wasn’t finished with the topic and decided to ditch Wilde’s argument between intellects and just take the basic love story and completely fictionalize it.

 

The Willie Hughes of my story is not the one Wilde vaguely describes. All you get from Wilde is what he believes he learns from the sonnets, that the boy is unbelievably beautiful, is from humble beginnings (not the aristocrat many believed the beloved to be) and is named Willie Hughes.

 

I created Willie’s ale-house hustler backstory, his insecure bravado, his unrequited (for a while) longing for the Poet, and created Willie’s first great love, Barnaby Stubb.

 

Wilde suggests Marlowe is the rival poet in the sonnets (which I used) but Wilde also barely mentions the Dark Lady in the essay, believing her to be less important than the youth. I felt she is vital to the story, especially since there is a moment in the sonnets where the youth and the Dark Lady get together, and Shakespeare wants to save the youth from her.

 

Another interesting tidbit about Wilde’s essay is that it was used as evidence against him in his trial for gross indecency, which put him in prison and ultimately lead to his death.

 

Heterosexuals don’t like queers trying to claim Shakespeare as our own, so I was like F that. If you read the sonnets, Shakespeare is far more ours than theirs, damnit.  

 

So, I wanted to take Wilde’s theory even further, in honor of him, Shakespeare, and all queer artists who have been appropriated or suppressed throughout history. It was incredibly brave (and foolhardy) for Wilde to write the story when he did, but I’m so glad he did. He saved lives with it.

 

This is why, in this horrible time in which we live, we have to keep telling queer stories, so queer young people can know they are both not alone, and inheritors of brilliance.  

 

Q: Can you say more about how you created your character Willy Hughes?

 

A: As I mentioned, I started with Wilde’s description, beautiful, arrogant, a boy actor, named Willie Hughes. From there I looked to see if there were any other clues in history, the sonnets, or elsewhere as to the nature of the boys and young men who played the female roles.

 

I looked at age, they could be anywhere from 13 to 24, depending on how pretty they looked. I wanted Hughes to be of an acceptable age for our time, since he was involved in a love story.

 

I saw that many youths came from choir lofts, and would later learn that some companies actually kidnapped young beautiful boys for the children’s acting companies, like The Children of The Chapel Royal, a children’s acting company sponsored by the Queen. (I use this detail for another character in the book).

 

Then it was all about my imagination and the voice from which I drew the other aspects of his character and back story. Willie Hughes’s voice as a narrator came to me pretty quickly and I loved how he was both arrogant and insecure as hell. He was also funny, which I appreciated.

 

He’s someone who, like me,  is very much led by his heart, so finds himself, very fortunately, having fallen into an acting career because of his longing for Shakespeare. Of course he suffers a lot because of this love.

 

This is also my story in a way, so much good in my life came from romantic heartbreaks, so it’s a theme I go back to again and again. Turning that romantic wound into art, into joy.

 

I truly adore Willie Hughes, because while deeply flawed and foolish, he’s got a huge heart, and is relentless on demanding love and all that he deserves from life.

 

Q: What did you see as the right balance between fiction and history as you wrote the novel?

 

A: Great question. I didn’t want to be barricaded into what we absolutely know, because we actually know almost nothing about Shakespeare’s life.

 

We know he was married, and he left his wife his “second best bed” and then he wrote these 154 love sonnets, 125 of which are written to a young man, and 25 to this woman with dark skin and “wiry” hair. That’s it.

 

So, I abandoned any truth telling as far as the actual biography goes, and just ran with the fact that he clearly loved this young man, and he lusted after this “dark lady,” and he did not like how the surrounding culture criticized him for how he lived his life. (At least in one sonnet he mentions this.)

 

As far as the history of play-making, the environment, the Globe et al., I read a lot of history books on Shakespeare and his times, and tried to stick with what was actually going on.

 

So there is much truth about all that, like the word “theatre” was actually taken from an actual playhouse at the time, and the art form wasn’t called that for a while. Or the fact of kidnapping young boys (legally) to act in companies sponsored by the Queen. That’s also true.

 

So I mined other author’s histories of the period and the facts of theater, the plague, and different professions a lot.

 

I do play loose and fancy free with the chronology of the plays, and the chronology of Marlowe and Shakespeare’s possible working together etc. But so did Wilde, and I might add that Shakespeare himself manipulated history, geography, and everything else to serve a play.

 

So in many ways, this novel is incredibly meta. You can see where I even play with your question in the text.

 

The biggest digression from history is the actual love stories in the novel. As I said, we can’t really know anything more than Shakespeare was married, he also loved this young man, and he also lusted/loved this dark-haired lady. Period. 

 

So the love story of the novel is  an almost total invention inspired by the sonnets, Wilde’s story, and theories by other exegetes like the writer Joseph Pequigney, whose book Such Is My Love was also a huge influence on what I knew about queerness in the sonnets.

 

So beyond just being a total fiction, I also use these loves stories in the novel as my way of exploring how all different sorts of romantic passions (new, old, requited, unrequited, short, long, lost forever) affect us, wound us, create us.  

 

Q: What do you think are some of the most common perceptions and misconceptions about Shakespeare’s life?

 

A: That we know it at all. That he was straight. That his love sonnets were all written to a woman – which is something we’ve actually known for over 400 years, but didn’t like to discuss, and also didn’t stop Tom Stoppard (a wonderful writer) from still using “Shall I Compare Thee To A Summer’s Day” as a love poem to Gwyneth Paltrow in Shakespeare In Love.  

 

This is not only an affront to the young man to whom it was really written, but to the fact that in the sonnets, the 25 written to a woman, were written to/about a woman with dark skin and “wiry” hair – possibly black, North African, Italian, who knows. (I make her North African and Armenian in my telling because that’s a big part of my own racial background.) Sorry Gwyneth, but it ain’t you. This poem was written to a dude.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: Several ideas. The one furthest along is a weird speculative love story about mannequins trying to fight for their freedom in the face of the oligarchy and redundancy. No, they do not come to life.  

 

Then there are several other ideas in different stages, including a follow up to Disco Witches et al. Who knows. I just keep writing. See what sticks. Fingers crossed the publishing world likes it.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: So much. But we all have to accept we shall forever live in ignorance for all we should know. Haha. JK. I think that’s it for now.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb