Interview with author Brin Friesen

After reading Sic, the debut novel by Brin Friesen, I had a couple of questions for the author, which he kindly (and promptly!) answered. Below you will find my interview with him. You can also find a review of his book here and more of his writing here.


First, I'm curious about the name of the book. How did you come up with it and what does it mean?

The name of the book referred to the idea of Jasper Finch telling his story, an admittedly disturbing one, and knowing most adults don't have any clue what their kids are doing (despite their own childhoods) and most likely would blame anybody who told/exposed the truth about it. Galileo and Rosa Parks weren't thanked for their efforts in revealing the truth about an ugly situation: they were thrown in jail. With the subject matter of school shootings looming over this story, the aftermath nearly always leads to the knee jerk reaction of blame and attribution of fault. However, the profile of a school shooter is that there is no profile for a school shooter. There's poetry in that fact. My protagonist is willing to tell his story but he doesn't want to be blamed for the telling the truth.

And yet, not too many people know what "sic" even refers to, so it was probably a lousy choice. They assume I'm talking about calling for a dog to attack someone. Sic is about fault. Blame. If you talk about troubled kids you blame long before anyone attempts understanding. All the killings at schools and universities are called "senseless" at one point or another. Any rudimentary examination of the facts and invariably they immediately start making a whole lot of sense. They only way they don't is through cognitive dissonance and negligence.

You mentioned in one of your TNB posts that the first part of the book is based on a similar experience you had in elementary school. Did you stay friends with your Norman Apple afterward? And, how did the fight effect your later school years?

I was lured out to watch a fight and swarmed once I was out there by everyone in attendance to one degree or another. I did patch things up with the real Norman Apple. I think the fight served me the way any traumatic event serves an artist: they're unable to cope with their given reality and find the necessity to create for themselves a new one. Fiction has to make sense where real life doesn't. So you're obliged to make the details in the story something which for yourself and the reader can have more traction than real life. The impetuous for this is of course an attempt to rewrite your own history. I gave myself a fictional first kiss on the same day as the worst day of my real life. The details of the story have in many ways overtaken the real details of my life. Which is good, because that was an ugly space to occupy. People often forget that the three most popular kids authors for kids are Roald Dahl, Lewis Carrol, and JD Salinger. The three most banned books FOR kids are by Roald Dahl, Lewis Carrol, and JD Salinger. Innocence isn't Disney. It's complicated.

How much of the book is autobiographical? Please tell me there was no real-life Fresa.

There was indeed a Fresa; though I took from another incident that actually happened and combined the person with the event that killed him. The curbing happened while I was in 8th grade and the perpetrators were never found while 100's of kids knew exactly who they were. It was a scary time. The real life Fresa went on to become a paramedic, which seems entirely appropriate. A great deal of the book is autobiographical, however I used an extensive amount of composites. Once I had my finger on the pulse of the story much of it wrote itself.

What inspired you to write a book like this? Did you set out to write a book that focused so much on the state of mind of a bullied teenager?

High school is very attractive to me as subject matter since most people who leave it spend a tremendous amount of energy either clinging to or running from who they felt they were perceived to be during that time in their lives. I'm interested in a time where the events that mark people mark them for life. First kiss, first beating, heartbreak, etc.

That's where I started with this story: give a kid his worst day and best day on the *same* day.

Bullying was obviously a major theme also, but also examining bullying not just from the main bullies but those complicit and rooting it on. The German's were fairly recently allowed to join in on the VE Day celebration which was very interesting when they expressed the argument that they were "liberated too" from Hitler. Finally the legacy of what happened during WWII will be Hitler bullied everyone into it. The real lesson, in my view, is how regular, decent, law abiding, family loving people were persuaded of the legitimacy of genocide. In schools suicide is one the major leading causes of mortality, especially among boys. And naturally it's an under reported statistic also. Newspapers print murder stories but not suicides.

In a society that holds the "pureness" and "innocence" of children above all else, I don't have a sense that society even *likes* kids. They can be tried as an adult for a crime but can't vote. They can be legally assaulted.

Growing up the kid of a child protection lawyer a lot of this stuff has been discussed at length.

How did things end up with your Marie? Or are they still in the happenings?

Ten years later she contacted me about whether or not I became a writer and asked if I'd written anything. I said yes. She asked what it was about. I said, YOU. She read it in a night and flew from Scotland to move with me the week after that. I'm not going to spoil the ending. I
think without ever having a meaningful conversation with the real girl I didn't come up with such a misguided stand-in. But I never wrote the book to find her. It just ended up that I did.

Lastly, can you tell me a little more about And/Or Press?

And/Or Press was started by my friend Dan Starling. D.R Haney's book Banned For Life is the latest book with the And/Or stamp of approval. We're both crazy about D.R Haney.

(I'm crazy about D.R. Haney too!)

Again, to read more by Brin Friesen (or D.R. Haney), you can visit www.thenervousbreakdown.com. And, no, I don't get paid to promote the website (nor to write for it), I just love the authors and their stories there.

Best to you all,

Becca

Interview with D.R. Haney on The Nervous Breakdown

So, I was planning on doing an interview with D.R. Haney, author of Banned for Life, which I reviewed here, but I've been super busy with packing for Istanbul and moving out of my apartment so I haven't had time. THEN, today I looked on The Nervous Breakdown and there's a fab interview with him and one of the other TNB authors, so I thought I'd just post a link here for any of you who are interested. I think the interview will give you more insight about the book. And, really, who doesn't love reading interviews with authors?

ALSO, D.R. Haney will be doing a reading in L.A. this weekend. If you're in town, you should check it out. Here's the details:

Date: July 25, 2009, 8:00PM

Venue: Stories

Location: 1716 Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA

Description:D. R. Haney will read from his recently-published novel about punk rock, "Banned for Life," along with other guests, including singer-songwriter Tif Sigfrids, who'll charm and disarm with dainty song.

Interview with M.J. Rose and a Giveaway!

Today, as part of her TLC Blog Tour, M.J. Rose is here with some more insight to her newest novel, The Memorist, which I reviewed on Tuesday. In this interview we learn more about where Rose came up with the ideas for her novel, some of her own experiences in Vienna and how she came to be so interested in reincarnation. But first, a little about the author:

You may have heard about M.J. Rose through her first adventures in the publishing industry. Rose self-published her first novel, Lip Service, late in 1998 after several traditional publishers turned it down. Editors had loved it, but didn't know how to position it or market it since it didn't fit into any one genre.

Frustrated, but curious and convinced that there was a readership for her work, she set up a web site where readers could download her book for $9.95 and began to seriously market the novel on the Internet.

After selling over 2500 copies (in both electronic and trade paper format) Lip Service became the first e-book and the first self-published novel chosen by the LiteraryGuild/Doubleday Book Club as well as being the first e-book to go on to be published by a mainstream New York publishing house.

Today, she is the international bestselling author of 10 novels; Lip Service, In Fidelity, Flesh Tones, Sheet Music, Lying in Bed, The Halo Effect, The Delilah Complex, The Venus Fix, The Reincarnationist, and The Memorist.

Rose has appeared on The Today Show, Fox News, The Jim Lehrer NewsHour, and features on her have appeared in dozens of magazines and newspapers in the U.S. and abroad, including USAToday, Stern, L'Official, Poets and Writers and Publishers Weekly. And now she's here today:

You noted at the end of The Memorist that you have spent time in Vienna and that the underground ruins really do exist – Did you get a chance to explore some of the abandoned city below the surface?

Yes I did, it’s an amazing thing to see.

What first interested you in reincarnation and binaural beats?

When I was three years old, I told my great grandfather things about his childhood in Russia that there was simply no way I could have known. He became convinced I was a reincarnation of someone in his past. And over time, after more incidents, my mother – a very sane and logical woman -- also came to believe it.

Reincarnation was an idea I grew up with that my mom and I talked about and researched together.

For years, I wanted to write a novel about someone like my mother – who was sane and logical – who started out skeptical but came to believe in reincarnation. But I was afraid if I did people would think I was a “woo woo weirdo”.

I tried to start the first book in this series ten years ago after my mother died but I was too close to the subject and missed her too much to be able to explore it objectively. Every once in a while the idea would start to pester me again but I still stayed away from it.

Then a few years ago on the exact anniversary of my mom’s death my niece, who was a toddler at the time, said some very curious things to me about my mother and I – things she really couldn’t have known -- and the pestering became an obsession.

That’s when I sat down and started in earnest to write The Reincarnationist – which was published in September '07 and is out now in paperback and is the first book in the series. But they don’t have to be read in order.

As for binaural beats- I came across them in my research I did in 2005 when I was searching out information for the first novel in this series.

Throughout the book there are quotes from famous people like Carl Jung, Tolstoy, and Goethe regarding reincarnation. Were you surprised to find that so many influential people throughout history believed in reincarnation?

Yes and it was one of the things that really helped make me decide to tackle these books on this complicated and amazing subject.

Are you a fan of Beethoven, or was he just used because of the location and his interest in this type of research?

Here’s a short essay I wrote about the inspiration for this book that explains all that…

Once upon a time, my husband and I went to Vienna on a vacation and fell in love. Not with each other - we'd already done that - but with the city.

Growing up in Manhattan you don't bump in to history on every street corner - mostly you're bumping into other people or great shopping or eating experiences. In New York you have to go out of your way to find eighteenth century history but it’s still alive on every block in Vienna. There’s so much of it you are literally breathing it in. Arts and sciences have flourished here for centuries and whatever your passion you can visit museums, monuments and memorials to art, music, architecture, literature philosophy and psychology.

And visit them we did including making visits to homes of many famous people who’d once lived there and since my husband is a musician the trip turned out to be what I now jokingly call our Beethoven pilgrimage.

There are several of the great composer's residences in the city proper and its environs and we visited every one of them as well as churches, cafes and music halls he frequented. We walked the streets he walked following the routes he took and spent one day wandering the woods he wandered during the summers he spent in Baden, a spa town an hour out of the city.

But it was in the Heligenstadt house that the idea for my novel, The Memorist was born.

The house at Probusgasse 6 is in a neighborhood called Heligenstadt at the bottom of the Kahlemberg, which in Beethoven’s time was outside the city and filled with vineyards that are still growing there. And it was here at the end of the summer of 1802 that the 31-year-old Beethoven wrote the heart-wrenching Testament to his two brothers documenting his anguish at the onset of his terrible deafness.

The upstairs of this small apartment is open to the public and we walked through the ordinary rooms where he lived. Wandering over to the window I looked down at a simple courtyard where there was a single tree growing.

I stared at the gnarled, twisted trunk and the rich healthy verdant green leaves and realized that Beethoven must have once stood there and looked down at that same tree. Suddenly the composer’s ghost was standing there with me looking out the window.

Later I told my husband what I had been thinking and he said: “You’re going to write about that aren’t you?” Until that moment I hadn’t thought about it but after he said it, I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

At home I read several biographies about Beethoven and in one discovered the great composer had been fascinated with Eastern philosophy, which includes a strong belief in reincarnation. His own notebooks contain quotes a number of passages from Bhagavad-Gita. As well as a quote from William Jones that was included in his Hymn to Narayena, We know this only, that we nothing know.

And with that piece of information the idea at the heart of my tenth novel revealed itself.

The Memorist is not about Ludwig Van Beethoven although he does play a small part in it. Rather it’s a suspense novel about a woman on a search for her own ghosts but it was Beethoven’s spirit that inspired the book and his everlasting gifts to us are at the heart of the mystery I attempted to unravel.

Is there going to be a third book in this series?

There is and I’m writing it now.

(Looks like Rose is going to leave us in suspense, but rumor has it the third book will have more details about FBI Agent Lucien Glass, who was one of my favorite characters in this book. Yay!)

Was it difficult to keep all of the timelines straight in this book? How did you manage them and the characters from each time period?

It’s a bit tricky to keep it all straight but I write a first draft and then go back and do a timeline outline and then do a second draft fixing all the dates and making it all consistent.

How long did you spend researching the Indus Valley and Viennese history before writing this book?

I have been researching the whole subject of reincarnation for many years and have read over 50 books – I did an additional 3 months of research before I started this book and then while I was writing the first draft kept doing more research.

I’m also curious about the references to Judaism and Kabbalah. Did you have to research this or is it something you have studied throughout your life?

I’m Jewish but knew nothing about the Kabbalah until I stared doing the research for this book.

One of my readers was also wondering about online marketing for books. She asks: What are some of the biggest mistakes inexperienced writers can make on the web while they're promoting their work? Is it possible to rectify them, or do mistakes follow us forever and ever?

I teach an online marketing class once a year that is of great help to writers starting out or those already out. It will be taught in Jan 2009 - more at this link.

And the biggest mistake is to spend your entire marketing budget on a website. The second biggest is to think you don’t need to do anything - that your publisher will do it all. At Authorbuzz.com we help authors do affordable marketing - and since we work with all the major publishers - authors can feel confident about working with us.

Also, do you have any easy tips for authors starting out who have decided to self-publish?

I’m sorry, I don’t. And unless it’s very niche marketed non-fiction I don’t recommend self-publishing at all. I think it’s a big mistake to self-publish fiction. I’ve written a lot about that online and you can read about why here.

On your Website you mention that The Secret Garden was the first book to get you thinking about writing. Are there other books that have influenced you along the way? And what are you currently into reading? Some favorites?

I hate to do these lists because I always leave too many books out. Here are some of my favorite authors: Paul Auster, Anne Rice, Robert Goddard, Michael Connelly, Arthur Phillips, Lisa Tucker, Douglas Clegg, Ruth Rendell, Sophie Kinsella, Alice Hoffman, Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child, Steve Berry, Jeffery Deaver… and I’ve been influenced by: John O’Hara, Ayn Rand, Daphne DuMaurier, and John Gardner.

I’m reading Buddha by Deepak Chopra right now.

M.J. Rose, is the international bestselling author of 10 novels; Lip Service, In Fidelity, Flesh Tones, Sheet Music, Lying in Bed, The Halo Effect, The Delilah Complex, The Venus Fix, The Reincarnationist, and The Memorist. Rose is also the co-author with Angela Adair Hoy of How to Publish and Promote Online, and with Doug Clegg of Buzz Your Book. She is a founding member and board member of International Thriller Writers and the founder of the first marketing company for authors: AuthorBuzz.com. She runs two popular blogs; Buzz, Balls & Hype and Backstory.


And now for the giveaway! MIRA Books has been kind enough to send me extra copies to give away to FIVE lucky readers! Two winners will each receive a paperback copy of The Reincarnationist. Two winners will receive The Memorist. And the Grand Prize winner will receive both books in the series.* So here's how to enter:

1. For one entry you can leave a comment below answering the question: If you were a historian/archaeologist/anthropologist, what place and time would you most like to learn more about?

2. For an extra entry you can post about this giveaway on your blog OR if you don't have a blog you can send an e-mail about the giveaway to five friends. Leave a comment here letting me know you did this.

Also, feel free to leave comments about the interview and the book itself. I'd love to hear what you all think about the themes in this book.

Thanks so much for reading! And be sure to leave your comment by 11:59 p.m. on November 23. I'll be drawing winners on November 24.

*Sorry to do this to you international readers, but I'm super poor right now so this giveaway is only open to the U.S. and Canada.

Also, check out some of the other upcoming TLC Tours for more chances to win The Memorist:

Monday, November 17th: Booking Mama

Tuesday, November 18th: Books I Done Read

Wednesday, November 19th: Diary of an Eccentric

Thursday, November 20th: MommyPie

Monday, November 24th: Bloggin’ ‘Bout Books

Friday, November 28th: Frequency of Silence

Check out TLC tours for the entire list.

Questions for M.J. Rose?

In my post about the upcoming interview with M.J. Rose, I received a comment from Lauri Shaw who had a question for the author, and I thought it might be fun to see if any of the rest of you had questions. SO if you have any questions about the book, the writer, or the writing process, feel free to leave your questions below (by Sunday evening) and I'll include them in the interview questions I send over to her.

Thanks so much!

Giveaway Coming!

Yesterday afternoon I received a box full of books to giveaway to you lovely readers. Super exciting, yes? I'll have three copies each of The Memorist and The Reincarnationist by M.J. Rose available for a giveaway that will begin on Nov. 13 when M.J. Rose stops by my blog for a little chit-chat. I'll be posting my reviews of the books the day prior to give you all a little reminder, but I'm super excited to be a part of Rose's blog tour and I can't wait to get started on these books. Oh, and to get you excited too, here's a little preview of what The Memorist is about:

International bestseller M.J. Rose has written a gripping and unforgettable novel about a woman paralyzed by the past, a man robbed of his future, and a centuries old secret. The dreads are back. As a child, Meer Logan was haunted by memories of another time and place, always accompanied by the faint strains of elusive music.

Now the past has reached out again in the form of a strange letter that sets her on a journey to Vienna to unlock the mystery of who she once was. With each step, she comes closer to remembering connections between a clandestine reincarnationist society, a lost flute linked to Ludwig van Beethoven, and David Yalom, a journalist who understands all too well how the past affects the future. David knows loss first hand--terrorism is a reality that cost him his family. He's seen every solution promised by security experts around the world--and he's seen every solution fail. Now, in a concert hall in Vienna, he plans to force the world to understand the cost of those failures in a single, violent act. Because those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it...

Interview with Karen Harrington and a giveaway

I'd like to introduce you all to Karen Harrington, author of Janeology, which I reviewed earlier this week. Harrington is a Texas native who has been writing fiction for more than twenty years. Her writing has received honors from the Hemingway Short Story Festival, the Texas Film Institute Screenplay Contest and the Writers’ Digest National Script Contest. A graduate of the University of Texas at Dallas, she has worked as a speechwriter and editor for major corporations and non-profit organizations.

She authored and published There’s a Dog in the Doorway, a children’s book created expressly for the Dr. Laura Schlessinger Foundation’s “My Stuff Bags.” My Stuff bags go to children in need who must leave their home due to abuse, neglect or abandonment.

She lives in Plano, Texas, with her husband and two children.

Harrington has kindly taken the time to answer some questions for this post:

How did you keep track of all of the branches of Jane’s family tree?

I used my genealogy software to create a realistic pedigree chart for Jane’s family. I referred back to it several times to ensure I was keeping my dates and places correct along the way. The chart can be found on my website, too, and my publisher is considering including it in the paperback version.

Why did you decide to tell this story from the husband’s point of view?

I chose Tom’s point of view because he could ask all the questions about his spouse that I would have if I were in his shoes. He was/is the person most interested in finding out the answers to all the “why” questions. So it seemed logical to follow his journey. Plus, I was initially undecided if the spouses of women who kill are responsible in some way for the death of their children. So I wanted to follow that path to its end until I was satisfied I had at least uncovered a few answers. I think I did.

Why add a clairvoyant to the mix?

That’s an interesting question. The short answer is that this character was the vehicle to time-travel into the past. Antiques have long provided intrigue for me. I look at them and think “What if this piece could talk? What if it could tell me what scenes it had witnessed?” So, I developed the idea of a person with retrocognition to give those family heirlooms and photos a voice. I wanted you, the reader, to have the experience of looking at a photo and leaping right into the moment the camera took the picture. Enter, Mariah the clairvoyant.

What inspired you to write this story?

Initially, I wanted to write a story about a woman from the perspective of her genealogy and explore all the dark traits she may or may not have inherited. My father and I share a passion for our own family genealogy. Growing up, I was surrounded by his research and a lot of family photos of relatives I never knew. I developed an early curiosity about who they were and the possibilities of genetic inheritance. Then, there were far too many Texas news headlines about mothers who kill. When I had my first daughter, those stories really kept me up at night. And when a question keeps you up at night, that’s when you know you are going to write about it. So, the two ideas of genealogy and a troubled mother merged. Voila – Janeology!

I really liked the idea that objects are what keep us connected to our past. How did that part of the story evolve?

As I mentioned before, so many family pictures of my grandparents and great-grandparents surrounded me during my childhood. We also had a lot of well-preserved antiques passed down through the generations. So I was always curious about the origins of these heirlooms. For instance, the trunk and the necklace featured in the book (both shown on my website) are both family heirlooms passed down from my great-grandfather to my father and now to me.

What’s been the biggest challenge to you as a writer?

Managing the whole landscape of a story as it expands. It gets a bit unwieldy as it enlarges and you must constantly stay on top of it, making sure your facts are correct and that you are consistent. For me, working on the same piece every single day, even if it’s just to tweak one paragraph, over several months is the only way to stay in the story.

I’m also curious about the publishing house you chose. How did you find Kunati? And what was it like working with an independent publishing house?

I have to smile here when you say “the publishing house you chose.” It’s fortunate to be published at all when you consider the number of writers out there. So if your dog had his own publishing house and offered me a contract, I would have jumped at it. That said, my relationship with Kunati began by way of the typical submission process. I sent out my manuscript to dozens of agents and publishers and was thrilled that Kunati selected me; particularly, after I saw the types of bold stories they embrace. Plus, I think my experience with an independent publisher like Kunati has been great because of the level of communication exchanged from the editors and publishers directly to the authors. I’m not sure if the lines of communication are that open to the authors of larger houses. The best thing about my Kunati experience has been learning from the other talented authors on its roster.

Are there any other Karen Harrington books in the works?

Why, yes! I just got my next manuscript back from my freelance editor and I’m working on revisions now. I’m hopeful it’ll be at my publisher in January. (Unless, of course, your dog would like to have a look.)

Lastly, I’d like to know what you like to read. What are the three books you think everyone needs to read at least once in their life?

I think everyone should take on Homer’s Odyssey at least once. There are so many offshoots of this story in modern literature that reading Homer will make one’s reading experience richer.

The same is true for Shakespeare. If I had to pick a couple, I’d say take on Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet.

And third, I think every writer should get a healthy dose of Hemingway to learn lean prose and Elmore Leonard to learn dialogue. Any books from these authors are terrific.

And what are you currently reading?

Fresh Kills by Bill Loehfelm and The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty.

And now for the giveaway. One lucky reader will receive my copy of Janeology by doing the following:

1. Leave a comment here saying why you'd like to read this book.

2. You can earn a second entry by posting about this giveaway on your blog.

The deadline for entering is October 30th.

For more information about the author or the book, you can visit Karen Harrington's website, which includes a pedigree chart for the characters in her book. Also, below is back-of-the-book description of Janeology.

Tom Nelson is struggling after the death of his son at the hands of his wife Jane. While Jane sits in a Texas mental hospital for her part in the crime, prosecutors turn their focus to Tom. They believe Tom should have known Jane was on the cusp of a breakdown and protected his children from her illness. As a result, he is charged with “failure to protect.” Enter attorney, Dave Frontella, who employs a radical defense strategy – one that lays the blame at the feet of Jane’s nature and nurture. To gather evidence about Jane’s forbears, Frontella hires a woman with the power of retrocognition – the ability to use a person’s belongings to re-create their past. An unforgettable journey through the troubled minds and souls of Jane's ancestors, spanning decades and continents, this debut novel deftly illustrates the ways nature and nurture weave the fabric of one woman's life, and renders a portrait of one man left in its tragic wake.

Sitting Down with Kathleen McCleary, author of House & Home

Today I am happy to host an interview with Kathleen McCleary, author of House & Home, as part of her blog tour put together by TLC Book Tours.

Kathleen McCleary has worked for a variety of publications, including The New York Times, USA Weekend, Good Housekeeping, More, Health, Martha Stewart Living, and Ladies Home Journal. She was a columnist for several years for HGTV.com. A 2004 job opportunity for her husband brought her reluctantly back to Virginia (which is a beautiful and friendly state that had nothing to do with her discontent other than the fact that it wasn't Oregon). The move sparked the idea for a novel, and she spent almost three years writing House & Home, while also working as a freelance writer and as a barista at the local, independently owned coffee shop in her town.

House & Home is "the story of a woman who loves her house so much that she'll do just about anything to keep it." And it's the book selected this month for our online book club, which will take place next week. I finished the book quite quickly and was surprised by how much I really enjoyed reading it. I hope some of you have already read the book. If not, perhaps this interview will peak your interest. Enjoy!

What was your inspiration for this book?

In 2004, I moved from Oregon to Virginia and had to sell the house we’d owned for 12 years. It was harder for me to give up the house than I could have imagined. I thought, “What if someone literally couldn’t give up a house?”

When you moved from Oregon to the East Coast did you face some of the same emotions as the main character, Ellen Flanagan?

Of course. Uprooting my kids from the only home they’d ever known was really, really hard. And I loved my house, in part because we had a close-knit neighborhood with many friends, and because so much of my kids’ childhoods were lived out in that house.

One of my favorite parts of this book was reading the children’s reactions to the move, especially Sara. When I was younger my family moved a lot and I have to admit I was a lot like Sara in that I fought tooth and nail to convince my parents not to move – every time. How did your children react to the big move when it happened?

My oldest, who was ten at the time, was completely opposed to the move, and of course her resistance was a knife in my heart. She even knocked down the “For Sale” sign on a couple of occasions! My youngest, who was seven then, was more accepting. I moved several times as a kid and just hated it, so the fact that I had to move my kids was very difficult. I think all kids hate to move. I got the idea for the little “I’ll be back notes” that Sara left around the house from taking a tour of the White House in D.C. The guide said that one of Eisenhower’s grandchildren had hidden little notes around the White House before his grandfather left office.

Why did you decide to set the book in Oregon, rather than your new hometown?

My heart—and my head—were still firmly entrenched in Oregon for quite a while after I moved. In many ways, the book is a love letter to Oregon. Writing it was also a way to help me process my feelings about the move.

In the book, Ellen says to Jordan Boyce, “This is the West Coast. You’re not supposed to ask what college someone went to here.” This is one of my favorite quotes in the book, not only because Ellen had the guts to say it, but also because it’s a difference I often notice when I meet East Coasters. Did you find it difficult to get used to this when you moved to the East Coast? What were some of the other differences you noticed between the East and West Coast?

I experienced real culture shock when I moved east, although I had lived in the East before and grew up in the Midwest. The pace on the East Coast is much quicker, for one thing. People drive faster, walk faster, even talk faster! I’m still not used to it. There’s also much more focus on what college you went to, or what college your kids want to get in to, even when they’re in middle school. People also always want to know what you DO and where you work. There’s a lot to love about the East, but I’ll always be an Oregonian and plan to return to Oregon full time one day.

Could you see any other way for Ellen to resolve her issues with her house and husband aside from the house burning down?

Sure. Ellen could have taken the time to really clarify her priorities before she rushed into selling the house and then regretting it. She might have decided she wanted to divorce Sam but also sell part of her business to keep the house. Or she might have decided she and Sam needed to reevaluate the way they worked together as parents and marriage partners, but still stayed together. I think Ellen, because she was so hyper-competent, really enabled Sam in some ways, contributed to his less responsible side. The fact that she finally had had enough did force Sam to mature. It also helped Ellen to let go.

How long was this book in your head before you put it down on paper?

It was a slow process that developed over several months. I finally wrote the first paragraph, then just let it simmer for a while. I kept thinking about it, so then I wrote a little more, and then it started to unfold.

Why the title House & Home? What’s the difference between a House and a Home?

I originally called the book simply “House.” My agent, Ann Rittenberg, came up with the title “House & Home,” which is perfect. A house, as Ellen comes to find out, really is just a house. It’s a vessel. A home is what’s inside the vessel—the lives that are lived there, the people who live them, how they care for one another.

What is your favorite part of your home and why?

It’s my living room and dining room, which open into each other. The rooms both have huge, multi-paned windows that let in sun all afternoon, and they’re where we spend the majority of our time together as a family—eating meals, doing homework, practicing guitar, folding laundry, reading, talking, entertaining friends. It all happens in those two rooms.

Do you have any other books in the works?

Yes! I’m currently hard at work on my second novel. It’s about a woman who gets so overwhelmed by what she perceives as the negative cultural influences affecting her school-age children that she decides to move them to a remote island off the coast of Washington state to live without shopping malls, cell phones, or traffic lights for a year. The novel follows Susannah Delaney’s quest to create a meaningful life for herself and her three children; her relationship with her husband, Matt, which has grown increasingly strained as they clash over how to best raise the kids; her confusion over a haunting love affair from her past; and finally the changes that take place during the family’s time on Sounder Island, which turns out not at all as Susannah expected.


P.S. I'm giving away my copy of House & Home since I've already finished it. If you'd like to win a copy of this book, please leave a comment below telling me why you'd like to read this book. The winner will be chosen on Sept. 30, so please enter by midnight on Sept. 29!

P.P.S. If you don't want to be entered in the giveaway, you can still leave a comment below ;-)

Interview with author Raymond L. Atkins

As many of you know, I recently reviewed The Front Porch Prophet, written by Raymond L. Atkins. This was a book I really enjoyed and the author intrigued me, so I contacted Mr. Atkins and asked him to participate in an interview, to which he kindly agreed. First, a little about Mr. Atkins:

The author lives in Rome, Georgia, with his wife. They live in a 110-year-old house that they have restored themselves, and they have four grown children who drop by from time to time. Raymond has had a variety of occupations during the past thirty-five years, but now that the children are grown, he is pursuing his lifelong ambition of being a novelist and writer. His hobbies include reading, travel, and working on the house.

And now, on to the interview...

One of my favorite parts of this book was the names of the characters (including the cars). I loved the nicknames and double names scattered throughout the story. How did you come up with these names?

I spent my adolescent and young adult life in a small Southern town much like Sequoyah, and as anyone who has ever lived in that type of environment will attest, a great deal of time and effort generally goes into the naming of objects and people. It is the rare individual who does not have a nickname—mine was Old Great Longhair—usually based on some physical trait or habit. Thus my childhood was scattered with Rabbits, Squirrels, Gillas, Maggots, and the like, and I had a large selection of potential names to choose from when it came time to write the book. Additionally, it has always been a fairly common Southern practice to utilize the first and middle names. Thus you hear of Jim Bob, Joe Frank, Johnny Mack, John Robert, Natalie Ann, Mary Jean, and the like. Finally, in the culture of my youth, the naming of vehicles was common, as well. Some of the more memorable handles that still easily come to mind include The Green Hornet, The Chrysler from Hell, and the Love Mobile.

In the same vein, I'm curious about A.J. and Maggie's children's names, who were named after famous authors. Were the specific authors chosen because they are your preferred names in literature, or were they chosen at random? And, how did this idea occur to you?

I am not quite sure when I decided to name the children after famous authors, but I do recall that the decision was made fairly early in the drafting process. An acquaintance of mine had named a child after a rock star, and while I was not tempted to do that in the story, I think it must have been a short segue from that point to the introduction of the famous writers’ brigade. The actual authors were chosen based on novels I have enjoyed over the years.

I get a feeling you were a bit of a prankster like A.J. Were you a dad who told outrageous stories to explain simple phenomena to your children? If I'm right about this one, what's one of the famous Tall Tales of Dad from your house?

I have to admit that my children learned early in their lives not to take too much of what their father said as the gospel truth. The Wizard of Oz episode where the world turned to color before their very eyes was one I had great fun with. (Note from Becca: This is explained in the book, so read it to find out what The Wizard of Oz episode is!)

Why The Front Porch Prophet as the title of this book?

A long time ago, I wrote a very bad poem with that name. When I showed this sonnet to my wife, her advice was to “lose the poem, but hold onto that title.” As for why I decided to use the title for this book, Eugene physically resembles what I imagine an Old Testament prophet must have looked like, and some of his letters and meanderings do indeed prove to be prophetic. I have a mental picture of him on his front porch, holding forth—prophesying—on whatever comes to his mind.

On the inside cover there's mention of "a dead guy with his feet in a camp stove," but I don't remember that in the book. Was this something that was edited out? Or was I not reading carefully enough?

Estelle Chastain’s deceased husband, Parm, had a great many extras adorning his gravesite. One of these was an eternal flame (that was only lit briefly twice per year) made from the guts of a camp stove. (Oooooh! So, it was just me after all...)

Did you travel to Sequoyah, GA, to prepare for this book? How much of this town is true to life?

Sequoyah is a fictional locale that has some resemblances to every small Southern town. Rural Southern life is a distinct culture, and commonalities can be found between most of the communities.

What do you like most about living in the South? Have you ever lived elsewhere?

As I said in the book, I am a plowboy by conscious choice, not dumb luck. I was raised in a military family and lived a great many places in my childhood, but I have lived in the South since I was fourteen. I like the slower pace and the gentility of the life, although a little more of this lifestyle seems to slip away as each year passes.

What was your favorite part about writing this book?

Writing a novel is a great deal of work, but I enjoy each step of the process. It is quite exciting to be able to create a world, and then to have that world behave according to your own master plan. I suppose that my favorite part is when I re-read the previous day’s work—which I do every writing day as a prelude to beginning again—and discover that yesterday’s work accomplished what I wanted it to.

And why didn't you write sooner?!

My wife and I met while working in a cotton mill, and we married at age nineteen. We spent the next six years putting each other through college and the 25 years after that having and raising four children. So I guess you could say that life happened, which it will tend to do. And even though I always held the dream of writing close to my heart during those busy years, the time was just not available.

Lastly, can you tell us a bit about your next book and when it's scheduled to be released? Is it already completed?

My next book—Sorrow Wood—is completed and scheduled for release by Medallion Press in August of 2009. As with The Front Porch Prophet, it will be released in hardcover. Here are the cover notes for the story:

Reva Blackmon is a reluctant probate judge in the small town of Sand Valley, Alabama. She lives in a Rock Castle with turrets and a moat thanks to Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, and she walks on one leg thanks to a drunken railroad engineer on the Southern Pacific. She sings Wednesdays and Sundays in the choir at the Methodist Church and believes in reincarnation the rest of the time. Her husband, Wendell, is the love of her life, and if she is to be believed, he has been her soul mate for many lifetimes, stretching back down the corridors of time.

Wendell Blackmon is the disgruntled policeman in this same small town. He rides herd on an unlikely collection of reprobates, rogues with names such as Deadhand Riley, Gilla Newman, Otter Price, and Blossom Hogan. Law enforcement in this venue consists of breaking up dog fights, investigating alien abductions, extinguishing truck fires, and spending endless hours riding the roads of Sand Valley. Unlike his wife, Wendell does not believe in reincarnation. Nor does he believe in Methodism, Buddhism, or Santa Claus. But he does believe in Reva, and that belief has been sufficient to his needs over their many years together.

But the routines of Sand Valley are about to change. A burned body has been discovered at a local farm named Sorrow Wood. The deceased is a promiscuous self-proclaimed witch with a checkered past. Wendell investigates the crime, and the list of suspects includes his deputy, the entire family of the richest man in town, and nearly everyone else who knew the departed. As the probe continues, a multitude of secrets are revealed, including one that reaches from the deep past all the way to the Rock Castle. Who was this woman who met her end at Sorrow Wood? Where did she come from, what were the mysterious circumstances surrounding her death, and what did her presence mean to Wendell, Reva, and the remainder of the inhabitants of Sand Valley?

Thanks so much for the interview, Raymond! Have any of you read this book yet? What did you think of it?

July Selection and Interview with Jonathan Evison

As I mentioned a few weeks back, this month we'll be reading All About Lulu by Jonathan Evison. All About Lulu is a debut novel put out by Soft Skull Press, an independent publishing house in New York. The book follows the life of a boy who's mother dies of cancer when he is 7 years old. His father remarries and Will falls in love with his stepsister, Lulu. I haven't read the book yet, but it has gotten some great reviews and I'm really looking forward to it. I've been reading Evison's blogs on myspace and The Nervous Breakdown for some time and if his book is anywhere near as funny as his other writing, I'm sure I'll enjoy it.

For those of you who aren't familiar with Jonathan Evison, I thought I'd give you a little introduction by way of a short e-mail interview with him:

Let's start with a few questions about you. First, what's your favorite beverage?

Unquestionably, beer. Not even close.

What are some of the job titles you've had in the past?

Syndicated talk radio host, rotten tomato sorter, road-kill-butcher-and captive-bear-feeder.

Captive-bear-feeder?

. . . for awhile I was volunteering at a wildlife refuge in Merlin, Oregon, which I totally loved because I got to be around all the animals; cougars and wolves and bears and foxes and owls and eagles and otters and beavers . . . the downside was, I got a lot of the dirty work – cleaning cages, etc. People would bring fresh roadkill in, and one of my jobs was to hack it to pieces with a machete and feed it to the bears, a job which I had neither the stomach nor the heart for, but undertook for the pleasure of the bears . . .

Tell me something about All About Lulu that I won't read in the
press.

My wife wrote it. You’ll never read that in the press. Joking, of course. James Frey wrote it.

What have readers liked most from All About Lulu?

Will’s voice, I suppose. Or the characters. People really seem to like getting to know Gerard and Eugene and the twins.

What has been the most surprising part about the publishing process for you?

How civilized and generally nice people in the publishing industry are, compared to say, film and radio. Also, how ass-backward most publishing models are. Could there be a connection here? I’m not sure. I don’t think so.

Why did you choose to query Soft Skull publishing? What was it that attracted you to a smaller publishing house?

Two words: Richard Nash. One of the great editors working today. Richard not only has excellent taste, he’s got guts, heart, and he’s a madman— the dude e-mails me at two in the morning, sleeping baby in his arms, typing with one arm. The biggest advantage to Soft Skull, and other great indie presses, like Dzanc, or Hawthorne, or Greywolf, is that they actually concentrate on building readerships for their authors, putting all their intellectual resources and energy behind them, instead of trying to catch lightening in a bottle, like many of the corporate houses.

I've been reading your stuff on myspace for awhile now, and I was just wondering if you plan to publish a book of essays in the future (your Sketches of People I Hardly Remember)? I know you've got some other books waiting in the wings, what do you think will likely be the next thing we see from you?

Probably the next thing you’ll see from me is the big shaggy beast of a book I just finished called “West of Here,” which is either a six-hundred page world-beater, or just a very eccentric novel by a guy who should maybe watch his reefer intake on the next draft. But I do have two earlier novels that I haven’t physically burried, as well as the aforementioned “Sketches of People I Hardly Remember; A History of the World As I Found It,” all of which I would like to see go to press eventually. Or not. Who knows?

Why do you bury your books?

I don't bury all of them . . . I just bury the bad ones, which in my case meant the first three novels I wrote . . . and when I say bury, Imean literally dig a hole, salt the earth, the whole nine yards . . . I also dispose of all my rejection notices, although burning is my preferred method for this . . .confidence is indispensable to the writer if he or she is to make the right decisions . . . I don't like to have any reminders around of past failures . . .

Also, there seems to be a general buzz surrounding All About Lulu, how did the book get recognized so quickly?

A combination of things, luck being one of them. The right publisher. The right readers. The fact that Lulu is a trade paper original (which has really helped in terms of getting enthusiastic booksellers on board). And also, the book just sorta’ feels like the right book at the right time, kinda’ thing. I think a lot of people can relate to the family stuff. It’s good for group discussion, methinks. And of course, I’ve been very fortunate to have amazing advocacy and support all around me.

How do you feel about all of this (the book, the film, the recognition)?

Like a very grateful man. Incredibly grateful-- often of late, wistfully so. Like I was already lucky to have been dragging my bumper all over town all those years with no dental insurance, just because I had writing as a way of life, but now I can devote even more time to it, and make a living (sort of).

Lastly, where can readers go if they want a taste of your work?

Just about any bookstore, or Amazon, or whatever. Oh, you mean free work? Ha! There’s some personal essays archived at the nervousbreakdown.com— Brad Listi’s thriving literary co-op, which, as you know, is an excellent venue for dozens of great writers.

OK then, thanks so much Jonathan and I hope you make it out to Sacramento.

My pleasure, thanks to you, Becca! I also hope to get my ‘Sac on’, as it were . . .

Jonathan Evison likes rabbits. His work had appeared in Orchid, Knock, Opium, Quick Fiction, and other journals. All about Lulu is his first novel.

P.S. Check out Powell's Books for another interview with Evison.

Interview with Joshua Henkin, author of "Matrimony"

Joshua Henkin is the author of two books, Swimming Across the Hudson, released in 1997, and Matrimony, released earlier this year. In addition to writing, Henkin teaches at Sarah Lawrence College, Brooklyn College, and the 92nd St. Y in New York City.

In case you missed yesterday's review, here's a VERY short snippet about the book:

It is 1987, and Julian Wainwright, aspiring writer and Waspy son of New York City old money, meets beautiful, Jewish Mia Mendelsohn in the laundry room at Graymont College. So begins a love affair that, spurred on by family tragedy, will take Julian and Mia across the country and back, through several college towns, spanning twenty years.

First, I'd like to ask about the title of the book. When I first saw this book reviewed I skipped past it because I thought it was a nonfiction book about how to make your marriage work. Once it started showing up everywhere I finally settled down to see what all the fuss is about. So, my questions: Why did you choose the title Matrimony? Also, do you get any criticism about this title?

You're not alone in seeing the title and thinking it might be nonfiction, and yes, I've had some people think it's the wrong title for the book. I myself am ambivalent about the title, but on balance I stand by it. I tend to think that the best titles are evocative of the novel without telling the reader too much about it. My first novel, SWIMMING ACROSS THE HUDSON, is a good example of that. Swimming across the Hudson is simply an image from the book; it’s not a novel about aquatics, certainly. But you call a novel MATRIMONY and you create certain expectations. People might think it’s a self-help book, and even if they know it’s a novel, they might expect a certain kind of story that may or not be borne out by what happens in my book.

MATRIMONY is about more than marriage. It’s about friendship, class, maturing over the years, among other things. But I certainly couldn’t have called it MARRIAGE, FRIENDSHIP, CLASS, AND MATURING! OVER THE YEARS, though Alice Munro has a story collection with a title not so far from that. But she’s Alice Munro, and as far as I’m concerned she can do whatever she pleases; she’s that good.

In the end, the title MATRIMONY felt true to what the book was about, in that the central relationship is a marriage and the book is really about several other marriages as well—Carter and Pilar’s marriage, Mia’s parents’ marriage, Julian’s parents’ marriage. But I didn’t want to call the book MARRIAGE. I liked the more amorphous feel of MATRIMONY, as well as the implied phrase “holy matrimony,” which of course is belied (or at least rendered more complex) by what happens in my novel.

Are sections of this novel autobiographical? Where did you get your inspiration for writing this type of story?

In very deep ways, MATRIMONY is not autobiographical. I met my wife many years after college, her mother didn’t die of breast cancer, and my wife didn’t sleep with my best friend. Or, if she did, no one has told me yet! And, regrettably, I’m not nearly as wealthy as Julian is. The only character in the book who’s based on a real character is the dog, Cooper. Aside from a sex and breed switch, Cooper is a dead ringer for my wife’s and my beloved golden retriever, Dulcie. But all the other mammals in MATRIMONY are products of my imagination.

It’s interesting that many people assume that the book is autobiographical and, if it is, that I must be Julian. If anything, despite certain superficial similarities (like Julian, I grew up in New York and have moved back there; we’re both writers; our names both begin with “J”), I’m probably more similar to Mia than to Julian. I’m Jewish; she’s Jewish. I’m the son of an academic; she’s the daughter of an academic. Not that there aren’t some key differences between Mia and me that go beyond gender. Still, the home she grew up in, with certain notable exceptions, was much more similar to the home I grew up in than Julian’s home was.

The only qualification I’d add is that in the broadest sense Julian, Mia, and Carter are the kinds of people who are familiar to me, who I might have hung out with at various points in my life. If they showed up at a party I was at, I wouldn’t be surprised. I’ve lived in some of the places they’ve lived (I spent eight years in Ann Arbor, and four years in Berkeley/the SF Bay area; I’ve lived almost half my life in college towns), and I share, in the broadest contours, some of their concerns. In this sense, I was doing what Professor Chesterfield said, which is writing what I know about what I don’t know or what I don’t know about what I know.

Beyond that, it's hard to say where I get my inspiration, other than that everything for a novelist is a source of inspiration. The people you meet, the situations you encounter, and, of course, your imagination pure and simple. A fiction writer obviously needs a certain facility with language, but just as important is an abiding curiosity about people and about the world. Novelists are psychologists in many ways, and so it's not entirely surprising that Julian and Mia end up together. When I was a toddler, I apparently made my mother pick me up so I could look into every store window we passed. Even now, you take me to a party and hand me a stranger's high school yearbook and I can entertain myself for an hour. I'm a gossip; in another life I'd have had a talk show. In that sense, I'm like Julian – the Julian who snoops through Mia's closets, trying to get to know her. For me, this is one of the appeals of visiting book groups. It's intellectually stimulating, certainly, but beyond that, I like meeting new people. It's not every day that you get invited into a stranger's living room!

In the same vein, did you have an inspirational teacher like Mr. Chesterfield in the novel?

I've had a number of influential and inspirational teachers. Professor Chesterfield isn't based on anyone exactly (he's quite different from any writing teacher I've ever had), but he's loosely inspired by my first writing teacher, Leonard Michaels, a terrific writer whose star fell precipitously after a very promising early career, and whose work has just recently been reissued posthumously (his collected stories were published last year by Farar Straus) and who is finally again getting the attention he deserves. Lenny was a complicated guy and not a particularly good teacher by traditional standards (he often didn't come prepared to class), but he was smart and passionate and funny, and he encouraged me early on in ways that were very important to me.

Also, are you a teacher like Chesterfield, or have you met teachers like him (teachers who have commandments about how to write)?

I myself don't resemble Professor Chesterfield--I'd like to think I'm a good deal kinder than he is, and I'm certainly less scary! I don't write commandments on the blackboard, nor do I speak in terms of commandments. That said, I think most of his commandments have a big kernel of truth in them (on balance, I agree with most of what he says), and I do have a reputation for being a traditionalist as a teacher and thinking aspiring writers should learn the "rules" and then break them knowingly, and with purpose, instead of doing so out of ignorance.

I'm all for experimental writing if it's good, but there's a lot of terrible experimental writing out there being perpetrated by 18- and 19-year-olds. There's an attitude that a lot of undergraduates, especially, bring to class, which is, essentially, "Hey, dude, it's creative writing, so I can do whatever I want." Well, you CAN do whatever you want, as long as it works – which turns out to be a pretty daunting limitation.! At the end of every semester I'll have several students say to me, "I never realized fiction writing was so hard." It pleases me to hear this, because I know this means they learned something.

What did you ultimately hope readers would take away from your novel?

The reason I read fiction is get out of my own experience – to have characters I didn't know before I started the novel come sufficiently to life that I know them as well as or better than the people in my own life. If a novel does that to me, then it has succeeded, and if my book does that to my readers, then I feel that I have succeeded.

For me, plot and language are important, but they're important as vehicles for exploring character. Beyond that, I'm not looking for the reader to take away anything from MATRIMONY, or from any other piece of fiction I write. It's a common but mistaken assumption that novels are supposed to make statements or have points. Novelists aren’t in the business of making arguments, statements, or points; they aren’t in the business of teaching lessons. If you want to make an argument or a statement, if you want to teach a lesson, you should become a philosopher, an economist, a theologian, or a lawyer, all of which are perfectly good professions. They’re just not my profession. A novelist is in the business of creating characters and telling stories—nothing more, nothing less.

I'd also like to ask about writing in general. What are your writing habits? And what suggestions do you have for young writers? You write about Julian's struggles with writing his novel, his worries of never finishing his novel, and, at one point, a problem with writer's block. Have you had the same types of struggles? What do you suggest writers do to keep imagination going?

Writing fiction is incredibly difficult, and you have to go about it singlemindedly. It took me ten years to write MATRIMONY and I threw out more than three thousand pages. No matter how much you've accomplished in the past, there's always the risk of failure, always the fraud police hanging over you. With novels, especially, unlike stories (I write those, too), it takes a leap of faith. With a story, you can sometimes see the whole in advance, but not so with a novel; you can't see the forest for the trees. It takes a couple of years before you know not whether it's a good novel but whether it's a novel at all. You need to just plow forward and not think about it. The best way to look at it is that you're not writing a novel; you're writing a page a day, two pages a day, half a page a day, and then, at the end of a couple of years, you have a whole bunch of pages, most of which are likely to be a mess, but you hope that over time you'll begin to figure things out.

The suggestions I have for young writers are the same suggestions I have for myself. Treat it like a job, because it is a job. If you wait for inspiration, you'll never write. I don't believe in inspiration; I believe in tying yourself to your chair. It's not that there's no such thing as inspired work. But I find that inspired work doesn't correlate to feeling inspired; if anything, the relationship is inversely proportionate. If you're feeling too inspired, you're likely to fall in love with the sound of your own voice, and what comes out is self-indulgent and maudlin. Often my very best work comes from when I'm feeling least inspired.

I try to write every day or as close to every day as I can, and I keep a calendar in which I mark down to the minute how long I worked each day, and if I didn't write at all on a particular day I put a big fat zero next to the date, and that's my guilt zero. Even if you have very little time, it's better to write regularly! I tell my students that, given the choice between writing ten minutes a day six days a week or an hour on a Saturday, I'd choose ten minutes a day six days a week. That way, you're living with your characters, and you come up with ideas even when you're not writing.

In terms of similarities to Julian, I certainly experience many of the same insecurities he does, but unlike him, I never had writers block. I was always writing. I just was writing a lot of bad pages along the way, and it took me many years to figure the book out.

Lastly, I'm curious about your decision to market your book through book blogs. What was your reasoning behind that? And, did you use book blogs to help market your first book? Has it been a successful endeavor?

The Web was in its infancy when I published SWIMMING ACROSS THE HUDSON (1997), and beyond that, the world of publishing has changed a lot. It's become a much tougher, bottom-line business, and writers have to do whatever they can to sell copies of their book. It's hard to isolate the impact of my marketing MATRIMONY through book blogs because I've been fortunate with MATRIMONY on many fronts.

The reviews have been terrific, which has helped the book a lot, as, no doubt, has the fact that it was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. And my publisher, Pantheon, sent me on a long book tour and put advertising money into the book, and there's no substitute for that kind of support. That said, with the publishing world being as difficult as it is and book sales suffering across the industry, authors who take initiative can really make a difference, and what I've done on the Web, both in terms of book blogs and in terms of using the Web to reach book groups that end up choosing MATRIMONY, has clearly had an impact and, I hope, will continue to have an impact when MATRIMONY comes out in paperback at the end of August.

Thanks, Rebecca, for these really thoughtful questions. If you or your readers have any follow-up questions, I'd be glad to try to answer them. Also, if anyone would like to see further thoughts I have about MATRIMONY and about the writing process, check out the online book group discussion of MATRIMONY that I participated in at mothertalk.com.

As always, I’d be delighted to participate in book group discussions of MATRIMONY. If you would like me to join your book group discussion, you can contact me through my website, or directly, at Jhenkin at SLC dot edu.

Josh

Me again (Becca): Also, I found this article about Josh Henkin in the New York Times. It's and old one, but if you're interested in reading more about him and his book, I recommend checking it out.