Author Snapshot: John McFetridge

Though The Toronto Star recently described John McFetridge as Canada’s answer to Elmore Leonard, in some ways that doesn’t even begin to cover it. If anything, McFetridge’s voice is colder, starker than Leonard’s, something likely due the fact that this Made-in-Canada author wears his nationality like a Hudson’s Bay blanket. McFetridge is one of a new breed of Canadian crime fictionists, building neo noir that seems touched by both the humor and self-consciousness of life north of the 48th.

Publisher’s Weekly called McFetridge’s most recent book, Everybody Knows this is Nowhere, a “noir love song to Toronto,” while in an early review for Quill & Quire, Sarah Weinman also chose the Leonard comparison, saying that “both writers seamlessly mix the police procedural with perp procedural to underscore the parallel lives of members of the opposing teams. But where Leonard tends to favour Hollywood-homicide banter, McFetridge keep the quips to a minimum, preferring punch to panache. As a result, the only time his prose gets purple is when fists are flying.”

Clearly, and like a growing number of his readers, one gets the idea that Weinman understands that this is an author everyone knows is going somewhere.



A Snapshot of John McFetridge
Born: Greenfield Park, Quebec
Resides: Toronto
Birthday: November, 16 1959
Web site: johnmcfetridge.ca


Please tell us about Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere.
The blurb is: an urban grow operator under house arrest must decide whether to trust a too-sexy stranger when a murder investigation threatens her business.

Which I guess sums it up, but it does start with an, “Arab-looking” guy falling 20 floors off the top of the apartment building she runs her grow op in, her 21-year-old daughter is in the mix, bikers are moving into town and going to war with the mob and the cops are in the middle of a huge corruption investigation, so there are some other complications.

What’s on your nightstand?
The Big O by Declan Burke, What Burns Within by Sandra Ruttan and the non-fiction McMafia: a Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld by Misha Glenny.

What inspires you?
Character, it’s all about the people. I spent a long time avoiding writing about people I knew, about their stories and situations, but the older I got the more I wondered, why? No one else seemed to be telling their stories, certainly not very many trying to do it in their voices (which is also my voice). So, I’m inspired by the people I’ve met, my friends.

What are you working on now?
More of the same, I guess. Another book with many of the same characters -- new main characters, though, that’s the series style I’m aiming for. Many of the same cops and the same crime figures involved in the lives of new people. I like the continuity of it, the way life goes on and the people keep doing what they’re doing, but I like new faces. In this book, Go Round, an ex-US Army guy and an ex-Canadian Army guy who met in Afghanistan are back home and bringing drugs and guns with them. The Canadian guy is JT, a biker we meet in Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere.

Tell us about your process.
It’s changing. When I started writing novels my kids were very small. Jimmy was just over a year and Doug was two and a half. I was (and still am) a stay at home Dad. So, the boys and I would often go to the park in the morning and while pushing them on the swings or watching them in the sandbox, I’d work out stuff in my head and maybe make notes if I could find 30 seconds with a pen and piece of paper. Then, in the afternoon while they napped, I’d type up what I had on an old laptop at the kitchen table.

As the boys have gotten older, I’ve gotten more time. Now Doug is in grade four and Jimmy’s in grade two so I drop them off at school in the morning and work till lunch. Then, I am the mack daddy of grilled cheese and pizza pops. In the afternoon I do research, poke around on line, get lost on blogs and webzines like this one and stuff till 3:30 and it’s time to pick up my boys at school. I’m looking forward to when they’re in high school and no longer come home for lunch (well, looking forward and not, at the same time).

As for the writing, I don’t work out plots or outline or plan too far ahead. My books aren’t mysteries with a crime being solved, they’re about ongoing crimes. I work from character and theme. Very basic themes. Dirty Sweet is about opportunity – how is it that some people see opportunity everywhere and some people never see it? Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere is all about how did I end up here? I get characters I’m interested in and then I put them in situations I think are interesting and I see what they do. Then I see what they do next and around about page 250 I start to wonder, wow, how are they going to get out of this (or not get out of it)?

Francis Ford Coppola said that the idea is the question and making the movie is how you try and find the answer. Then he added, “Just try telling that to the money guy.” It’s a funny line when you’re talking about movie money, but I find it actually works with books. The idea is the question and writing the book is finding out some of the answers. I don’t know what the answers will be ahead of time, I have to write the book to find out.

Lift your head and look around. What do you see?
One one side is my kitchen and living room, my dog is sleeping on the couch (hey, get off the couch!) and on the other side is the window to my front yard and the street. I really like to feel plugged into my neighbourhood, to my city. I don’t work well in solitude (well, I say that having lived in cities my whole life so I don’t really know, but I strongly suspect...). I’m a couple blocks from the library and the grocery store and the park so I walk everywhere. It’s a nice neighbourhood, very homey and like a small town in the middle of a big city. I know many of my neighbours and I like running into people when I’m out.

When did you know you wanted to be a writer?
When I read Elmore Leonard’s Swag? I don’t know. I wasn’t much of a reader when I was a kid, but I loved the movies. I moved around a lot in high school (I went to four of them) and at the last one I met a guy I’m still friends with named Randy McIlwaine (he’s now a cartoonist, very funny stuff). We went to lots of movies and decided to try and write one. We called it Opening Night at the Bijoux (we were in Montreal, see, and bijoux means jewelry in French, and we thought we were so clever, we imagined it as the sign outside an adult movie theatre, the Bijou X) and we still feel we pretty much invented the high school sex comedy. It pre-dated Animal House and Meatballs and Porkys.

Anyway, we showed it to some producers in Montreal and a couple were interested and it was fun (and extremely frustrating), but it never went anywhere. Anyway, I thought I could make movies. For twenty years I tried -- not always full-time, head on trying, but on and off.

After a while I realized all the movies I really liked were either made by John Sayles or based on a book. I was intimidated by the idea of trying to write a novel -- every novelist I ever heard talk was well-educated, well traveled, confident. Then another buddy of mine from my high school years, Michel Basilieres, convinced me most novelists were just faking it, so I gave it a try. Michel is also a writer, his novel Black Bird won the Amazon.ca/Books in Canada Best First Novel Award a few years ago.

If you couldn’t write books, what would you be doing?
I don’t know. Not much. Maybe I’d be a dog walker. I drifted aimlessly through a lot of my life. Dropped out of high school, moved out west, worked on construction sites and in warehouses, went back east, enrolled in university as a “mature” student and changed majors a few times before landing in English lit and history, dropped out and got kicked out a couple times before graduating at age 31. I thought I might be a teacher but after a dozen teacher’s colleges turned me down I got the hint. I didn’t have good enough marks to get into a master’s program. And like I said, my 20 year attempt at filmmaking was a complete bust.

My brother just retired after 39 years as an RCMP officer and sometimes I think I should have done that.

To date, what moment in your career has made you happiest?
It’s all been pretty good. I co-wrote a book of short stories, Below the Line, with my friend Scott Albert and getting that published was great. Then, when Jack David at ECW accepted Dirty Sweet and asked me if I could write some more books, that was pretty good. Working with Jack and Michael Holmes and everybody at ECW has been terrific. Being able to dedicate books to my wife after all she’s put up with is pretty sweet, too, and makes me very happy. I was very surprised when Dirty Sweet and Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere got picked up by Harcourt in the US, and pretty happy about it.

For you, what is the easiest thing about being writer?
Because I write crime fiction maybe the easiest is that the world keeps giving me material. Every time I open the paper some criminal has done some wacky, dumb thing and I just try and imagine what could have possibly led up to that and I have a scene.

Writing crime fiction is also a good way to deal with the huge amounts of hypocrisy I see every day. I write a scene in which a bunch of bikers talk about how they’d be out of business if marijuana was legalized and I feel like I’ve done some social commentary and maybe been a little entertaining at the same time.

What’s the most difficult?
Working alone all the time. One of the things that kept me trying to make movies all those years was the social aspect of it, the hanging out on set with a bunch of funny people doing something they liked (I always felt almost all that on set bitching was fake). I know writers are supposed to love the solitude, the quiet contemplation and all that, but it drives me crazy.

What question do you get asked about your writing most often?
Oh, the usual, where do the ideas come from. That way I know the person asking isn’t from Toronto or they’d recognize almost every crime in my books from stories in the newspaper.

What’s the question you’d like to be asked?
Not this one, that’s for sure ;) I don’t know, I’m pretty open about trying to answer whatever people ask.

What question would like never to be asked again?
I was confronted after a reading once by a very angry guy demanding to know why I would put young black men committing crimes in my book. I don’t actually mind the question, I think it’s good to start the dialogue and I think we avoid difficult questions too much in Canada, but he was a pretty scary guy and he kept shoving me and saying it was, “at your peril” (he had an odd accent and the phrase seemed to fit him). We talked for a while. I don’t think he ever agreed with me that we need to get this stuff -- racism, crime, sexism, inequality -- out in the open, we need to talk about it even if it makes us uncomfortable (or because it makes us uncomfortable) if we’re going to see the end of it, but at least we didn’t come to blows.

Tell us something about yourself that no one knows.
For most of my life I wanted to play goalie for the Montreal Canadiens. When I was a kid I was such a bad hockey player I was too embarrassed to tell my friends. Now I want to play soccer for Toronto FC.

Author Snapshot: Dan Vyleta

Some readers will have noticed that I’ve had trouble shutting up about Dan Vyleta’s debut novel since I read the book early in 2008. As I said not long ago, Pavel & I is nuanced and practiced and intelligent and brave. And when I talked about the “gritty majesty” of the book in this space earlier this year, here is what I said:

Vyleta’s biography alone sets the tone: he holds a Ph.D. in history from Cambridge, lives in Edmonton, Alberta and is the son of Czech refugees who emigrated to Germany in the 1960s. He understands, he knows, he sees, he wants peace. None of that is what Pavel & I is about, but it sets the stage.

Vyleta’s gorgeous debut takes place in occupied Berlin in 1946. Pavel Richter is a decommissioned soldier who is ill -- perhaps dieing -- from a kidney infection that he’s been unable to treat. The infection, as well as the unexpected arrival of a corpse in his apartment, set in motion a series of events and introductions that push our story towards disaster.

It astonishes me that we’ve not heard more about this book: it’s wonderful. Vyleta calls Pavel & I “a broken sort of love story,” but it’s so much more, as well. If you like classic cold war thrillers with a tough, literary edge, Pavel & I is one you’ll not want to miss.


A Snapshot of Dan Vyleta...
Most recent book: Pavel & I
Resides: Edmonton, Canada
Birthday: July 15th


What’s your favorite city?
Tough one. Barcelona ranks high. Prague, minus the tourists. New York, when I’m feeling flush. Vienna.

You only have six hours to spend there. What do you do?
Let’s say Vienna then, on a late summer’s day. Get up just before lunchtime, have a melange and a piece of strudel at this little bakery I know, in the 8th district. Go for a walk through the city, heading for the Naschmarkt, the open air market. I'll buy some sour gherkins there, and a bottle of beer from a cornershop, walk up to the Art University’s gardens, sit in the shade, read a Chekhov story. It’s not far to the museum district from there, so maybe I will head over, stare at the Schiele paintings for half an hour or so. Head up to a cafe, have some Austrian bread with speck and horseradish, and another beer, then jump on the tram and head out west, where there is a wonderful outdoor pool under the trees. Mostly, though, I will just walk. There is nothing quite like walking in a beautiful city, especially at night.

What food do you love?
Olives. I mean I love a thousand kinds of food, but I’m not sure I could do without olives. And sardines, anchovies. Salty stuff.

What food have you vowed never to touch again?
I’m not into food chastity, to be honest. I suppose I am not keen to return to student fare, plastic cheese and sliced economy loaf, but when push comes to shove that will do, too.

What’s on your nightstand?
Don’t have one. But there is a pile of books on the floor next to my bed, the manuscript of a friend’s novel, an IKEA alarm clock and probably a pair of old socks. And a cat, more often than not, curled up and sleeping.

Tell us about your process.
More computer than pen, though I take sketches and notes by hand. Working out everything about the plot ahead of time kills it for me. It needs to start in language rather than in some abstract idea, however sexy; I don’t like the feeling that I am merely putting words to pre-existing ideas. I used to write only at night, but it turns out any time is good. What I need is a strange mixture of inspiration and bloody mindedness. Sometimes it’s best to let it sit for a day, until something moves me. And sometimes I just have to buckle down and keep on pushing, no matter how dull I feel.

Lift your head and look around. What do you see?
A window. A bunch of small trees, newly in leaf. A courtyard, and the apartments on the other side, nine little balconies with garden furniture. Not a soul stirring today, apart from the woman who comes out to smoke.

When did you know you wanted to be a writer?
I read a lot as a kid, and it probably occurred to me then that it would be cool to be a writer. I didn’t do much about it then, however. When I started writing in earnest, I shied away from thinking of myself as a writer. It sounded pompous. But I knew right away that this was what I wanted to do with my life.

To date, what moment in your career has made you happiest?
Selling your first book is a big deal, because up until then you barely dare to hope for fear that too much hope will jinx it. Then you get the phone call from your agent that it’s time to get the bottle of bubbly out of the fridge. It took me a long time to digest. My publisher sent me a bottle of Scotch when the book was finally on the shelves. I think that’s when it really hit me. It made me very happy, opening that bottle.

For you, what is the easiest thing about being writer?
Sitting around, taking notes. Notetaking is great. You don’t yet have to commit to anything, there are no decisions involved, and you have the thrill of creative discovery. Writing is fantastic too, but is tinged with anxiety -- you lose yourself in the moment, but the next morning you wake up, read through your chapter and are beset by doubt.

What’s the most difficult?
Doubt, rejection, being made to wait. On the page, you control every single nuance of your story, but the moment you pass it on, you lose all control what happens with it.

What question do you get asked about your writing most often?
English isn’t my first language, so that comes up pretty regularly: why is it the language I write in? I am still working on an answer with real polish to it.

What’s the question you’d like to be asked?
How about: “Would you consider selling the film rights?”

What question would like never to be asked again?
“Does the protagonist have to be such an asshole?”

Please tell us about Pavel & I.
It’s a broken sort of love story: a boy is looking for a father, a woman finds a man she thinks she can trust, and the narrator is convinced that he’s identified his soul mate, a man he can talk to, get to the bottom of things.

The book is set in post-war Berlin, in the winter of 1946/47. The city is in ruins, there isn’t enough food to go around, and everybody is cold. In part, it is a Cold War thriller, in part a look at life at a time when civilization has grown threadbare; all told through the eyes of a man who loves a good story, perhaps too much so.

Also, there is a monkey, and a frozen midget, and an English Colonel who likes to wear mink.

Author Snapshot: Victoria Holmes

Victoria Holmes is one of the three writers known as Erin Hunter, a pen name Holmes and fellow children’s authors Kate Carey and Cherith Baldry dreamed up to avoid confusing readers with a platoon of author names on the front of their books.

Holmes tells us that two new titles in their popular “Warriors” series were launched in April: Power of Three Book Three: Outcast and the final part of the Graystripe manga trilogy, Warrior’s Return.

“In Outcast,” says Holmes, “our three young heroes -- Lionpaw, Hollypaw and Jaypaw -- travel far from the lake to the mountains, where they meet the Tribe of Rushing Water and find out that the Tribe’s ancestors hold a dark secret linking them more closely to the Clans than any cat imagined. In Warrior’s Return, Graystripe and Millie embark on the final part of their journey to find the Clans. And this time, it’s Millie’s kittypet origins that are needed more than Graystripe’s warrior skills to tackle their biggest challenge yet.”

Meanwhile, readers can be on the alert for Seekers: Book One, which has been screaming up the charts since its release just a few weeks ago. No big cats this time, though. In Seekers, three bears of different species find themselves thrust together in unexpected adventure.

All paws on board? Great: let’s meet Ms. Holmes.


A Snapshot of Victoria Holmes (one of the three writers known as Erin Hunter)...
Born: Berkshire, England
Resides: London, England
Birthday: July 17th
Web site: warriorcats.com


What’s on your nightstand?
A lamp, an alarm clock, a picture of my son Joshua when he was two and a half, and always, always, always a book.

What inspires you?
Anything that isn’t man-made.

What are you working on now?
Power of Three Book Five: Long Shadows; Seekers Book Three (which doesn’t have a title yet, but it might be called Smoke Mountains); a manga trilogy starring Ravenpaw and Barley, Warriors Field Guide: Code of the Clans, planning my wedding and redecorating my apartment.

Tell us about your process.
I use pen and paper to make copious notes on plot, character, dialogue and anything else that pops into my head during the early part of planning a book. Then I create a document on my computer and shuffle everything around until I have a rough outline of the story. Finally, I go through each part adding details until I know exactly what happens in each scene, how the conversations will go, what the characters are thinking, and how the story needs to be moved forward. Once I have all this planned out (usually taking up half the length of the final book), I send it to Kate Cary or Cherith Baldry, my co-writers, who write the script out in full. Once they’ve filled in all the gaps, they send the script to me for a final check to make sure it sounds consistently “Erin,” and then I deliver it to my editor in New York. Yay! I work regular office hours, and most weekends. Writing is a job, but it’s also a way of life.

Lift your head and look around. What do you see?
I’m in my hotel room in Los Angeles, with three hours to go before I speak on a panel about Writing for Tweens with Cornelia Funke and Rick Riordan. I woke at three am, quivering with nerves -- I just hope I’m not too star struck by my companions to say anything coherent! My hotel room is beautiful, way more glamorous than my apartment back home!

When did you know you wanted to be a writer?
I’ve always loved reading and writing stories -- and also poems, plays, newspaper articles, pretty much anything involving words. I grew up thinking it would be nice to have the chance to write a book one day; I never, ever dreamed I would be able to make a living by writing alone! I am the luckiest person in the world.

If you couldn’t write books, what would you be doing?
Lots of things! I love horses and dogs, and spent a year riding professionally just after graduating, so my alternative career would be training young horses and helping people with their dogs. I’m particularly interested in troubled animals who need to re-learn normal behavior and the ability to trust.

And if the weather was too cold and wet to be outside with animals, I’d bake cakes for a living. My specialty is chocolate brownies, yum.

To date, what moment in your career has made you happiest?
My first ever bookstore event at Politics and Prose in Washington, DC.

For you, what is the easiest thing about being writer?
Being able to work with nothing more than my imagination.

What’s the most difficult?
Having to rely on my imagination when it would rather be thinking about something else.

What question do you get asked about your writing most often?
Where do you get your ideas?

What’s the question you’d like to be asked?
Please can I buy you a chocolate chip cookie?

What question would like never to be asked again?
Not so much a question, but someone at a school event once said: “The kids were so disappointed when I told them Erin Hunter doesn’t exist!” OH YES SHE DOES.

Tell us something about yourself that no one knows.
My greatest ambition has always been to be a dancer but I’m too short and ungraceful.

Author Snapshot: Jim Krusoe

You could spend some time trying to get a handle on Jim Krusoe: trying to pin him down firmly enough to be able to write about him in a way that those unfamiliar with his work would find illuminating.

Sure, you can cover the basics. Cleveland born, Krusoe has lived for many years in Los Angeles where he teaches creative writing, specifically at Antioch University and Santa Monica College.

Krusoe founded The Santa Monica Review in 1988. It’s a well respected literary journal published by Santa Monica College. He is the author of five books of poetry, a collection of short stories called Blood Lake and two novels: Iceland and the newly published Girl Factory (Tin House Books). He is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Fund.

None of this really explains who Krusoe is: what drives him, what moves him and what -- forgive me -- makes him tick. It can’t, in a way. The closer you get, it seems, the more he manages to obscure himself. You see passion. You see talent. Beyond that, I’d wager he wants you to see his words.


A Snapshot of Jim Krusoe...
Born: Cleveland, Ohio
Resides: Los Angeles, USA

Please tell us about your most recent book.
Girl Factory is about a guy who discovers six young women suspended in acidophilus in the basement of the yogurt store where he works. He’s trying to find a way to bring them back to life. In this process one of the questions I asked myself was: what does it mean to try to help someone? I’m afraid the results are mixed, at best.

What’s on your nightstand?
My nightstand has only a lamp, the base of which was cracked when one of the cats knocked it over one morning about three, and where I tried to fix it there’s a thick unsightly ooze of hardened white glue. In the drawer beneath it, however, is a Yugioh card my son left about a year ago, a flashlight, a sock, three paperclips, a tape measure, a screwdriver, a kid’s Halloween mask, several pens, a salt shaker, a twig, two screws, a book of chess openings, several of my wife’s elastic hair-ties, a few sheets of lined notebook paper, and a small stone. Missing are the toenail clippers I’ve trying to find for a week.

What are you working on now?
I’m working on a book about a son who gets a postcard from his dead mother in Cleveland. She says she needs him to visit her right away.

Tell us about your process.
I love to use fountain pens because they slow me down. My process is as follows: I start with an image or something (in the case of Girl Factory it was yogurt) that won’t go away, because something about it bothers me. Then I accumulate as much material as possible around that image. When I have a couple hundred pages, I try to figure out what I don’t need and what’s missing.

I like to describe the writing process as follows: You have been put into a room with lots and lots of boxes, and are told that some, but not all, are the parts to a machine you need to assemble. No one tells you what kind of a machine it is or what its supposed to do. So you work for a long, long time, and eventually it looks as if you may be on the right track. Then there’s a knock at the door. Standing in the doorway is a UPS guy standing next to a stack of about 50 more boxes. “They forgot to give you these,” he says. “Do you want to sign for them?”

Lift your head and look around. What do you see?
I’m on the couch in the front room with a dog lying on either side of me. The big one is sighing at something outside the window, and the terrier is just asleep on her back, feet stuck straight out. Cars pass in the street. It’s mid-day, and my daughter is home from school, sick, but not too sick to work on her computer a room away. Every so often she yells out some fact she’s discovered about the report she’s writing for school. It’s about multiple intelligences, something we both are in favor of.

When did you know you wanted to be a writer?
In first grade, when they tested us for color-blindness, all the other kids could read the number six inside the dots, and I couldn’t.

If you couldn’t write books, what would you be doing?
Books or no books aren’t important, but I can’t imagine myself not writing.

To date, what moment in your career has made you happiest?
I don’t think about a career. I write to make sense out of the world, and that’s that.

For you, what is the easiest thing about being writer?
Writing.

What’s the most difficult?
Writing well.

What question do you get asked about your writing most often?
Where do you get your ideas?

What’s the question you’d like to be asked?
How many drafts to you do? (The answer is about 40, and the reason I like to tell is to let others know the process is a long one. When I began to write I imagined a novel would be finished after about three drafts, and I worry too many other writers may set an artificial limit on when they decide a book is finished. For me, and much to my surprise, the process of revision is as pleasurable, or maybe more so, than the actual imagining.)

Tell us something about yourself that no one knows.
I don’t watch television, except for slow-speed police chases which, I’m beginning to think, are the metaphor for my life.

Author Snapshot: Barbara Fister

Anyone who knows Barbara Fister even slightly is not in the least surprised to discover that her novels are smart, sophisticated and deeply concerned with the larger world. In many ways, all of those words -- smart, sophisticated, concerned -- describe the Madison-born and Minnesota-based author perfectly.

An academic librarian at a liberal arts college, on her own Web site, Fister says her “research interests are wide, not to say idiosyncratic, but they all have to do, one way or another, with how various media shape our understanding of the world.”

These interests -- and even passions – inform Fister’s work. “I’m particularly interested [in] the role of anxiety in the formation of social issues,” says Fister, “in life and in fiction.”

In her second novel, Fister says she is exploring “how anxiety becomes a device for the suppression of dissent in In the Wind.” The book draws parallels between the contemporary insouciance regarding civil liberties and the counterintelligence practices of the era around the Vietnam War. Fister herself tells us that she would “like to think I’m contributing my small part toward carrying on the feminist contribution to the PI genre.” And, sure: there’s that. But there’s so much more here, as well.


A Snapshot of Barbara Fister...

Born: Madison, Wisconsin
Resides: Rural Minnesota, US
Birthday: I’m 53. I’m not big on birthdays.
Web site: barbarafister.com


Please tell us about In the Wind.
The book draws on the resonance between the present state of our civil liberties and the excesses of law enforcement during the Vietnam War era.

A woman who has been working quietly in a church on Chicago’s West Side goes on the lam, accused of having killed an FBI agent in 1972, when she was a member of a radical offshoot of the American Indian Movement. The narrator of the story, Anni Koskinen, has recently resigned from the Chicago PD after getting on the wrong side of her fellow cops, and is not quite sure what to do with herself; her only job so far as newly licensed PI has been tracking down a teenage girl with bipolar disorder. By happenstance, Anni helps the fugitive escape, then gets involved in her defense -- which is tricky because her closest friend is not only an FBI agent himself, but the son of the murdered man. But even he is unhappy with the way the FBI is handling the case, and is troubled by the direction the bureau has been heading. Her investigation leads down some mean streets, up to the White Earth Reservation, into the past -- and, of course, into a whole lot of trouble. Which, when all’s said and done, is her business.

I had to reach for the smelling salts when Kris Nelscott, whose Smokey Dalton series is one I’ve long admired, read the book and said I was “Sara Paretsky’s heir apparent.” I’m sure Paretsky is too busy writing to think about heirs, but I like to think I’m contributing my small part toward carrying on the feminist contribution to the PI genre.

What’s on your nightstand?
A lovely big pile of books, including Minette Walter’s The Chameleon’s Shadow and Andrew Pyper’s Wildfire Season.

What inspires you?
I get my dander up about a lot of things, and writing is a good outlet. In the Wind was a therapeutic way to deal with my negative feelings about George Bush. It was strange, as I did research for the story, to read about counterintelligence practices exposed after Watergate; they’re identical to what’s going on today. When Chris Dodd read from the 1976 Church Committee hearings this past December on the floor of the Senate as he filibustered a bill sanctioning warrantless wiretapping, it sent chills up my spine. We’re in a weird time warp; the only thing missing is the outrage and the tear gas. That said, though my book has political themes, I try to play fair with the issues. Anything less would belittle the very real issues at stake, and straw men don’t make for very compelling characters in fiction.

What are you working on now?
My next book deals with the immigration debate and the aftermath of an exoneration. A black man who has spent 20 years in prison, convicted in a highly-publicized rape case, is released after his conviction is overturned. The woman who is raped wants to know who was really responsible -- especially once she discovers that several women have been attacked since in similar circumstances. Anni Koskinen starts to investigate just as another highly-charged crime is stirring passions in Chicago, when an undocumented alien is arrested for the murder of a young woman who had been missing for months. As with In the Wind, what really interests me is the way in which general social anxiety shapes the way people respond to crime, and how that anxiety is manipulated for various ends. While it sounds as if I’m on a soapbox, I’m not: I just think this stuff makes for compelling stories.

Tell us about your process.
I’m what someone at Crimespace evocatively called a “fog walker.” I can’t map out a story in advance, I have to discover it as I go groping along. I’m sure it would be more efficient to work from an outline, but I just can’t do it. If I can see two or three scenes ahead, I’m doing well. Thank god for word processors.

Lift your head and look around. What do you see?
There’s a cat trying to climb into my lap. He’s jealous of all the time my laptop spends there.

When did you know you wanted to be a writer?
When I was in fifth grade I wrote a story about a horse that was a whole eight pages long. I was very impressed with myself.

If you couldn’t write books, what would you be doing?
I would be reading them. (Which I do, anyway.) I have a job I like quite a bit -- as an academic librarian and college teacher. I enjoy writing fiction, but I fit it in when I can. I feel a little guilty saying this, because I know how many people’s fondest desires are caught up in the identity “writer.” For me, it’s something I love to do, but it’s not who I am.

To date, what moment in your career has made you happiest?
That’s a very interesting question, actually. You’d think it would be when my agent closed the deal on my first book, in a preempt the day after he put it on the market. But that was both unreal and fraught with anxiety. I hate having my hands shake every time the phone rings. It may sound corny, but my happiest moments are when I write a scene that really works. There’s no anxiety involved, no regrets, no ambition to be someone other than who I am; just pure satisfaction.

For you, what is the easiest thing about being a writer?
Hmm, I’m beginning to visualize Gabriel Byrne sitting in a chair on the opposite side of the room asking me these questions as he tents his hands in front of him. “Being a writer” is a phrase that makes me oddly nervous. I guess I’m only comfortable with it as a verb: to write, not as a descriptive noun: a writer. I write. That’s easy.

What’s the most difficult? Avoiding the hype and hysteria about how to market yourself. I see so much unhappiness among people who act like stage mothers to their inner child. That’s no way to treat a kid.

What question do you get asked about your writing most often?
I don’t get many questions about it; not that many people know I write mysteries.

What’s the question you’d like to be asked?
Read any good books lately?

What question would you like never to be asked again?
What do you think of my book trailer? (Or any other marketing topic.) Look, Doc, I’ll level with you: I think capitalism, which celebrates greed as a virtue and separates us all into winners and losers, like some cosmic American Idol show, appeals to our worst nature and fosters intolerance and inequality. Too much bad energy is generated around books as product and authors as brands, and none of it actually benefits readers. It’s gotten so bad that writers go on discussion lists to chide people for checking books out of libraries. It would be much more beneficial to think about developing a healthy book culture than to focus so much on selling ourselves. I think my inner librarian is coming out.

Tell us something about yourself that no one knows.
Well, quite a few people know this, since I wrote about it in an article that got picked up at Slashdot (“News for Nerds”), but I’m a self-disclosed anarchist librarian -- which is not an oxymoron. In reality, libraries are a model of anarchist philosophy. They are full of ideas that coexist side by side, even though they disagree with one another. You may think we’re creating order, but actually we put all those books together so they can have a good brawl. No single authority gets to decide which answers are the right ones. Anyone who comes in the door gets to make up his or her own mind. When it comes to crime fiction, two of Ranganathan’s laws of library science, first laid out in 1931, provide a model of tolerance: every reader his book, every book, its reader. Forget the bestseller lists and the hype -- just be open-minded, look for the unusual voices that speak to you, find the right match, and all will be well.

Is our time up already? I must say, I feel much better. This therapy seems to be working.

Author Snapshot: Sandra Ruttan

Titian hair. A deceptively sweet smile. Arms akimbo. Mystery writer and journalist Sandra Ruttan manages these disparate things easily, seemingly without contradiction.

I say this about Sandra Ruttan the author, but it could all be easily translated to what works about her fiction: Sandra Ruttan looks at things from a connected distance. She assesses dispassionately, beautifully, and with a frighteningly delicate care. And then she brings us along.

With her second novel, What Burns Within (Dorchester), just a few days from publication, the editor of Spinetingler magazine and the heft behind At Central Booking contemplates the path that led her to this place... just remember, please, not to call her Susan.

Crimespree Magazine said this author is “talented in the way that a natural musician is talented, making all the notes seem effortless.” We agree, and hold our breath to see what’s next.


A Snapshot of Sandra Ruttan...

Please tell us about your new novel, What Burns Within.
When I was a baby, my mother was walking in Toronto, with my two-year-old sister by the hand and me in her arms. She lost her grip on my sister, and they got separated. A stranger picked my sister up and took her to a police station. Things like that make you realize it’s down to luck. Anyone could have found my sister, but the person who did was a responsible citizen.

The opening scene for What Burns Within came from there. The book was inspired by a real moment in my life, when I realized that anyone could know I was home alone, but saying more would be a bit of a spoiler. That feeling of vulnerability was the seed, and I started to think about how so many people are at risk, every day, without even realizing it, just like that situation with my sister.

When I worked in education it was my responsibility to anticipate danger and protect the children when we did field trips, and once you start writing crime fiction it isn’t hard to imagine the many ways a person can harm another. It made me think about what could have happened all those years ago.

My ex-husband is also a firefighter, so the three main crimes in What Burns Within -- rape, child abductions and arson -- all came out of personal experience. In the book, three RCMP officers who have a history end up working together when their investigations collide and their personal history may get in the way, with devastating consequences.

What’s on your nightstand?
I’m in the midst of moving and packing, so I don't have a nightstand at the moment. But the books I’m keeping in my suitcase are Paying For It by Tony Black and Russell D. McLean’s The Good son.

What inspires you?
News stories, bits of conversation, personal experiences... everything, in other words.

I was on a plane recently, flying from Dallas to Baltimore, and I ended up sitting beside a woman who does national educational testing in the US. By the end of the flight I had her contact information, a resource Web site link and a new book idea. I do keep an ideas file, but it’s more about technical research and contact information, because I find news stories are sometimes taken down or blocked after a certain period of time. I don’t usually look at anything in the file, unless I need to do research, or get in touch with someone. I just wait to see if the idea takes root and starts growing.

What are you working on now?
A stand-alone book I don't want to say too much about, but it isn’t a police procedural. Although a criminal investigation is a part of the book, the focus is on relationships and the things that happen to a person that shape their life and their choices, and how it leaves their life in ruins.

I am also working on the third book in the Nolan, Hart and Tain series... and in that book readers will finally get the full scoop on the investigation the three were working when they met. It’s a story with intersecting timelines when the past finally catches up with the present.

Tell us about your process.
I usually write in the morning, and in the afternoon, and evening. When I’m working on a book I work seven days a week. I don’t pre-plot, so I keep paper and a pen beside my bed and often write illegible notes in the middle of the night, in the dark. I’m obsessive. That said, I do most of my work on the computer, and it’s almost always entirely freeform, minimal pre-plotting. With What Burns Within, the only thing I knew for sure was the last scene of the book.

Lift your head and look around. What do you see?
Right this moment, an air hockey table, a plastic child-sized chair, a Hogwarts-designed playroom, my nephew Athaniel talking on the phone to his friend, my two-year-old nephew Dashiell grooving to Tom Waits...

When did you know you wanted to be a writer?
As a child, from the time I read The Call of the Wild and The Chronicles of Narnia... I guess around the age of seven.

If you couldn’t write books, what would you be doing?
Working with children with speech delays, or other special needs.

To date, what moment in your career has made you happiest?
There are three moments tied for this spot. One was when I got my Publishers Weekly review and they said, “The child abduction and sex crime aspects of the story are handled without exploitation or kid gloves.” Although I’m dealing with heavy subjects, I don’t just do that to manipulate the reader, and I was pleased the reviewer sensed that I wasn’t trying to exploit the crimes in the book for shock value.

The second moment was when Sean Chercover phoned me after reading The Frailty of the Flesh, the second Nolan, Hart and Tain book [coming November 2008 from Dorchester]. Sean told me he had tears running down his face. I knew then that the book had the strong emotional impact for others that it had for me.

The third was when my boyfriend made a remark about Craig Nolan. It was an off-hand thing, but Brian completely understood the character and sensed where I was ultimately going with him. Since we’d never discussed the character or my long-range plans, it was a great moment. It’s very rewarding when someone gets what you’re trying to do with your work, though it probably speaks to what a close reader Brian is more than anything.

For you, what is the easiest thing about being writer?
The evolution of ideas. I have so many ideas it would take me ten years to write them all if I started on them right now, and I’d be scared to think of how many new ideas I’d develop before I finished the current list.

What’s the most difficult?
The politics, all the expectations people start putting on you, what you can and can’t blog about, can and can’t say in an interview, review, etc. Some seem to think you should stop being a person and just be a product. If I wanted that, wouldn’t I have set my sights on Hollywood? The pay is better. It seems the best way to survive is to be nothing but a smile, have no strong opinion about anything, never take a stand. And that runs counter to my nature. I don’t do wishy-washy.

What question do you get asked about your writing most often?
Where my ideas come from, I guess, but I don’t mind. Usually something interesting sparked them, and that’s why I wrote the story.

What’s the question you’d like to be asked?
What’s the worst piece of writing advice you ever received.

What question would you like never to be asked again?
I appreciate any interest in my work and will answer pretty much any question, but I guess if there’s one question that drives me mental it’s one I get asked in life regularly, not in interviews. For the record I am not related to Susan Ruttan. I don’t know her, I was not on L.A. Law and I don’t find it funny when people call me Susan.

Tell us something about yourself that no one knows.
I’m sure a few people know that as a child, I had recurring nightmares about Hamburglar.

Author Snapshot: Shanna Swendson

We join the Texas-based author previously known as Samantha Carter at a beautiful moment in her career: Don’t Hex With Texas (Ballantine Books), the fourth novel in her widely acclaimed Enchanted, Inc. series is appearing in bookstores right now and the reviews that have been heralding the way have been sunny and enthusiastic. Last fall, the first book in the series, Enchanted, Inc., has been optioned for film by Universal's Strike Entertainment.

The Enchanted, Inc. books are… well… enchanting. And certainly charming. A small town Texas girl pulls up stakes and moves to the big smoke where she gets a job with a mysterious company called MSI, Inc. Magical high-jinx follow. In a review of Don’t Hex With Texas, Booklist said the Enchanted, Inc. books comprised “one of the best romantic-fantasy series being written today.”


A Snapshot of... Shanna Swendson

Born: Fort Sill, Oklahoma
Reside: Irving, Texas
Birthday: August 7
Web site: shannaswendson.com


Please tell us about your most recent book.
Don’t Hex With Texas is the fourth book in my Enchanted, Inc. series about an entirely unmagical woman who works for a magical corporation.

In this one, the action moves to Katie Chandler’s home town, which means that for a change, she’s not the fish out of water. I had a lot of fun making odd magical stuff happen in a small Texas town.

What’s on your nightstand?
A towering pile of partially read books that I’ll get back to someday and read, books that need to be reshelved that’s someday going to topple and kill me, a telephone, alarm clock, earplugs (I have noisy neighbors) and a flashlight (it’s thunderstorm season).

But if you mean what am I reading now, well, I just started reading Pyramids by Terry Pratchett, but it’s on the floor by my bed instead of on my nightstand because the nightstand is where books go to die (or wait to be re-shelved).

What inspires you?
Just about everything inspires me. I like playing games of what-if, taking things too literally, fixing things that I feel were done wrong in another story, trying to see what I can get away with. Most of my story ideas seem to come from me being a brat.

What are you working on now?
I just started playing with a new idea, and I’m way too early in the process to have the slightest idea of whether or not it will go anywhere, so I’m a little hesitant to talk about it.

Tell us about your process.
My process seems to change with each book. Each one has its own rhythm. I write on a computer (because if I wrote by hand, I’d never be able to read it), and usually in the late afternoon or at night. I seem to have the worst of both worlds between plotting or writing free-form -- I can’t get very far without plotting everything out, but then I don’t really seem to know what the book is about until I’ve written it, and then I have to do a lot of revising. I usually write enough to get a feel for it -- as little as five pages, as many as 60 -- then do some brainstorming, plotting, character development, that sort of thing. Then I write a very, very rough, fast draft. And then I take it all apart and put it back together again. My first draft usually takes about a month, and then revisions can take up to six months.

Lift your head and look around. What do you see?
If I look straight ahead, I look out the glass doors onto a balcony that overlooks a little lawn area, the major street beyond that, and then the buildings across the street. The signal lights at the intersection are blinking red thanks to a storm last night, so the traffic flow is fairly entertaining as people unexpectedly encounter a four-way stop and aren’t sure what to do. If I look any other direction, I see a terribly messy office that I really do plan to clean someday.

When did you know you wanted to be a writer?

I think my very first inkling that writing was fun came in fourth grade when we were supposed to write a paragraph describing a picture and I found myself writing a whole short story. I first started really thinking about writing as a career when I was about 12. I figured out then that if I wrote down the stories I made up in my head, I’d have a book, and it was around that age that I looked up “publishers” in the phone book. But as I didn’t live in New York, I didn’t find any.

If you couldn’t write books, what would you be doing?
I have no idea. I keep thinking of things I could do as a fallback career, and none of them hold much appeal for me -- or else they somehow come back to writing. I suppose if I got truly desperate I could go back to doing marketing and public relations work, which was my career before I started writing full-time, but I dread the thought of that. I’m fascinated by psychology and have thought that might be something to pursue, but then I’d still probably end up writing psychology books. I guess if I can’t make this writing thing work, I’m doomed.

To date, what moment in your career has made you happiest?
A few days before the release of the first book in my series, I got a copy of the review Charles deLint wrote in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, in which he raved about the book and about how original my concept was. He was one of the writers I’d looked to as an example in writing contemporary fantasy, and I love his work, so seeing one of my role models praising my work and really getting what I was trying to say was overwhelming. I burst into tears when I read it and spent the rest of the day shaking.

For you, what is the easiest thing about being writer?
Coming up with story ideas is probably the easiest thing. Just about everything I see or do gives me some fragment of idea. I doubt I’ll ever run out of things to write because I have a huge backlog of ideas.

What’s the most difficult?
The most difficult thing is releasing my baby over to other people and realizing that once I’ve written the book, I have very little control over it. I may get to make suggestions, but ultimately, I can’t control where the books are shelved, how they’re distributed and how people can find out about them.

What question do you get asked about your writing most often?
When’s the next book coming out?

What’s the question you’d like to be asked?
Can we please pay you large sums of money to write something for us?

What question would like never to be asked again?
For frequency and futility: Why aren’t your books shelved as fantasy? (Not that I don’t think that’s a brilliant idea. I’ve been politely suggesting it for a while now, but questions about where/how my books can be found are best directed to the publisher or bookseller since I have no control over that.)

For making me deeply uncomfortable: Can you read my manuscript and critique it/recommend it to your editor or agent/give me an endorsement blurb? (I’m not a very good critiquer, I have a reading backlog so you might get a faster response just submitting your work to agents or publishers without my recommendation, and I only take blurb requests that come through editors or agents because I only give blurbs for books when I enthusiastically recommend them, and I’m a huge weenie so I never want to have to tell someone directly that I didn’t like her book enough to give it a blurb. It’s hard enough telling an agent or editor that it’s not for me. I guess the weenie thing also applies to critiques or giving referrals. I don’t want to have to tell anyone I don’t like it.)

Tell us something about yourself that no one knows.
I’m not sure there is anything that no one knows that I’m willing to share. That’s a hazard of blogging regularly for years. If I wanted to tell it, I already have. My readers already know about my crippling shyness in the presence of people I admire, my huge crush on a local TV anchorman, my telephone phobia, my aversion to bananas and my extreme levels of geekiness. What more could I tell?

Author Snapshot: Daniel Kalla

When you meet him he is quiet, articulate, soft-spoken. An emergency physician, he is certainly hard-working: though that just goes with the territory. And then, beginning with his debut novel, 2005’s Pandemic, you read his work and discover unplumbed depths of the type that fuel that very best high tech thrillers. And the type that cause the more gentle souls among us to lose sleep.

Though perhaps it is no longer fair to call these depths “unplumbed.” Kalla has been plumbing just fine, thank you penning a novel a year and sometimes more since Pandemic, each bringing still more readers to the talented doctor’s fanbase. The latest -- the fifth -- is Cold Plague, reuniting us again with Pandemic’s Dr. Noah Haldane, and introducing a plot that feels like Al Gore meets Michael Crichton: planet saving pathos gone somehow desperately wrong.

A Snapshot of ... Daniel Kalla

Born: Vancouver, Canada
Resides: Vancouver, Canada
Birthday: May 4th, 1966
Web site: danielkalla.com

Please tell us about Cold Plague, your most recent book.
Pristine water -- millions of years old and untouched by pollution -- is discovered miles under the Antarctic ice. Meanwhile, a cluster of new cases of mad cow disease explode in a rural France. Dr. Noah Haldane -- the hero of Pandemic -- and his team are urgently summoned. Noah recognizes the deadliness of the protein responsible for mad cow disease and its human equivalent. It is the prion that kills with the ferocity of a virus, but he suspects factors other than nature have ignited its spread among people and animals of France.

Facing a spate of disappearances and unexplained deaths, he uncovers a conspiracy that stretches from Moscow to Beverly Hills, and from the North to the South Pole. And he recognizes that the scientific find of the century: a body of water the size of Lake Michigan buried under Antarctic ice might hold the key to a microscopic Jurassic Park.

What’s on your nightstand?
Lamb by Christopher Moore and A Short History Of Almost Everything by Bill Bryson.

What inspires you?
My family. My work. My work-outs. Reading. Writing. Walking. The world in general. Essentially, anyone and anything can inspire me, but inspiration is a fickle and elusive state. I don’t do well at all when I’m actively looking for it.

What are you working on now?
I’m working on a “big” book. I use the term because it has a large cast and covers over a hundred years from the turn of the 20th century to the present. It’s my first non-thriller. I’m trying to capture a bit of an “epic” feel. Hospital tells story of a fictional West Coast Mayo Clinic, the Alfredson, which is careening toward a major crisis along with the characters who live and work inside it. The story centers around two families -- the Alfredsons who funded and still control the place, and the McGraths who have always been its medical leaders -- and their often-times adversarial and destructive relationship.

Tell us about your process.
I work on a computer. I have world-class bad penmanship, even for a doctor, which says a lot! Once I have an idea, I write from a very loose two to 10 page outline, which I never consult once I start writing the manuscript. If I have something to say, I can write anywhere and anytime I’m near a computer. And if I don’t, it’s just a complete and utter waste of time... but I never seem to learn that lesson!

Lift your head and look around. What do you see?
Chaos. I’m in my office. Pictures, discs, papers, magazines, books, wires, computer equipments, three or four boxes that might possibly contain body parts. I really ought to clean this place up!

When did you know you wanted to be a writer?
When I was six years old and taking my first violin lesson.

If you couldn’t write books, what would you be doing?

Not playing violin (see above)!

I have the luxury of a day job working as an emergency room physician, which I still enjoy, especially since I work at a teaching hospital and I have the pleasure of mentoring medical students and residents. I suppose I would be doing more of the same, and possibly some work in medical administration. Come to think of it, I better keep writing!

To date, what moment in your career has made you happiest?
It’s a tie between: 1) Hearing from my agent that an editor at Tor-Forge in New York wanted to publish my novel, and 2) receiving a letter of endorsement (with quotable praise for two of my novels) from one of my literary childhood heroes, Nelson DeMille.

For you, what is the easiest thing about being writer?
Don’t know about easiest, but my favorite part is hitting what I call “the point of engagement” in a story. By that I mean the point in a new manuscript when I know most of the main characters and have a rough idea of what has to happen next. Generally, the writing flows much faster for me after that. It’s always fun from that point because I never know how it’s going to end. And it’s fun to find out.

What’s the most difficult?
Reviewing the final proofs. I have a desperately short attention span and, besides, I’m a terrible proof reader. Inevitably, when those final pages come back to me to review before the book is moved into its final draft phase, I have trouble reading the novel again as I’m usually immersed in a new manuscript. It’s an important step, but one I can never get excited about.

What question do you get asked about your writing most often?
Being a practicing physician, father of two girls, and writer, I get asked by everyone -- and I mean everyone -- “Where do you find the time to write?”

What question would like never to be asked again?
Being a practicing physician, father of two girls, and writer, I get asked by everyone -- and I mean everyone -- “Where do you find the time to write?”

What’s the question you’d like to be asked?
With so little time on your hands, how do you manage to write such engaging stories? (Hey, a guy can dream!)

Tell us something about yourself that no one knows.
I don’t like rabbits. Never have. Never will.

Author Snapshot: Josh Karp

A Snapshot of Josh Karp...

Born: Chicago, Illinois
Resides: Evanston, Illinois
Born: October 22nd, 1966
Web site: Dougkenney.com


Please tell us about A Futile and Stupid Gesture.
It’s a biography of comedy writer Doug Kenney, set against the backdrop of National Lampoon’s golden era -- the 1970s -- during which they were instrumental in making comedy dangerous, socially relevant and a very good business.

Kenney was kind of the key figure in the comedy revolution of the 1970s that resulted in Saturday Night Live and all that came after that, including Animal House and Caddyshack, both of which he wrote. He was a brilliant, Harvard-educated guy who was loved and regarded as a genius by pretty much everyone, but he never quite seemed to know who he was or what he wanted -- unless he was writing. Pretty much everything about him was conflicted and confusing except for his work, which fed off that inner conflict.

Kenney died under mysterious circumstances in 1980 at the age of 33. He had gone to Hawaii with Chevy Chase after the Caddyshack premiere. Both were trying to get off of cocaine. Chase went back to Los Angeles and Kenney disappeared a short time thereafter. He was later found in a canyon. He’d either jumped off a cliff or fallen by accident. One of his friends joked that he’d “fallen while looking for a place to jump.”

What’s on your nightstand?
A book about Wayne Gretzky for my five-year old son. Death of a Writer, which is a really great humorous mystery by Michael Collins and a biography of Ben Hogan.

What inspires you?
Mostly things that I’m incapable of doing -- visual art, jazz music (or any music), dunking a basketball. And definitely movies. The film Swingers -- as ridiculous as it sounds -- made me decide that I needed to change careers and become a writer.

What are you working on now?
A semi-humorous book about golf, spirituality and American manhood for Chronicle Books.

Tell us about your process.
I pretty much can only write on a computer. I teach journalism at Northwestern University and often I’ll be editing a student’s work or trying to explain how something should read differently and suddenly I find that the only way I can convey my point is to type it into their computer.

My first book was pretty much a super-detailed, heavily outlined piece. It needed to be. The book I’m currently working on is absolutely the opposite, I am just writing and it seems to be working. Whenever I get hung up on trying to outline or structure it, the writing suffers.

As much as I can, I try to write in the mornings. I drop my kids at school, go pick up a cup of coffee and then go up to the office on the third floor of my home and pretty much write, even if it’s not coming easily, from nine to 12 or one. Everything I do after that is always much more productive and enjoyable if I’ve written that morning.

Lift your head and look around. What do you see?
A Colonel Klink bobblehead that my brother sent me, a picture of Bing Crosby playing golf, photos of my wife and kids and my neighbor’s front yard out my window. Add to that a bunch of stacks of paper and books with a computer buried somewhere in the middle -- and that’s pretty much it.

When did you know you wanted to be a writer?
When I was about 11. I really wanted to be a sportswriter. I thought anyone who got paid to watch sports had the best job in the world. That said I was pretty bad at advertising, law and business during my 20s. I didn’t start writing for a living until I was in my early 30s.

To date, what moment in your career has made you happiest?
The first time I was paid and had a byline. The money itself wasn’t what was important. It was just that someone would pay me to write. I was utterly and completely thrilled. I think I made 50 bucks covering a community safety meeting on the North Side of Chicago. About a year later I finished journalism school and pretty quickly started making a living. I am always still pretty much thrilled that I get paid to write about stuff that interests me.

For you, what is the easiest thing about being writer?
Well, it’s hard to beat the dress code and the commute. But, more importantly, I find it fairly easy to come up with ideas that I want to execute, which is the really fun part of this job.

What’s the most difficult?
Being organized. That is not my strong suit and, more often than not, I have a lot of things I need to keep going at once and being able to do that in any kind of structured way is a bit of a struggle sometimes. I always seem to be able to do it, but I usually do it in a way that creates lots of unnecessary stress for myself.

What question do you get asked about your writing most often?
How do you write at home when you have four kids?

What’s the question you’d like to be asked?
What are your ten favorite movies?

What question would like never to be asked again?
What’s my opinion of movies made by the current National Lampoon.

Tell us something about yourself that no one knows.
Well a few people know. I failed biology sophomore year in high school. My parents are just getting over it now.

Author Snapshot: Rachel Cline

Last month, we told you a bit about Rachel Cline’s journeyman’s eye and poet’s heart when the author’s second novel was published. My Liar (Random House), follows up 2004’s highly acclaimed What to Keep.

The Los Angeles film community provides the backdrop for My Liar, and though this community is well rendered (it’s a world this author once inhabited) it really is just the setting. The real meat here comes through the relationships between women: the complex connections, the competitions and self-definitions. Cline serves it all up with pathos and heart and great dollops of dark humor.

A Snapshot of Rachel Kennedy Cline...

Born: New York Hospital, but was taken home to Brooklyn
Resides: Brooklyn, New York
Birthday: 1957
Web site: rachelcline.com


Please tell us about your most recent book.
My Liar is about a creative woman working as a film editor in Hollywood, on the scruffy or “indie” end of the movie business -- and particularly looks at her twisted friendship with another woman, the director she works for. A critic named Helen Eisenbach recently wrote this sentence, which I love as a summary: “My Liar is the doomed ménage a trois between an artist, her art and that dirty mistress, commerce.”

What’s on your nightstand?
What Maisie Knew by Henry James, because I’m thinking about writing something about a child who knows too much and because I’m always feeling remiss about not having read enough of James.

A Dream from My Father by Barack Obama, which I picked up while checking to see whether the local McNally-Robinson bookstore had My Liar in stock (it didn’t). So, I buried my sorrows and my nose in the book on the ride home and couldn’t stop reading -- it’s such a nuanced self-portrait, full of confusion and ambivalence. In other words, it’s a lot more interesting than what I expected to find in a book authored by a presidential candidate.

Last Resorts by Clare Boylan, a book with a tacky-looking cover that I picked up at a second-hand shop, but which turned out to be the best thing I’d read in ages. I’m keeping it close to remind me to look out for more of Boylan’s work -- she died in 2006 (at only 58) but left seven novels and three story collections.

What inspires you?
Finding a great book by an author I’d never heard of. Reading a great book by anyone.

What are you working on now?
Don’t want to jinx it.

Tell us about your process.
Establishing a practice is the most important part of learning to be a writer and everyone’s approach is different -- I didn’t find my own way until I finally just gave in to the fact that it requires sitting there and tolerating feeling completely uncomfortable until you don’t feel that way anymore. For me, the only way to do that is to get to the desk when I’m still half-asleep and to not let myself flake out until I’ve either sat there for two hours or produced 1000 words.

Lift your head and look around. What do you see?
It’s winter and the leaves are down, so if I really crane my neck, I can see the Statue of Liberty.

When did you know you wanted to be a writer?
The idea of becoming “a writer” crystallized for me when I was nine or ten (around the time my parents’ marriage broke up, and also around the time I first read Harriet the Spy). Of course, my mother was a writer, so that was where I really got the idea. The hard part wasn’t knowing that being a writer was what I wanted, but realizing that it was something I had to do whether or not I could ever figure out how to get paid for it.

If you couldn’t write books, what would you be doing?
Probably writing them anyway. Unless you mean, in a coma or something -- that’s really the only circumstance I can imagine keeping me away from writing, entirely.

To date, what moment in your career has made you happiest?
Looking around at all my friends and the people who had helped me at the publication party for What to Keep. I figured that was what a bride must feel like, except I was actually being praised for something I had done (versus a role I had assumed in society) and so even my snotty little inner voice couldn’t find a way to berate me at that moment. Added bonus: I was wearing a red dress.

For you, what is the easiest thing about being writer?
None of it’s easy. But I think I’m better at taking criticism than a lot of people. I find it strangely satisfying to hear what’s wrong with my work -- as long as it’s at a point where I can still fix it. (And even after publication, if the criticism is based on a serious reading, I don’t mind that so much, either. It’s being dismissed that kills me.)

What’s the most difficult?
Getting out of the habit of thinking of myself as a failure.

What question do you get asked about your writing most often?
Isn’t [enter character name here] really you?

What’s the question you’d like to be asked?
Anything about the ideas and images in the book, itself.

Tell us something about yourself that no one knows.
I’m afraid that one day I’ll unconsciously lick the spoon I just used to serve the cat food from the can. Ick!

Author Snapshot: Anne Simpson

She dazzles us with lyricism, with meter and cadence as well as story. That should not surprise: Anne Simpson, the novelist, came after Anne Simpson, the poet, at least for the purposes of her bibliography.

Simpson’s first published collection, 2000’s Light Falls Through You, was the winner of the Gerald Lampert Award and the Atlantic Poetry Prize. Her debut novel came the following year: Canterbury Beach (Viking Canada) was published to much applause in 2001.

Simpson’s most recent book is called Falling (McLelland & Steward) and it shows early signs of outstripping even that first novel’s acclaim.

“Simpson’s skill is such that the sum total here is far greater than the parts,” said Emily Donaldson for The Toronto Star. “We don’t quite realize the force of what’s built up until near the end, when we suddenly find ourselves fully invested in this compelling web of characters.”

Here’s hoping that she gets the chance to see her Luna moth, after all.


A Snapshot of Anne Simpson…
Born: Canada
Resides: Antigonish, Nova Scotia


Please tell us about your most recent book.
This novel really had its beginnings, in an article that I think I read in Saturday Night Magazine -- this was five or six years ago -- about someone who was obsessed with designing barrels meant to go over Niagara Falls. I asked myself the question: why would anyone be obsessed with doing that? Why would anyone go over the Falls? And the more I thought about it, the more I became interested.

I guess I’d say that Falling is a novel about how ordinary people rise to meet enormous challenges in their lives. I was especially interested in two characters: Damian, who is in his early 20s, and his mother, Ingrid. I wondered whether they would move towards creativity or towards destruction. And I think they move towards creativity, ultimately.

What’s on your nightstand?
If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, a book of Sappho’s poem fragments translated by Anne Carson. And Scar Tissue by Charles Wright. I also have a couple of books in the pile from Gaspereau Press, a really fine small press in Nova Scotia: one by Don McKay, Deactivated West 100, and another by John Terpstra, Falling into Place.

What inspires you?
Here’s one thing that would inspire me: being outside on a winter night -- with a full moon -- cross country skiing with my two Labrador dogs. But I take inspiration wherever I find it, anything from what people say as they’re getting their hair cut, to the things they talk about when they’re on the bus.

What are you working on now?
I’m working on a book of essays about a hodgepodge of things, from the connection between poetry and art to the idea of poetry as play, or poetry as an act of witnessing.

Tell us about your process.
I work in an office -- not at home, but at St. Francis Xavier University, where I work part-time. I go to work at the same time as other people; I try to write in the morning, and then I switch and do other work in the afternoon. I write on the computer, but I take notes with pen and paper now and then. As for the actual process of writing, it really is very organic for me. I don’t always know where I’m heading -- I have a rough idea, but I like to allow for change.

Lift your head and look around. What do you see?
From the window near my computer I can look out and see a courtyard with trees. From the other window, I can see the cathedral, which is the most imposing building in town, and a road leading out to hills in the northwest. The hills are rolling, with pockets of spruce here and there, and patches of snow on the fields. I can’t see the ocean from here, but it’s close by.

When did you know you wanted to be a writer?
I’m not sure when I began writing seriously, but it was after I came to Nova Scotia, years ago. I read something by a woman living in a small town in New Hampshire and she said she’d started writing when she realized she could watch television or she could write stories. And even though I was caring for my young children at the time, I realized I could make a similar choice.

If you couldn’t write books, what would you be doing?
I’d be painting large canvasses -- the kind that take up the whole wall.

To date, what moment in your career has made you happiest?
I don’t know if I can pin it down ... it’s not the big moments in my life as a writer, it’s the unexpected pleasures, like meeting other writers and talking over a certain sticking point in a book someone is working on, or collaborating with other people on projects, or talking to people after a reading.

For you, what is the easiest thing about being writer?
I live in a very supportive environment: our Nova Scotia Writers’ Federation is just tremendous. So it’s great to see other writers in Atlantic Canada flourish. One of the best things is seeing someone -- with whom I’ve worked -- get a book published.

What’s the most difficult?
It’s hard to watch writers get discouraged. It’s such a roller coaster ride at the best of times.

What question do you get asked about your writing most often?
I’m asked about what inspires me, and I always find this question hard to answer. Don Domanski was asked, by a student here, whether the muse comes to him, and he answered that he once had a landlady called Mrs. Muise. It was very funny. But it’s also true that the nearest thing we might ever get to a muse is the landlady who lives downstairs. Someone else said that writing in Canada happens between home and the nearest Kwik-Mart, and I’m inclined to think that’s true. It’s whether you’re open to what’s happening to people at the Kwik-Mart that allows for inspiration.

Tell us something about yourself that no one knows.
I would really love to see a Luna moth just out of the blue. I’ve only seen one Luna moth in my life; I’m hoping another will come along.

Author Snapshot: Edward Hardy

Edward Hardy weaves the sort of fiction that is most often described as “poignant” and “moving,” though as Amanda Heller of The Boston Globe pointed out in a recent review, “Edward Hardy keeps the narrative sufficiently off-center to evade any charges of outright heartstring-tugging.”

The point Heller seems to miss in her review (or perhaps I miss seeing her get it) is the fact that Hardy is an author of the old school. More: in a sense, the path he’s taken to authordom is Ivy League. Hardy has an MFA from Cornell and though there has thus far only been one other novel -- 1996’s Geyser Life -- his short stories have appeared in virtually all the important literary magazines including Ploughshares, Epoch, The New England Review, Witness, Prairie Schooner, Ascent, Boulevard, Yankee and The Quarterly. The some-time journalist and editor has taught creative writing at Cornell and Boston College and currently teaches non-fiction writing at Brown.

The fact that Hardy has spent at least his adult life thinking about words and how they fit together is something that shows in his beautiful and expertly wrought work. You do not merely read a novel like Keeper and Kid, Hardy’s latest. You inhale it. And if you let it, it touches you forever.

A Snapshot of Edward Hardy...

Born: Ithaca, New York
Resides: Providence, Rhode Island, USA
Born: November 25, 1957
Web site: edwardhardy.com


Please tell us about your most recent book.
Keeper and Kid is the story of what happens when a 30-something guy, happily living his antiques dealer/salvage yard life in Providence, inherits a three year-old, is suddenly pulled through the portal of parenthood and the rest of his life nearly falls apart in the process.

What’s on your nightstand?
Really it’s the stack on the floor beside the bed, but right now there’s: Washington’s Crossing, by David Hackett Fischer, Magic For Beginners, by Kelly Link, The Best American Poetry 2006, The Playhouse Near Dark, by Elizabeth Holmes, (poems), Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, by Haruki Murakami and Housekeeping vs. The Dirt, by Nick Hornby.

What inspires you?
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly. With stories sometimes an idea or a situation will just pop up and you can go: Oh look, there’s a story. Other times something small will happen and I’ll go through old notebooks looking for other events that might go along with that first one until it feels like there’s a story there. With novels it feels like something of the same process, but slower. And starting a novel is always a much bigger leap than jumping into a story.

What are you working on now?
At the moment I’m collecting scraps for a new novel, which might be about a group of over-extended grown-ups who start an alt-country band with unintended consequences, but that’s all I can say.

Tell us about your process.
I’m a keyboard person all the way and that started back when I was working in newspapers. I used to be a late night writer, but these days once the wheels start turning I can’t get to sleep, so I’m restricted to daylight hours, usually mid-morning to mid-afternoon. Plot-wise it seems to work best if I more or less know where I’m going but not exactly, that way there’s room for a few surprises along the route, and when you’ve signed on for a novel you need a few surprises.

Lift your head and look around. What do you see?
I’m at the kitchen table (old, oval, oak, a little tippy), to my left there’s a foot-tall stack of kids’ library books (The World of Castles and Forts, etc.) and grown-up CDs (Bella Fleck and Alison Krauss) that need to go back, plus my to-do list on a small yellow pad. In front of me is a vase with pale pink roses from Valentine’s day, all gloriously turning brown and falling apart. To the right is my half-full coffee cup, a white clay sculpture our five-year old won’t let us take off his placemat and next to that his blue plastic plate, still holding the remains of a half-eaten, syrup-soaked toaster waffle. The house is very old so the drafts come from all directions, but the radiators are whistling and from the table you can see into the cold and windy backyard and it’s bright out there.

When did you know you wanted to be a writer?
When I was about eight or nine, my best friend at the time announced to his mom that he was going to be a writer and this voice in the back of my head said: No, that’s what I’m going to do. Little did I know what was involved or that there could be more than one writer in the world.

To date, what moment in your career has made you happiest?
There are lots of them. It’s always a kick to open that envelope from the publisher and see the galley of your book for the first time or to see a magazine with a story of yours in it on an actual newsstand somewhere. With this new book I got an e-mail from a high school friend who said he read it straight through on the plane while on a business trip to Germany and it made him laugh out loud, and I thought: OK, I made my friend’s plane trip a little shorter, that’s worth it.

For you what’s the most difficult thing about being a writer?
These days with kids and teaching, carving out the time and psychic space to get the work done is much more of a challenge than it used to be. That, and I never have all that much fun cranking out a first draft.

What’s the easiest thing?
Revising. I can sand sentences all day long.

What question do you get asked about your writing most often?
Mostly they seem to be how-to questions. How did you start with a certain book or story? Where did it go next? How long did it take?

What’s the question you’d like to be asked?
Where would you like to go to dinner?