The 7am Novelist

Alex Marzano-Lesnevich discusses the first pages of their essay “Futurity” which appeared in the 2022 Best American Essays. We talk about their splintered approach to the essay during a splintered time, how they bypassed the usual expectations of structure and made their process physical (hint: it involved little pieces of paper) with the help of Jane Allison’s beloved craft book Meander, Spiral, Explode, and issues of audience and representation.

Marzano-Lesnevich’s full essay can be found here.

Help local bookstores and our authors by buying Alex’s book, The Fact of a Body, on Bookshop.

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The above link will be available for 48 hours. Missed it? The podcast version is always available, both here and on your favorite podcast platform.

Alex Marzano-Lesnevich is the author of The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir, which received a Lambda Literary Award, the Chautauqua Prize, the Grand Prix des Lectrices ELLE, the Prix des libraires du Quebec, and the Prix France Inter-JDD, an award for one book of any genre in the world. It has been translated into eleven languages. Their next book, Both and Neither, is forthcoming from Doubleday and publishers internationally. An excerpt, "Body Language," appears in Best American Essays 2020. A 2023 United States Artist fellow, they are the Rogers Chair in Creative Nonfiction at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

Carter Sickles discusses the first pages of his latest novel, The Prettiest Star, including the importance of setting and belonging for his queer character, threading in the all-important backstory of loss, the necessity of witnessing and documenting what shouldn’t be forgotten, and how he handled multiple points of view.

Sickles’ first pages can be found here.

Help local bookstores and our authors by buying this book on Bookshop.

Click here for the audio/video version of this interview.

The above link will be available for 48 hours. Missed it? The podcast version is always available, both here and on your favorite podcast platform.

Carter Sickels is the author of the novel The Prettiest Star, published by Hub City Press, and winner of the 2021 Southern Book Prize and the Weatherford Award. The Prettiest Star was also selected as a Kirkus Best Book of 2020 and a Best LGBT Book of 2020 by O Magazine. His debut novel The Evening Hour (Bloomsbury 2012), an Oregon Book Award finalist and a Lambda Literary Award finalist, was adapted into a feature film that premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. His essays and fiction have appeared in a variety of publications, including The Atlantic, Oxford American, Poets & Writers, BuzzFeed, Joyland, Guernica, Catapult, and Electric Literature. Carter is the recipient of the 2013 Lambda Literary Emerging Writer Award, and earned fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and MacDowell. He is an assistant professor of English at Eastern Kentucky University. 

Caroline Leavitt discusses the first pages of her upcoming novel, Days of Wonder, to be released in April. We talk about how and when to provide backstory and how not to answer questions, navigating two timelines and multiple points of views, and how those moments of self doubt and dread about your writing most likely means you’re onto something good.

Dalton’s first pages can be found here.

Click here for the audio/video version of this interview.

Help local bookstores and our authors by buying this book on Bookshop.

The above link will be available for 48 hours. Missed it? The podcast version is always available, both here and on your favorite podcast platform.

Caroline Leavitt is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of thirteen novels including Pictures of You, Is This Tomorrow, Cruel Beautiful World, and the Good Morning America online pick, With or Without You. Many of her titles were Best Books of the Year and Indie Next Picks. A New York Foundation of the Arts Fellow, she was also shortlisted for the Maine Readers Prize, and was a Goldenberg Fiction Prize winner. Caroline was the founder of the Nothing is Cancelled Virtual Book Tour, an initiative she started when the Pandemic began. It quickly grew and she and novelist Jenna Blum co-founded A Mighty Blaze, which promotes independent book stores, authors who lost their tours, and helps readers. She lives in Hoboken, New Jersey, with her husband, the writer Jeff Tamarkin, and has an acting student son, Max.

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David Heska Wanbli Weiden discusses the first pages of his novel, Winter Counts, how he studied fight scenes to get it right, his best dialog tricks, the vulnerabilities of his tough-guy protagonist, and how to speak to political and social justice issues while staying true to your story.

Weiden’s first pages can be found here.

Help local bookstores and our authors by buying this book on Bookshop.

Click here for the audio/video version of this interview.

The above link will be available for 48 hours. Missed it? The podcast version is always available, both here and on your favorite podcast platform.

David Heska Wanbli Weiden, an enrolled citizen of the Sicangu Lakota Nation, is the author of Winter Counts (Ecco, 2020), which was nominated for an Edgar Award for Best First Novel. The book was the winner of the Anthony, Thriller, Lefty, Barry, Macavity, Spur, High Plains, Electa Quinney, Tillie Olsen, CrimeFest (UK), and Crime Fiction Lover (UK) Awards, and was longlisted for many other awards. The novel was a New York Times Editors’ Choice, an Indie Next pick, main selection of the Book of the Month Club, and named a Best Book of the year by NPR, Amazon, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, The Guardian, and other magazines. His short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in The Best American Mystery and Suspense Stories 2022, Denver Noir, Midnight Hour, This Time for Sure, Never Whistle at Night, and The Perfect Crime. He’s the series editor of Native Edge, an imprint of the University of New Mexico Press specializing in Indigenous literature. Weiden received the PEN America Writing for Justice Fellowship and is the recipient of fellowships and residencies from MacDowell, Ucross, Ragdale, Vermont Studio Center, Sewanee, and Tin House. Weiden received his MFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts, his law degree from the University of Denver Sturm College of Law, and his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin. He is a professor of Native American studies and Political Science at Metropolitan State University of Denver and serves on the faculty of the Cedar Crest Pan-European MFA Program and also the Mile-High MFA Program at Regis University. He lives in Denver with his family.

Shilpi Suneja shares the first pages of her debut novel, House of Caravans, how she discovered the core of her story (and therefore where to begin) after several rounds of revising, her use of the omniscient first person and how she transitions between characters’ internal states without losing her reader, and the weight of history both on her book and her psyche as a writer.

Suneja’s first pages can be found here.

Help local bookstores and our authors by buying this book on Bookshop.

Click here for the audio/video version of this interview.

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Shilpi Suneja was born in Kanpur, India. At the age of fifteen, she moved with her parents to a tiny village in North Carolina. She later earned  an MA in English from NYU, an MFA from BU, and another MFA from UMass Boston. She’s won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Her short fiction and essays, nominated for a Pushcart Prize, appear in Arrowsmith, Asia Literary Review, Bat City Review, Cognoscenti, Consequence, Guernica, Hyphen, Kartika Review, Kafila, Little Fiction, McSweeney's,  Michigan Quarterly Review, Solstice, Stirring Lit, and TwoCircles.Net among other places. In 2019 Shilpi attended the Jack Jones Literary Retreat as a Desai Fellow. Her essay won the 2022 Bechtel Prize from Teachers & Writers Magazine. Her first novel about the long shadow of the Indian Partition of 1947, her grandfather's story of migration from Lahore to Kanpur, is slated for publication in September 2023 from Milkweed Editions.

Isa Arsén shares the first pages of her debut novel, Shoot the Moon, which releases in October. We discuss how she broke two cardinal rules of beginnings (and got away with it splendidly), her experience working with her editor, managing time shifts by paying attention to emotion, and how the image of the moon helped her both thematically and structurally.

Arsén’s first pages can be found here.

Help local bookstores and our authors by buying this book on Bookshop.

Click here for the audio/video version of this interview.

The above link will be available for 48 hours. Missed it? The podcast version is always available, both here and on your favorite podcast platform.

Isa Arsén is a certified bleeding heart and audio engineer based in South Texas, where she lives with her spouse and a comically small dog. She’s published several shorts and pieces of experimental interactive media. Inspired by her own childhood summers in New Mexico, Shoot the Moon is her debut novel. 

Virginia Pye discusses the first pages of her wonderfully smart and imaginative novel, The Literary Undoing of Victoria Swann. AND, a special gift to our listeners: The ever-brave and generous Ginny also shares with us several paragraphs from her very first “shitty” draft for us to compare (which isn’t so “shitty” after all, but sure makes her published pages look even better). We talk about the importance of narrative distance in historical fiction, how not to overly antiquate the prose and dialog, and how quickly we need to feel that trouble is brewing for the main character.

Pye’s first pages can be found here.

Help local bookstores and our authors by buying this book on Bookshop.

Click here for the audio/video version of this interview.

The above link will be available for 48 hours. Missed it? The podcast version is always available, both here and on your favorite podcast platform.

Virginia Pye is an award-winning author of three novels and the short story collection, Shelf Life of Happiness, which won the 2019 Independent Publisher Gold Medal for Short Fiction. Her debut novel, River of Dust, (Unbridled Books), was an Indie Next Pick and a 2013 Finalist for the Virginia Literary Award. Her second novel, Dreams of the Red Phoenix, (Unbridled Books), was named a Best Book of 2015 by the Richmond Times Dispatch. She is Fiction Editor for Pangyrus, a literary journal based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a board member of the Women’s National Book Association, Boston Chapter. Virginia grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and moved back after thirty-five years living up and down the East Coast. 

Charlotte Rixon discusses the first pages of her latest novel, The One That Got Away, how she wanted to create a larger story by beginning the book with a terrifying event, her manipulation of time and point of view, and her best advice for first pages: Just write it. Don’t go back. And keep the faith that it will be okay.

Rixon's first pages can be found here.

Help local bookstores and our authors by buying this book on Bookshop.

Click here for the audio/video version of this interview.

The above link will be available for 48 hours. Missed it? The podcast version is always available, both here and on your favorite podcast platform.

Charlotte Rixon is the pen name of Charlotte Duckworth, USA Today-bestselling author of suspense fiction published by Quercus. Charlotte studied Classics at Leeds University and went on to gain a PGDip in Screenwriting. She worked for many years as a magazine journalist, and is a graduate of the Faber Academy 'Writing A Novel' course. The One That Got Away will be published in the UK and the US in 2023. The film rights have been optioned by a major US producer.

Angel Di Zhang discusses the first pages of her debut novel, The Light of Eternal Spring, how her single point-of-view novel grew out of an idea for many more vantage points, her use of photography to help her choose her time period as well as show the progression of time, and how her background as a painter influenced her openness to emotion and character as she allowed her story to change and form intuitively on the page.

Zhang’s first pages can be found here.

Help our authors by buying this book.

Click here for the audio/video version of this interview.

The above link will be available for 48 hours. Missed it? The podcast version is always available, both here and on your favorite podcast platform.

ANGEL DI ZHANG was born in northeast China, and raised in China, England, Canada and the United States. She was educated in the joint BA-MIA program at Columbia University, and is a painter and an internationally exhibited fine art photographer. Angel now lives in a secret garden near Toronto.

Rachel Kadish discusses the first pages of her latest novel, The Weight of Ink, how she followed the voice in her first lines to discover her story, the care she took in introducing the reader to a 17th-century voice and point of view (hint: she did it in small pieces), and the importance of “scaffolding” in your early pages and letting that scaffolding go as you revise to find the heart of your beginning and your book.

Kadish’s first pages can be found here.

Help local bookstores and our authors by buying this book on Bookshop.

Click here for the audio/video version of this interview.

The above link will be available for 48 hours. Missed it? The podcast version is always available, both here and on your favorite podcast platform.

Rachel Kadish is the award-winning author of the novels The Weight of Ink, which won the National Jewish Book Award, From a Sealed Room, and Tolstoy Lied: A Love Story, as well as the novella I Was Here. Her work has appeared on NPR and in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, Ploughshares, Paris Review, and Tin House. She lives outside of Boston.

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