The 7am Novelist

Aaron Hamburger discusses the first pages of his latest novel, Hotel Cuba, and how he knew his first fragment of a sentence, “Fish and oranges,” from the first draft. We talk about the importance of working with all five senses, the necessity of movement from the very first lines, how to work in backstory, and grabbing hold of your character’s yearning early to drive the book forward.

Hamburger’s first pages can be found here.

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Aaron Hamburger is the author of the novel NIRVANA IS HERE, winner of a Bronze Medal from the 2019 Foreword Reviews Indie Awards. His story collection, THE VIEW FROM STALIN’S HEAD, was awarded the Rome Prize by the American Academy of Arts and Letters and nominated for a Violet Quill Award. And his novel, FAITH FOR BEGINNERS, was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Village Voice, Tin House, Michigan Quarterly Review, Subtropics, Crazyhorse, Boulevard, Poets & Writers, Tablet, O, the Oprah Magazine, Out, The Massachusetts Review, The Bennington Review, Nerve, Time Out, Details, and The Forward. He has also won fellowships from Yaddo, Djerassi, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, and the Edward F. Albee Foundation as well as first prize in the Dornstein Contest for Young Jewish Writers, and his short fiction and non-fiction have received special mentions for the Pushcart Prize. He just received word that he has won the Lambda Literary Jim Duggins Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize. He has taught creative writing at Columbia University, George Washington University, New York University, Brooklyn College, and the Stonecoast MFA Program.

Idra Novey discusses the first pages of her third novel, Take What You Need, how she developed a front and back story to create tension and complexity, her love of place, the power of her descriptive details, the familial relationships that tie us emotionally to her story, and how she handled going between two timelines.

Novey’s first pages can be found here.

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

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Idra Novey's most recent novel Take What You Need was named a spring fiction pick with The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Take What You Need was a 2023 selection for CBS Talk Pittsburgh and NPR's Nerdette Book Club. She is also the author of Those Who Knew, a finalist for the 2019 Clark Fiction Prize, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and a Best Book of the Year in over a dozen media outlets, including NPR, Esquire, BBC, Kirkus Review, and O Magazine. Her first novel Ways to Disappear, received the 2017 Sami Rohr Prize, the 2016 Brooklyn Eagles Prize, and was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize for First Fiction. Her poetry collections include Exit, Civilian, selected for the 2011 National Poetry Series, The Next Coun­try, a final­ist for the 2008 Fore­word Book of the Year Award, and Clarice: The Visitor, a collaboration with the artist Erica Baum. She is the recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Poets & Writ­ers Mag­a­zine, the PEN Trans­la­tion Fund, and the Poetry Foundation.Her works as a translator include Clarice Lispector’s novel The Pas­sion Accord­ing to G.H. and a co-translation with Ahmad Nadalizadeh of Iranian poet Garous Abdolmalekian, Lean Against This Late Hour, a finalist for the PEN America Poetry in Translation Prize in 2021. She teaches fiction at Princeton University.

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Wanda Morris discusses the first pages of her latest novel, Anywhere You Run, how she represented the racist language of the time period, why she felt it necessary to do so, and the bridge she creates as she moves from a powerful third-person prologue with a different point of view to the first-person voice of Violet in her opening chapter.

Morris’ 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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Wanda Morris’s Anywhere You Run was called one of the Best Crime Novels of the Year by the New York Times, NPR, Washingting Post, CrimeReads, and many more. She is also the author of All Her Little Secrets, which has been praised by Karin Slaughter as "brilliantly nuanced" and was reviewed by The Boston Globe, LA Times, New York Times, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Seattle Times, and South Florida Sun Sentinel among others. It was named as one of the "Best Books of 2021" by Hudson Booksellers and selected as the #1 Top Pick for Library Reads by librarians across the country. It was also serialized in Entertainment Weekly and selected as a Marie Claire book club pick and has been optioned for a Showtime limited series. Wanda is a member of Sisters in Crime, Mystery Writers of America, and Crime Writers of Color. A corporate attorney and former President of the Georgia Chapter of the Association of Corporate Counsel, Wanda established a signature female empowerment program known as the Women's Initiative. She is married, the mother of three and lives in Atlanta, Georgia. 

Daphne Kalotay discusses the first pages of her award-winning short story, “Relativity,” from her recently released collection The Archivists. We talk about using humor in otherwise heavy material, the power of blending stories, how language frames a character’s mindset and personal tragedies, and how fiction conveys powerful truths, often above and beyond that of nonfiction.

Kalotay’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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Daphne Kalotay is the author of the fiction collections Calamity and Other Stories, shortlisted for the Story Prize, and The Archivists, winner of 2021 The Grace Paley Prize, as well as three award-winning novels: the national and international bestseller Russian Winter, which won the Writers' League of Texas Fiction Award; Sight Reading, winner of the New England Society Book Award in Fiction, and Blue Hours, a Massachusetts Book Awards "Must Read." Daphne received her M.F.A. from Boston University's Creative Writing Program, where her stories won the Florence Engel Randall Fiction Prize and a Transatlantic Review Award from the Henfield Foundation, before earning her Ph.D. in Modern and Contemporary Literature. She has received fellowships from the Christopher Isherwood Foundation, Yaddo, Bogliasco, and MacDowell and has taught literature and creative writing at Princeton University, Middlebury College, Boston University, and Harvard University. She lives in Somerville, Massachusetts.

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BA Shapiro discusses the first pages of her latest novel, Metropolis. We learn about how she worked with six very different points of view, how she handled narrative distance, how she decided where to start and why, the power of questions, the necessity of playing with time, and her advice to writers about their own first pages: Get it wrong.

Shaprio’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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B.A. Shapiro is the award-winning and New York Times bestselling author of nine novels, including Metropolis (May, 2022), The Collector’s Apprentice, The Muralist and The Art Forger, which won the New England Book Award for Fiction, among other honors. Her books have been selected as Community Reads throughout the country and have been translated into over a dozen languages. She holds a PhD in sociology and has directed research projects for a residential substance abuse facility, worked as a systems analyst/statistician, headed the Boston office of a software development firm, and served as an adjunct professor teaching sociology at Tufts University and creative writing at Northeastern University. She likes writing novels the best. Barbara splits her time between Boston and Naples, Florida.

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First pages are impossible… so we’re hearing from authors about how they got them right. 

In this episode, Frances de Pontes Peebles discusses the first pages of her latest novel, The Air You Breathe, her powerful use of a reminiscent narrator, how to plant the seeds of what your reader needs to know (and leave out what they don’t), how best to include lists and dialog to wake up your prose, and how to stick to your decisions as a writer.

Peebles’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.

Frances de Pontes Peebles is the author of the novels The Seamstress and The Air You Breathe. She is a Creative Writing Fellow in Literature for 2020 from The National Endowment for the Arts. Her books have been translated into ten languages and won the Elle Grand Prix for fiction, the Friends of American Writers Award, and the James Michener-Copernicus Society of America Fellowship. Her second novel, The Air You Breathe, was a Book of the Month Club pick. Born in Pernambuco, Brazil, she is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She has received a Fulbright Grant, Brazil’s Sacatar Foundation Fellowship, and was a Teaching Fellow at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Her short stories and essays have appeared in O. Henry Prize Stories, Zoetrope: All-Story, Ploughshares, Guernica, Missouri Review, Indiana Review, Catapult, and Real Simple. Her novel, The Seamstress, was adapted for film and mini-series on Brazil’s Globo Network. She is proud to serve as Chair of the Board of the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights. In Spring 2019, she served as Visiting Associate Professor of Fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

First pages are impossible… so we’re hearing from authors about how they got them right. 

In this episode, Henriette Lazaridis discusses the first pages of her second novel, Terra Nova, and how she discovered a new writing practice out of a heavy dose of writer’s block. We also talk about challenging the usual historical novel voice, putting yourself in the body of your characters to stir suspense and a sense of place, planting the seeds of conflict, and delaying the need for exposition by concentrating instead on rich sensory detail.

Lazaridis’ 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.

Henriette Lazaridis latest novel TERRA NOVA was called "ingenious" and "provocative" by the New York Times. She is also the author of the best-selling novel THE CLOVER HOUSE. Her short work has appeared in publications including Elle, Forge, Narrative Magazine, The New York Times, New England Review, The Millions, and has earned her a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artists Grant. Henriette grew up in the Boston area as the only child of Greek expats, speaking Greek as her first language. Devoted to storytelling since her childhood bedtime stories from the Odyssey, Henriette earned degrees in English literature from Middlebury College, Oxford University, where she was a Rhodes Scholar, and the University of Pennsylvania. Having taught English at Harvard, she now teaches at GrubStreet in Boston and runs the Krouna Writing Workshop in northern Greece. She writes the Substack newsletter The Entropy Hotel, about athletic and creative challenges at henriettelazaridis.substack.com. 

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First pages are impossible… so we’re hearing from authors about how they got them right. 

In this episode, Amina Gautier discusses the first pages of “Lost and Found,” the first story in her collection The Loss of All Lost Things. She explains how the story prepares the reader thematically and stylistically for the stories that follow, how she manipulates voice, avoids graphic representations of abuse and violence, and how she has produced a record-number of published short stories (hint: it has to do with working on many stories at once).

Gautier’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.

Amina Gautier is the author of three award-winning short story collections: The Loss of All Lost Things, which won the Elixir Press Award in Fiction, Now We Will Be Happy, which won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize, the USA Best Book Award in African American Fiction a Florida Authors and Publishers Association Award Gold Medal in Short Fiction, and was Long-listed for The Chautauqua Prize in Fiction, and At-Risk, which won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, and received an Eric Hoffer Legacy Award and a First Horizon Award. Gautier has published a record number of one hundred and forty-five short stories for which she has received numerous prizes, fellowships, and grants. For her body of work, Gautier has been the recipient of the PEN/MALAMUD Award for Excellence in the Short Story.

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First pages are impossible… so we’re hearing from authors about how they got them right. 

In this episode, Julie Carrick Dalton discusses the first pages of her second novel, The Last Beekeeper. We talk about how she used the power of a front and back story to create tension and complexity, her love of place, the power of her descriptive details in terms of nature and time period, her use of rich familial relationships to tie us emotionally to the story, and how she handled going between two timelines.

Dalton’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.

Julie Carrick Dalton is the Boston-based author of The Last Beekeeper and Waiting for the Night Song, named a Most Anticipated 2021 novel by CNN, Newsweek, USA Today, Parade, and others, and an Amazon Editor’s pick for Best Books of the Month. A Bread Loaf, Tin House, and GrubStreet Novel Incubator alum, Julie is a frequent speaker on the topic of Fiction in the Age of Climate Crisis at universities, conferences, libraries, and museums. Her writing has appeared in Chicago Review of Books, Orion, Newsweek, The Boston Globe, Electric Literature, Lit Hub, and other publications. When she isn’t writing, you can usually find Julie digging in her garden, skiing, kayaking, or walking her dogs.

First pages are impossible… so we’re hearing from authors about how they got them right. 

In this episode, Jasmin Hakes discusses the first pages of her debut novel, Hula, and how she structured the novel using traditional storytelling techniques from her native island. We also talk about the power of the royal we, addressing the reader directly and therefore challenging them, how to make summary work, and how to manage the revision process with agents and editors who might not know your novel’s most important contextual details in terms of place, culture, and time.

Hakes’ 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.

Jasmin ʻIolani Hakes was born and raised in Hilo, Hawaiʻi. Her essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Times and the Sacramento Bee. She is the recipient of the Best Fiction award from the Southern California Writers Conference, a Community of Writers LoJo Foundation Scholarship, a Writing by Writers Emerging Voices fellowship, and a Hedgebrook residency. HULA is her debut novel and is an Amazon Editor’s pick. It’s received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, Booklist, and Shelf Awareness, and is an Elle magazine 39 Best New books to Read this summer. She lives in California.

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