The 7am Novelist

Today, we hear from Jamie Quatro whose latest novel, TWO-STEP DEVIL, releases in September. We’re talking to Jamie about experimenting with form.

Sorry! There’s no audio/video version of this episode available. Check out the podcast version above or on your favorite podcast platform.

To find Quatro’s debut and many other books by our authors, visit our Bookshop page. 

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Jamie Quatro is the New York Times Notable author of I Want to Show You More, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award and the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, and Fire Sermon, a Book of the Year for the Economist, San Francisco Chronicle, LitHub, Bloomberg, and the Times Literary Supplement. HER new novel, Two-Step Devil, is forthcoming from Grove Press in September 2024, to be followed by a story collection, Next Time I'll Be Louder. A finalist for the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction, she is the recipient of fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, Bread Loaf, and Maison Dora Maar in Ménerbes, France, where she will be in residence in the spring of 2025. Quatro holds an MA in English from the College of William and Mary and an MFA in fiction from the Bennington College Writing Seminars. She teaches in the Sewanee School of Letters MFA program and lives with her family in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

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Today, we hear from Ann Hood whose latest novel, THE STOLEN CHILD, was released in May. We’re talking to Ann about writing multiple points of view, introducing a new point of view late in the structure of a book, and how to increase emotional tension in scenes.

Watch a recording here. This audio/video version is available for one week. Missed it? Check out the podcast version above or on your favorite podcast platform.

To find Hood’s latest and many other books by our authors, visit our Bookshop page. 

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Ann Hood is the author of over a dozen novels, including the bestsellers The Knitting Circle, The Obituary Writer, The Book That Matters Most, and Somewhere Off the Coast of Maine; and several memoirs, including the bestsellers Kitchen Yarns: Notes on Life, Love and Food and Comfort: A Journey Through Grief, which was named one of the top ten books of 2008 by Entertainment Weekly. Her most recent book, The Stolen Child, a novel about art, secrets, love lost and found, and the nature of forgiveness set partially during the First World War was published in May. 

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Today, we hear from Crystal King whose latest novel, IN THE GARDEN OF MONSTERS, releases in September. We’re talking to Crystal about writing about real people, particularly really problematic people, as well as familiar stories and places.

Watch a recording here. This audio/video version is available for one week. Missed it? Check out the podcast version above or on your favorite podcast platform.

To find King’s debut and many other books by our authors, visit our Bookshop page. 

Looking for a writing community? Join our Facebook page. 

Crystal King is a novelist, culinary enthusiast, and marketing expert. Her writing is fueled by a love of history and a passion for the food, language, and culture of Italy. She has taught writing, creativity and social media at UMass Boston, Boston University, Mass College of Art, Harvard Extension School, and Grub Street. She’s a Pushcart Prize–nominated poet and former co-editor of the (now defunct) online literary arts journal Plum Ruby Review.  She received her M.A. in critical and creative thinking from UMass Boston, where she developed a series of exercises and writing prompts to help fiction writers in medias res. She lives in Boston but grew up in the Pacific Northwest (Spokane, Seattle, Boise). She also works in the world of social media, AI, marketing, and community management. 

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Today we get to hear from Pagan Kennedy, whose newest book, The Secret History of the Rape Kit, will be released in January. Pagan and I will be talking about the ways in which contemporary events and your own past can disrupt what you thought your book was about.

Watch a recording of our live webinar here. The audio/video version is available for one week. Missed it? Check out the podcast version above or on your favorite podcast platform.

To find Kennedy’s book and many books by our authors, visit our Bookshop page. 

Looking for a writing community? Join our Facebook page. 

Pagan Kennedy is a journalist and author of eleven books, most recently Inventology: How We Dream Up Things That Change the World, which was optioned for adaption into a TV show and podcast, and The Secret History of the Rape Kit: A True Crime Story, which will be released by Vintage in January. She has also been awarded a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at MIT, an NEA fellowship, a Smithsonian fellowship, and two Massachusetts Cultural Council fellowships. She is a longtime contributor to the New York Times.  

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Today, we’ve got another special “Listeners’ Roundup” episode. This is when we get to hear from some of our listeners about they’ve learned from the past few episodes, what ideas they consider the most important, what questions or confusions they have, and their own advice and/or experience in dealing with the same issues in their writing. 

So today, we’ve got listeners Karen Gruzen, Stephen Dawley, and Nancy Crochiere talking with us about what they heard, what they loved, and how it speaks to their own work. 

Watch a recording here. This audio/video version is available for one week. Missed it? Check out the podcast version above or on your favorite podcast platform.

To find books by our authors, visit our Bookshop page. 

Looking for a writing community? Join our Facebook page. 

Karen Gruzen an avid 7am listener and graduate of GrubStreet’s Novel Generator with Annie Hartnett, is writing a novel inspired by her time living in Japan, and joins us from Crested Butte, CO where she’s busily revising her Save the Cat 5-part finale.

Stephen Dawley is a lawyer living in CT who several months ago finished (and have started querying) the novel it took him ten years to write, and he’s started another one.

Nancy Crochiere is a former humor columnist whose comic debut novel, GRACELAND, published in May of 2023, was named a best book of summer by Parade, Woman’s World, and Deep South Magazines. 

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Today we get to hear from Femi Kayode whose latest novel, Gaslight, the second book in his popular Philip Taiwo Mysteries series, was released in November. Femi and I will be talking about the challenges of writing a sequel when the rules of engagement are already set.

Watch a recording of our live webinar here. The audio/video version is available for one week. Missed it? Check out the podcast version above or on your favorite podcast platform.

To find Kayode’s debut and many books by our authors, visit our Bookshop page. 

Looking for a writing community? Join our Facebook page. 

Femi Kayode trained as a clinical psychologist in Nigeria, before starting a career in advertising. He has created and written several prime-time TV shows. His debut novel, Lightseekers, was selected as a Best Crime Novel of the Month by The Times, Sunday Times, Independent, Guardian, Observer, Financial Times and Irish Times, was longlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger Award and was a Waterstones Thriller of the Month. He lives in Windhoek, Namibia with his family.

Today we get to hear from Hesse Phillips whose historical novel, Lightborne, was released in May 2024. Hesse and I will be talking about the difficulties of writing queer history and the task of humanizing an historical figure that has often been mischaracterized and misunderstood by both the public and literary scholars.

Watch a recording here. The audio/video version is available for one week. Missed it? Check out the podcast version above or on your favorite podcast platform.

To find many books by our authors, visit our Bookshop page. For Phillips’ debut, available from the UK, click here.

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Hesse Phillips’ historical novel Lightbourne was a finalist in the Irish Writers Centre Novel Fair 2022 and is now forthcoming from Atlantic Books UK. Their poetry and prose have appeared in The Bridport Review, the époque press é-zine, Sage Cigarettes, Roi Fainéant Press, Pangyrus and others, and have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Hesse was born and raised in rural Pennsylvania but now lives in Spain. They have a PhD in Drama from Tufts University and are a graduate of Grub Street Boston’s intensive Novel Incubator program.

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Today, we get to hear from Mark Cecil whose debut novel, BUNYAN AND HENRY; OR, THE BEAUTIFUL DESTINY, was released in March. We’ll be talking about ways in which an author can deliver deeply personal/private stories from secondary characters even while writing in 3rd person limited. 

Watch a recording here. The audio/video version is available for one week. Missed it? Check out the podcast version above or on your favorite podcast platform.

To find Cecil’s debut and many books by our authors, visit our Bookshop page. 

MARK CECIL is host of The Thoughtful Bro show, for which he conducts interviews with an eclectic roster of award-winning and breakout storytellers. Formerly a journalist for Reuters, he is Head of Strategy for literary social media startup A Mighty Blaze and has taught writing at Grub Street in Boston. Bunyan and Henry; Or, the Beautiful Destiny is his first book.

By the way, Mark and myself are just a few of the hundreds of authors involved in WRITERS FOR BLUE. If you’re interested in contributing, go here.

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credit: Janna Giacoppo

Today, we hear from Shi Naseer whose debut novel, THE CRY OF THE SILKWORM, was released in June. We’re talking to Shi/LILY about how to handle multiple timelines and settings in her book as well as how to write (or not) for a Western audience.

Watch a recording here. This audio/video version is available for one week. Missed it? Check out the podcast version above or on your favorite podcast platform.

To find Naseer’s book, try Amazon/UK. To find books by our other authors, visit our Bookshop page. 

Looking for a writing community? Join our Facebook page. 

Chinese-Australian-Pakistani author Shi Naseer has lived in nine countries and backpacked to over seventy. She recently moved with her husband and young son from Uppsala, Sweden, to Stamford CT, the USA, and spends her winters in Punjab, Pakistan. She aims to connect people by telling stories from different cultures. Her debut novel, The Cry of the Silkworm, was released in June 2024 with Atlantic Books/Allen&Unwin. A coming-of-age revenge story of a young girl in turn-of-the-century China, it reveals the devastating consequences of the one-child policy. Shi Naseer holds a PhD in theoretical physics from Harvard University.

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Today, we hear from Thérèse Soukar Chehade, whose second novel, WE WALKED ON, will be published in September. We’re talking to Therese about truth in historical fiction.

Watch a recording here. This audio/video version is available for one week. Missed it? Check out the podcast version above or on your favorite podcast platform.

To find Chehade’s debut and many other books by our authors, visit our Bookshop page. 

Looking for a writing community? Join our Facebook page. 

Born in Beirut, Thérèse Soukar Chehade moved to the United States in 1983 during the Lebanese Civil War. Her first novel, Loom, was published in 2010 and won the 2011 Arab American Award for fiction. It portrays a Lebanese-American family struggling to reckon with their memories of the civil war during a Vermont blizzard in which the family’s matriarch ventures out to help a mysterious neighbor, forcing everyone in the family to follow. Her second novel, We Walked On, will be published by Regal House in September. It tells the story of a thirty-something Arabic teacher and his bookish student as their lives spiral out of control following the outbreak of the war in 1975. Thérèse lives in Granby, Massachusetts.