The 7am Novelist

Today, we hear from Tessa Fontaine whose latest novel, THE RED GROVE, was released in May. We’re talking to Tessa about how to bring a shy, attention-avoiding character to life on the page by discovering the many aspects of her situation and her past that gets her moving forward.

By the way, on July 19 Tessa will be at Newtonville Books with authors Clare Beams, Rufi Thorpe, and Annie Hartnett. 

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 Fontaine’s debut novel and many other books by our authors, visit our Bookshop page. 

Looking for a writing community? Join our Facebook page. 

Tessa Fontaine is the author of THE ELECTRIC WOMAN: A MEMOIR IN DEATH-DEFYING ACTS, a New York Times Editors' Choice, Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick, and best book of 2018 by Southern Living, Refinery29, Amazon Editors', and The New York Post. Other writing can be found in Outside, The New York Times, Glamour, AGNI, The Believer, LitHub, Creative Nonfiction, and more. Raised outside San Francisco, Tessa is a former professor and has taught in jails and prisons for five years. She co-founded and teaches the Accountability Workshops with writer and pal Annie Hartnett, and lives in Asheville, North Carolina, with her husband, daughter, goofy dog and sassy cat. THE RED GROVE is her first novel. It is a best book of May from Amazon and People Magazine, and on most anticipated lists from The Rumpus and Alta Magazine.

Photo by Artur Rutkowski on Unsplash

Want to join the podcast? Come together with other listeners in a deep dive into this summer’s episodes, discussing ideas, asking questions, and sharing your experiences about issues brought up in our interviews. Perfect for writers at every level. Only a few spots available. Email [email protected] for more info.

Today we get to hear from Annie Weatherwax whose much-lauded novel, All We Had, was adapted by Katie Holmes for her  directorial debut. But Annie and I will be talking about how her career as a visual artist inspires her writing and vice versa, particularly as a writer and artist with dyslexia. 

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 Weatherwax’s debut and many books by our authors, visit our Bookshop page. 

Looking for a writing community? Join our Facebook page. 

Annie Weatherwax is an author and artist who spent her early career sculpting superheroes and cartoon characters for Nickelodeon, DC Comics, and Pixar. Winner of the Robert Olen Butler Prize for Fiction, her debut novel All We Had, was a finalist for the Massachusetts Book Award and is now a major motion picture from Tribeca films. In 2017, she received The Hamilton Life Achievement Award for individuals with dyslexia. In 2021, she was the inaugural fellow at New Yorker Cartoonist, James Stevenson’s Lost and Found Lab. Character sketches and stories from her  collection, “Odd Balls and Relationships,” appeared in the winter 2023/24 issue of Ploughshares Magazine. Her work exploring the relationship between language and vision, visual art and literature has been published in the New York Times and Publishers Weekly. Her most recent endeavor is "Monster in a Dress”—an animated short about her journey with gender, identity and personhood. 

Today we hear from Sarah Tomlinson whose novel, The Last Days of the Midnight Ramblers, was released in February. Sarah and I will be talking about red herrings and how to make them work in a character-driven novel rather than letting them be a mere plot contrivance. 

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 Tomlinson’s debut and many books by our authors, visit our Bookshop page. 

Looking for a writing community? Join our Facebook page.

Sarah Tomlinson, a former music journalist, has been a ghostwriter since 2008, penning more than 20 books, including five New York Times bestsellers. In 2015, she published the father-daughter memoir, Good Girl (Gallery Books). She wrote The Last Days of the Midnight Ramblers, her first novel, in-between assignments for a who’s who of celebrity clients.

Today, another special bonus episode of our “Listener’s Roundup” with Alison Langley, Patricia Manuel Go, and Erica Ferencik. The Listener’s Roundup 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. 

By the way, we still have a couple more open spots for YOU to take part in a listener’s roundup. If you’re interested, email me at [email protected].

So today, we’ve got listeners Alison Langley, Patricia Manuel Go, and Erica Ferencik with us.

Watch a recording here. This audio/video version (unedited) 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. 

Patricia Manuel Go is the author of a short story, “Pig,” which was published in the US in the anthology Growing up Filipino 3 (2022)—she has since turned it into a novel with much help from GrubStreet, especially her mentor, Henriette Lazaridis. 

As a foreign correspondent, Alison Langley freelanced for The Wall Street Journal Europe in Budapest from 1990-94. That experience forms the backdrop of her first novel, Budapest Noir: Ilona Gets A Phone, published by Dedalus Books, UK.

Erica Ferencik is the author of the critically acclaimed, bestselling novels, The River at Night and Into the Jungle. Film rights for her latest release, Girl in Ice, have been optioned by Netflix.

Photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash 

Today we get to hear from Steve Almond, whose latest book on the process of writing, TRUTH IS THE ARROW, MERCY IS THE BOW, was released in April. Steve and I will be talking about writer’s block, how to convey a character’s inner life, and what that heavy word, ART, might really mean.

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 Almond’s new book and many books by our authors, visit our Bookshop page. 

Looking for a writing community? Join our Facebook page. 

Steve Almond is the author of twelve books of fiction and nonfiction, including the New York Times bestsellers Candyfreak and Against Football. His recent books include the novel All the Secrets of the World, which has been optioned for television by 20th Century Fox, and his first novel, co-written with Julianna Baggott, WHICH BRINGS ME TO YOU, is now a major motion picture, filmed with actress Lucy Hale. For four years, Steve hosted the New York Times Dear Sugars podcast with his pal Cheryl Strayed. He is the recipient of a 2022 NEA grant in fiction, and his short stories have been anthologized in the Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize, Best American Erotica, and Best American Mysteries series. He also publishes crazy, DIY books. 

Photo by Jill Heyer on Unsplash

Today, we hear from Laura van den Berg whose latest novel, STATE OF PARADISE, will be released on July 9. We’re talking to Laura about writing a book that combines autofiction and speculative fiction and what to do when another novel you’re writing is asking for attention.

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 van den Berg’s debut and many other books by our authors, visit our Bookshop page. 

Looking for a writing community? Join our Facebook page. 

Laura van den Berg was born and raised in Florida. She is the author of five works of fiction, including The Third Hotel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018), a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, and I Hold a Wolf by the Ears (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020), which was one of Time Magazine’s 10 Best Fiction Books of 2020. She is the recent recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, and a literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her next two novels, State of Paradise and Ring of Night, are forthcoming from FSG in 2024 and 2026. She is the author of two previous story collections, The Isle of Youth (FSG, 2013) and What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us (Dzanc Books, 2009), and the novel Find Me (FSG, 2015). She is currently a Senior Lecturer on Fiction at Harvard University. Laura lives in the Hudson Valley with her husband, the writer Paul Yoon, and their dog, Oscar.

Photo by Paul Yoon

Today we get to hear from Kate Woodworth whose novel, Little Great Island, will be released in May of 2025. Kate and I will be talking about managing multiple points of view—the book has eleven!—which she refers to “as playing three dimensional chess in the dark.”

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 Woodworth’s debut and many books by our authors, visit our Bookshop page. 

Looking for a writing community? Join our Facebook page. 

Kate Woodworth’s first book, Racing into the Dark, came out in 2009 from Dutton and has been optioned for film. Booklist called it “a compelling exploration of mental illness.” She later went into a career as a medical writer before receiving her MFA from Boston University. Her second novel, Little Great Island, will be released in May 2025 from Sibylline Press, a woman-owned independent press publishing work by women over 50.

Photo by Taneli Lahtinen on Unsplash

Today, we hear from one of our most beloved Boston-area writers, Marjan Kamali, whose lates novel, THE LION WOMEN OF TEHRAN, will be released on July 2. We’re talking to Marjan about how she handled the passage of time in writing the book.

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 Kamali’s latest and many other books by our authors, visit our Bookshop page. 

Looking for a writing community? Join our Facebook page. 

Marjan Kamali is the award-winning author of the forthcoming The Lion Women of Tehran (out July 2024), The Stationery Shop (Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster), a national and international bestseller, and Together Tea (EccoBooks/HarperCollins), a Massachusetts Book Award finalist. She is a 2022 recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship. Marjan’s novels are published in translation in more than 25 languages (21 languages for The Stationery Shop and 10 languages for Together Tea). Her essays have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Literary Hub, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. Marjan holds a bachelor’s degree in English literature from the University of California, Berkeley, a Master of Business Administration from Columbia University, and a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from New York University. Born in Turkey to Iranian parents, she spent her childhood in Turkey, Iran, Germany, Kenya, and the U.S. Marjan is currently the Fannie Hurst Writer-in-Residence at Brandeis University. She lives in the Boston area with her family.

Photo Credit: David E. Lawrence

Today, we get to hear from Maurice Carlos Ruffin whose novel, THE AMERICAN DAUGHTERS, was released in February. We’ll be talking about how to write politically charged topics. 

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 Ruffin’s latest novel and many other books by our authors, visit our Bookshop page. 

Looking for a writing community? Join our Facebook page.

Maurice Carlos Ruffin is the recipient of the 2023 Louisiana Writer Award and the Black Rock Senegal Residency. He also wrote The Ones Who Don’t Say They Love You, which was published in August 2021. It was the 2023 One Book One New Orleans selection, a New York Times Editor’s Choice, a finalist for the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence and longlisted for the Story Prize. The book was also selected to represent Louisiana at the 2023 National Book Festival. His first book, We Cast a Shadow, was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and the PEN America Open Book Prize. It was longlisted for the 2021 DUBLIN Literary Award, the Center for Fiction Prize, and the Aspen Words Literary Prize. A New Orleans native, Ruffin is a professor of Creative Writing at Louisiana State University, and the 2020-2021 John and Renee Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi. Ruffin is part of the Artist Network of Narrative 4, an organization dedicated to aiding the educational opportunities of young people.

Today we’re talking to three authors—Jean Duffy, Bev Boisseau Stohl, and Laura Beretsky—and the writing group that provided them with the support and encouragement to keep them going. What makes the Page Six Writing Group so special? While usually only 1-2% of writers get their books published, three of its six members published a book in the same year.

The Page Six Writing Group also includes writers Susan Schirl Smith, Marcie Kaplan, and Maggie Lowe.

Looking for a writing community? Join our Facebook page. BONUS! Today, you’ll find a tip sheet from The Page Six Writing Group on this page about making a group like theirs work.

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 the debuts mentioned in this interview and many books by our authors, visit our Bookshop page. 

Laura Beretsky is a writer who lives in Somerville with her children, husband and two cats. She recently published Seizing Control: Managing Epilepsy and Others' Reactions to It, a memoir about the challenges facing those who live with perceptible health conditions. Her work has appeared in Health Story Collaborative, The National Library of Poetry, and Cognoscenti. More at https://lauraberetsky.com/published-essays/

Bev Boisseau Stohl is a non-fiction writer whose blog grew into Chomsky and Me: A Memoir, (from OR Books) published in July of 2023. Her book tells the story of her 24 years as assistant to linguist, activist, Professor Noam Chomsky at MIT, and the unexpected bond that developed through a shared humor and compassion. You can find Bev with her wife walking her two rescue dogs in Watertown, and at www.instagram.com/ChomskyandMeAMemoir.

Jean Duffy is a nonfiction writer whose first book, Soccer Grannies: The South African Women Who Inspire the World (Rowman & Littlefield), was published in 2023. Jean can be found on the soccer field in Lexington, Massachusetts, where her team, the Lexpressas, have been playing for some twenty years. She lives with her husband in Somerville, Massachusetts. More at https://jeanduffy.com

Photo by Chang Duong on Unsplash