Writer's Voices

While Kovac has been dancing since the age of 7, she actually started writing far earlier than that. “I have been writing longer than I have been dancing, so as soon as I could read, I started writing books… and when my twins were born… they were born several months premature and so they were in the hospital for three months, and it was in that moment that I realized I have to figure out how to be a writer. It’s not enough anymore to just write… so I found a community of writers, I volunteered for literary festivals… I found writers who were better than I was and read writers who were better than I was. That’s something else you do, you find people who are better than you are and try to hang around them… and I put my work out there. I revised it when it’s not what I wanted to say and I just keep doing that. That’s basically all you do.”

So, I have always written. What I didn’t know was how to make the leap from someone who writes a lot to someone who is a writer. So I decided to use my dance career as a template.”

The beauty of ballet is the pleasure of dancing and it happens in the present, and it pleases many people who watch.”

Regarding her writing process, Wilson prefers to let her stories develop as she’s writing rather than planning everything out beforehand. “I am constantly surprised. I am very much a pantser. I am not a plotter… I can’t do it. I tried. It doesn’t work for me, and I also write chronological. I just write the book in order… I know what that chapter’s going to be, but I don’t really know what’s coming after that, so hopefully by the end of this chapter I will have figured that out, and I usually do. I’ve only been stuck maybe a couple of times, but… it just comes to me in these little bits and pieces… it’s a fun way to write… I get surprised a lot. I think it’s good because I think that it translates to the readers, too, and they get surprised too.”

It was kind of like American Idol , but for books where you could put up your cover and the first chapter, and then readers could vote. I entered and I won, and the next thing I know I’m getting a phone call from them.”

Fantasy is hardly an escape from reality. It’s a way of understanding it.”

While Falk-Allen did write her book chronologically, she decided to start the story with a significant event that happened later on. “…I wanted the first chapter to be a look ahead because I wanted to set the scene that Frank had taken these kids to an orphanage and you want to know why, and you can assume that it’s because times were hard financially because most people know that in 1929 the stock market had fallen, especially people who’ve read a lot of history or historical fiction, but that actually isn’t the case. So, I just wanted to set up that little deception in the beginning that he had taken the kids to an orphanage and you want to find out why, and then go back in time to set up the way their life was from 1918 through 1930.”

What I’m interested in is what they do and what they say, and that tells me who they are, what their character is, so I try doing it with dialogue and actions.”

Gender inequality is still around, and so I don’t suppose it’ll ever change, but women are stronger now than they were back then, so maybe it will change.”

As far as his writing process, FitzSimmons says his style is somewhere between a plotter and a pantser. “…I think of myself sort of in the middle. I call myself a road tripper in that, I know where I’m starting from and I know where I’m going. I know where the ending is and I have the highways I’m going to take, but if as I’m on those highways I see an exit sign that says, ‘Biggest Ball of Yarn in North America,’ I’m getting off the highway. Oh, we gotta go see what’s over there.’ So I give myself latitude to detour.” When it comes to editing, he has found that editing as he’s writing really slows down his writing progression. “[Now] I’ll do light editing, I’ll go back and look at things… I’ve tried to like, ‘Let’s just go. Let’s edit after you get your arms around the whole thing rather than edit when you’ve only got this much of it to look at.’ I think that’s made me a better writer. It’s making me a less crazy writer…”

I believe there is talent involved with being a writer. but having taught writing for 10 years, I also really believe that writing is a craft and skill and something that you can get better at.”

Whenever people tell you they’re going to wipe the slate clean, it’s your slate they mean to wipe.”

As for Stallworth’s first memoir, Black Klansman , which became the basis for the Spike Lee-directed, 2019 Academy Award-winning film, BlacKkKlansman , he described what it was like watching himself depicted on-screen for the first time. “…I can honestly say that there were times when I sat there with tears in my eyes because I realized that every time they said the word ‘Stallworth’ or ‘Ron’ they were referring to me. That was my name, my image, in the form of John David Washington on the big screen portraying a chapter in my life. My mother has been deceased now since 1982, but I sat there thinking about my mom and how she would be crying if she saw that her third born child had a movie about him and it was very touching, very moving. I’ve seen the movie now almost a hundred times over the years and it still brings a tear to my eye, lump in my throat.”

Writing is a way to speak truth to power.”

“The return from your work must be the satisfaction which that work brings you and the world’s need of that work. With this, life is heaven, or as near heaven as you can get.”

Concerning the structure of her collection, she explained, “So, broadly they are: the first section is love poems. The second section is, sort of, not complaints, but rage… The third part is… self love and cheering for yourself, and the fourth section, informally, is lullabies and basically things to soothe you…” For her readers, Rush organized her book in a way where they would be able to open the book and turn to a piece that relates to them in that moment. “…I felt like people could pick it up and, depending on how they were feeling or how they wanted to feel, could find a poem that would meet them where they were… Part 1 is called “When you have a crush on everything and everyone.’ Part 2 is called ‘When the monster turns out to be 3 dogs and a trench coat…’ That section deals with a lot of my experience leaving the religious system I grew up in and anything that had helped me change my mind about things. Part 3 is called ‘When you have main character syndrome and aren’t looking for a cure…’ That’s where ‘She’s a Bit Much’ is, and then part 4 is called ‘When someone telling you to relax actually works.’ Of course I had to call them something silly. I couldn’t call them ‘Lullabies and Rants.'”

My favorite thing to do is to make sure that the poems end with a punch line that would either take you where you were hoping to go, take you somewhere that surprised you, turn the whole thing on its head. You know, just really got you thinking.”

I slip the Do Not Disturb sign onto the doorknob of my life. I’ve got important work to do: minding my own business, accommodating my whims, guarding my joy, nose buried in the story only I can tell.”

As for how he came up with the title, Colbert said, “I was invited to speak at… the Singapore FinTech Festival, which is the largest financial technology conference in the world… I said to the gentleman who invited me, I said, ‘I will only speak if I can speak on whatever I want to speak on… I said, ‘The title of my talk will be ‘Technology is Dead,’ and at that point all I really knew was I wanted to talk about was humanity. I wanted to talk about human first technological innovation. Ultimately, as I thought about the title, I came to realize that it’s pretty appropriate that the way technology has insinuated itself into our lives, sometimes it feels like it is part of us, like we are connected to it in a way where, it’s almost as if we’re bionic… what I’m trying to convey is, it’s a tool… It is not part of us. We are not as reliant on it as we think we are… so it’s dead… and the question is, ‘are we using the tool effectively, where effectively is not simply productivity…’ Effective is, is the tool contributing to a more meaningful life, a life of well-being, a life of fulfillment, a life of happiness? Are we using the tool the right way? And I think more and more as I talk around the world on the topic, people are realizing the answer is, ‘not really. No!'”

How do we help each other, better understand each other, in order to navigate our lives in a more meaningful and consequential way?”

The saddest aspect of society right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”

As far as the various gender identity terms we use in society today, how does one know which word to use to describe someone correctly? Ehrensaft said, “Every person has a unique gender web. So even when we have these categories… there’s spaces in between. For example, in our clinic, there are several children, or youth, adolescents, who say they’re agender, but it means something different to each of them, so you have to go further… the one that’s most prevalent right now as a category is nonbinary, and nonbinary usually goes along with the pronoun ‘they,’ which makes many people very uncomfortable because it’s not grammatically correct… but what really makes them uncomfortable, I believe, is this new category of gender…” She concluded by saying, “There’s been moments in history where we have strong objections to change because it makes us anxious and it defies what we know of the world… it’s basically been decades and decades of socialization and therefore it becomes habitual, and that’s why it feels like bedrock…”

Gender is no longer bedrock, but it’s now becoming moving boulders for many people, and for any of you who are hikers, it is so much easier to hike on bedrock.”

A gender-equal society would be one where the word ‘gender’ does not exist: where everyone can be themselves.”

Filled with profound and insightful poems, reflections, and stories, Himmelman’s book comprises of pieces that not only vary in different ways, but also draw upon a number of emotions. He said, “Since there’s no linear form, it’s not a novel by any means. These are pieces of various lengths. I sort of say in my introduction, they’re similar to my songs with different tempos and different colors.” With regard to the structure of the book, Himmelman remarked, “I thought it would be a good idea to arrange them, at some moment, I just thought I’m going to make them into 3 or 4 parts. The first part is ‘astonishment,’ which I think these are things that I recall that really changed the way I see things. The other is ‘shadows,’ which is some of the really sad parts that I recall… and the other technical category is ‘teachers’ and that’s not only the human beings, there have been many, have really changed the course of my life whether they know or not, but also just tiny little experiences that I was taught something very fundamental by. There was another fourth section called ‘notes to self,’ which I’d written in the third person… and it was decided, my publisher and I… she said it might be best to think about peppering those somewhat randomly through those other sections. I think it adds a nice texture.”

When you pick up a book or you go to a concert or even a movie, you’re looking for some form of transcendence. That’s the job of the artist.”

Do not fight the darkness, let the light in and the darkness will disappear.”

As for the setting of this novel, what inspired Trussoni to choose Japan as its location? For her, her love of this country and its culture stemmed from her time living there for two years after college. “I was hired to teach English in high school in southern Japan, and I loved it! It was just one of these amazing, life-changing experiences for me… when I was there, I’ve always wanted to write about Japan after that experience and had just, sort of, carried around all of this knowledge about that country with me over the years… sort of just waiting, like, when am I going to find a book that I can write, you know, bring Japan in somehow, and after creating this character, this puzzle savant character in The Puzzle Master , I realized that he could be a really great way to get me to Japan and to write a book about Japan.”

I firmly believe we are all seeing the world slightly differently than each other. So, it really makes you sensitive to other people and appreciate that we’re all just a little bit different.”

The solution often turns out more beautiful than the puzzle.”