Writer's Voices

Readers will notice that Silver included a soundtrack that is referenced throughout his novel. Being a musician and songwriter himself, he made sure to incorporate this important element into his story. He explains, “Well, like me and like many, many, many other people, there’s a soundtrack to our lives and it often relates to what we go through and it often influences what we go through, so I picked from my experience and my knowledge of music the things, the music, that would resonate for my main character and his circle, and it ended up, I didn’t realize it because I’m so into music, but music is all over this novel and references to songs and bands and records are plentiful.”

In regards to his writing process, Silver sits down to write every day and on good days, will spend as much as 6-8 hours working, editing as he goes. Once his entire draft is complete, he goes back and focuses on polishing the body of the work. Each piece of writing can take him up to 6 to 7 years to write. What would he say to those who aspire to become published writers like himself? “I think something that was told to me before during my MFA, I guess, is that you’ve got to read. You’ve got to read a lot in addition to your 10,000 hours, 2 or 3 times, to become good. You really need to read hundreds of books by people who are good, to know whether you are in the right, whether you’re playing Little League or you’re playing in minor leagues or you might want to take a crack at a book that would ask somebody to, you don’t know, to sit down with.”

I just put five young men in a car with a couple of six-packs and no adult supervision, and, you know, what could possibly go wrong with that?”

Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.”

While we do find out the protagonist’s name, it’s rarely mentioned throughout the book. Walley shared that this was done intentionally. “I’m always straddling with, ‘Is it real or is it not? Is it in her mind?’ because it has many magical things going on, unrealistic things. Like, when she meets that man who gives her a heart, you know, glass heart…. her mind is the real thing, but… I wanted to keep it in the imagination.” As far as similarities, Walley does share some commonalities with the heroine. “Well, what is similar to me is she’s a writer in New York and she seems to be editing and writing stuff for other people, as I do, and she… I wrote it during Covid so basically I had a desire to leave, but I couldn’t, so I decided to imagine it all. She’s like me in temperament, and she’s like me in imagination, I guess, obviously, but I have never run off to the coast of England and I’ve never met the characters that I meet there…. unfortunately, I quite like them, and so that part is not true. Some of the stuff that she internally wrestles with, obviously, is a bit true… I think we pick subjects that we like to wrestle with.”

With other novels, I kind of knew what I was doing. With this one, I let it go and let it happen on the page.”

You find peace not by rearranging the circumstances of your life, but by realizing who you are at the deepest level.”

As far as his writing process, Weiner explained that he always begins with a chapter to work with as his template. He said, “I always need a model chapter… it’s never the first chapter or the last chapter, it’s somewhere in the middle, that captures the tone, the voice, the essence of what I’m trying to do with the book, and in this case… it was the “Buddha Ben” chapter that was the model… and realizing that was one side of him, that’s when I realized for each chapter I could find a different Ben, and since he contains so many multitudes… I thought, ‘let me do that,’ and it worked, I think, that I was able to make the book more than just chronological because, again, I didn’t want to write a conventional biography that’s existed, so I found a theme, a different aspect of Ben, and it sort of, as I say, fits him and his personality as well because he was so multi-faceted.” While the book is ordered chronologically, Weiner didn’t always write in sequence, at times going back and forth in Ben’s timeline. Additionally, he did most of his research before sitting down to write the book and it consisted of two parts: first was his fact-finding, academic research where he delved into library books and gathered as much information about Ben as he could, and second was his travel research, in which he went to places that Ben had lived in, worked at, or traveled to. “I do go into the footsteps of him in Boston, Philadelphia, of course, in London, Southampton, England, France, so I take you on the road and then I take you into my life as well, but the research is done before I sit down to write.”

It’s an act of creativity to write essentially a hybrid book that’s part memoir, part travelogue, part history, part biography, part personal prescription. There are a lot of parts, but then book sellers and people like you don’t always know what to do with the book.”

We hold these truths to be self evident…”

In the story, the Talmadge’s are the traditional, established family in the community. While many of the characters around them were able to progress during this transitional time, the Talmadge’s were slow to accept these changes. Daughtry explained, “The Talmadge’s were big landowners. They had been there all their life. Their ancestors had compiled about 1,800 acres… They loved the way their life was, they didn’t want it to change so they had sharecroppers and they also had a bank. The bank was not changing also… the time came when they should’ve started doing other things like credit cards, loaning money on banks, loaning money on cars… you can see the Talmadge family begin to not accept the changes that were taking place and they were suffering because of it.”

Talmadge Farm has often been described as a love letter to the South. According to Daughtry, “In spite of what the South has done and is doing, everybody loves the South. The South has a charm about it and this book talks about the good parts of the South and how good the people are and what the South has meant to so many of us… It’s a love story in many respects.”

Writing a chapter can take you on a rabbit hunt that you won’t expect, but I would bring it back, and I did have an outline of basically what I wanted to do, what I wanted to write.”

Let us not forget that the cultivation of the earth is the most important labor of man. When tillage begins, other arts will follow. The farmers, therefore, are the founders of civilization.”

Throughout the story, readers may notice that the characters are often eating and for her, incorporating food into her storytelling often provided more details about the characters and their surroundings than just the words on a page. She says, “Food’s very important to me… Food says a lot. Food says a lot about a world. It says a lot about the status of someone. It says a lot about commerce and how things are getting from one location to another, what the rich eat versus what the poor eat. You’ve got kids foraging for edibles in a meadow… you have the regionality coming into play of what a meal in Umbria looks like versus what it looks like in Tamneki… I think you can accomplish a lot of world building in just having your character sit down for meals.”

Although Corland’s ambition growing up wasn’t to pursue writing, she always did some form of writing whether it was through journaling or creating short novellas. It wasn’t until her stepfather was dying that she decided she wanted her life to be spent focusing on things she really wanted to do. “What’s the worst that happens? You get rejected, you can’t do it? Well, it’s better than never trying.” Even the time she spent writing pieces that were never published was still invaluable. “Everything is a learning experience. Everything’s a step… There are no wasted words. Everything makes you better at your craft.”

It is very much in the mystery genre… you have to have breadcrumbs. If it comes out of absolutely nowhere, I don’t think that you laid a good enough groundwork then. It shouldn’t be something a reader can’t foresee at all.”

The gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge.”

Although Flightless Falcon was set during the Vietnam War, Smith explained that the political climate then was not that different than it is now. He remarked, “The division within the country is just as bad or worse…” In spite of that, “…what I wanted [readers] to take away was… the importance of respect for each other and to have empathy and not to just assume that everyone is evil. That is the thing that I think is the hardest to experience, is not only now instead of saying, ‘Well, your policies are wrong,’ we’re saying, ‘No, you’re evil.’ That’s just not the way to go. We’ve got to learn to be more respectful somehow.”

But, I wanted also to give people the understanding that our political system has been in disarray and a mess before and we’ve survived.”

“If everyone fought for their own convictions there would be no war.”

As a vegan herself, Guilbeault set out to inform readers about the everyday foods they put on their plates, but as she dug deeper in her research, she learned how much more complex our food system actually is. She reflected, “…the entire structure… the incentives are toward profit and toward companies making more bang for their buck and very much the externalized costs are on society… writing this book was, at times, quite depressing because I was really learning, like very, very dark truths about our food system and for awhile, it really got me down because I was thinking… what can I do as a consumer, what can I do as a teacher, as an advocate… I came to realize I am someone who can make choices in my own life. I can inspire people to also try to make, even little baby steps, in their own life…. and so the book was an expedition into the food system and I wanted to take readers along for the journey so that they can make up their own minds about what kind of role they want to play in that food system.”

The heart of this book is this question, ‘Is there an ethical way to eat?'”

Vegetarian food leaves a deep impression on our nature. If the whole world adopts vegetarianism it could change the destiny of humankind.”

Regarding the title, Dr. Townsend explains that the name, This Ordinary Stardust , comes from a connection to his field of science, biogeochemistry. “…as most of us probably know, there’s this very cliche saying… that we’re all stardust, and we are, right? In the end, the elements that form our world, life… everything, they all originally came from stars, from the incredible heat and fusion of stars… but at some point, and especially going through this, it really hit me that thinking about that we’re all comprised of that, and that in effect those elements are immortal, they have been here since the dawn of time. Everything we are and have is, was, formed by very long, dead, stars now from billions of years ago… and those elements combine in us for awhile… so they really do carry the full story of the world and they continue us on in their own way when we disintegrate and move to something else… just the thought of that, in that light, actually brings me a lot of comfort… that form of immortality and that form of what connects us all in a whole bunch of ways.”

Writing was a way for me to cope with hard moments. It just came to me and so I started to do that as soon as Neva, my daughter, was diagnosed.”

Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality”.

When it comes to the illustrator, Rob Wilson, Dr. Rice is a huge fan. While Wilson’s area of expertise is not science, he was able to create the unique illustrations by simply reading the information that was given. She said, “The way that he draws things is the way that I, as an adult who’s spent her life studying the science behind these things, wouldn’t perceive this situation… I wouldn’t think of a… fish tank made out of guppies looking evil or a snake hopping into somebody’s suitcase. That kind of stuff doesn’t even cross my mind, but it crosses his mind because that’s what he envisions when he hears this, and I love that about it. His illustrations are my very favorite thing in the book!”

Amazingly, Dr. Rice has been able to build an entire career around her passion for animals. She remarked, “I feel so lucky that this has worked out this way… it’s so exciting! Everyday you learn something new. Everyday you get to see the world in a way that you wouldn’t have thought of before, and it just makes me so happy! It’s like being a reader… We all get to read these things that we wouldn’t have known otherwise, and I think it helps us to just be fulfilled in our lives.”

Some of this research has not ever been written about for public audiences, like, it’s brand new to most people because it’s never been reported on. It’s just been in the peer review journals.”

In ancient times cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this.”

At the age of 43, Alan died suddenly. Wagner reflected, “I was left with some questions. The biggest question was what happened… if you lose somebody really suddenly and unexpectedly you want to know what went wrong, but because of his intellectual disabilities, I also wondered things like, did he know that I loved him? Could he feel that love? Did he understand that people could fear him, but also love him at the same time? …and what I discovered is that the question of what happened to my brother is really a question of what happened to me and what happened to us growing up.”

For Wagner, going back to relive the past and revisiting painful memories was not as difficult as it once was. “I think for me, I had done so much healing work and processing off the page that by the time I sat down to write it wasn’t like I was re-opening old wounds, and I developed also some self-care around it, too, in terms of just blocking out my time as much as I could. I learned that if I wrote a scene that was really emotionally charged, I should do something immediately afterwards. I should go for a hike, I should go swim laps at the rec center. I needed to do something to move my body afterwards to clear my nervous system.”

I wrote the book that I wish that I’d had when I was going through the loss of my brother, and the story that I wished I’d had that would’ve validated my experience as a sibling.”

When you experience loss, people say you’ll move through the 5 stages of grief… Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance… What they don’t tell you is that you’ll cycle through them all every day.”