Writer's Voices

Similarly to the characters, Hoffman also faced a distressing encounter when he was 18 that was significant enough to have stayed on his mind years later. While Hoffman’s experience may have been traumatic and unforgettable, his situation was not unique. “The crime that happens, in its way, [is] somewhat mundane, mundane in a terrifying, terrible way… that it happens in parking lots in hundreds of cities every Friday night.” So much so that this type of storyline is a trope used many times in literature. So, how was Hoffman then able to make the story his own? “…I didn’t want to center the book on that trope, right? It drives the plot forward… It draws these men back together. I kind of think of it as the maypole around which the real story is wound, and the real stories are each of these men’s stories and the stories of their families… in some cases they’re lying, in some cases they’re keeping a horrible secret, and in all cases they haven’t really come to grips with the accountability that was demanded of them by what they had done… my way of making the story my own is examining how those repressions and how the lack of accountability can affect it and in a lot of ways introduce rot and problems into the relationships that are most important to them… If my first novel was about expectations, I would say this one is about accountability, as these men were drawn towards accountability, and resisted that accountability, and then made decisions about whether to embrace that accountability. I wanted to explore how that begins to repair some of the damage that they’ve done to their lives. “

True and full accountability must be chosen and it heals, right? And when it is chosen and it doesn’t, that’s when it’s thrust upon you.”

Friendship is born at the moment when one man says to another ‘What! You too? I thought that no one but myself…’”

Concerning her writing process, Reay prefers to write her stories chronologically to allow for the flow of emotions to build authentically. “If you write a book out of chronological order, you are depleting that, sort of, synergistic emotion building that is created within the story because you’re bringing different emotions on different days.” And for those who aim to become published writers in their future, Reay offers some encouraging words, “The writing wins and perseverance wins. Don’t let 41 rejections… that’s a big number, don’t let that stop you! My feeling about writing and about the publishing journey is, you cannot control the end. You can only control the journey and how you act on the journey. So keep your hopes up, keep your head high, enjoy the gift you’ve been given to write, and keep going.”

You really have to remember your character is moving through this story as if it’s life, and life builds upon the moment before.”

One should never discount the necessity or the power of a good friendship.”

When doing research for her stories, Webb finds most of her information through books than anywhere else. “I gather a lot of texts that are used, academic texts, that kind of stuff. You find some really good, juicy information in there and there’s all those coffee table books… you know, you find some good stuff in those. But yes, I absolutely, of course, use the Internet. It’s too helpful these days to not. You can access any library anywhere if you go through your main branch… Of course, I try to go to the locations in person because there’s just no substitute for that… it’s one of my favorite parts, obviously, the research. I mean, I get to learn and as a teacher, how can I not love that part? I love all the learning!”

That’s one reason why I enjoy historical fiction so much because I get to teach the reader something in a very fun, immersive, kind of, way.”

Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.”

As readers will notice when following the protocol, while Dr. Mushtaq does recommend certain supplements to include in one’s diet, such as Vitamin D3 and Omega-3 fish oil, she doesn’t limit the foods you already eat. “For the Busy Brain Cure, I didn’t want to put people on a diet. I wanted us to honor the foods we all grew up eating… I really believe that in order to be healthy we have to eat the foods that used to bring us joy, but eat it mindfully. When we have a busy brain, you could eat the whole bag of cookies and it’s mind-numbing and we don’t want that.” For those readers who are unsure whether the Busy Brain Cure is right for them, Dr. Mushtaq explained why this treatment is different and more effective than others they may have tried. “One is, this is up-to-date research. Number two, it’s one of the only books that gets to the root cause of what’s actually going on with the Busy Brain. We talk about a particular pattern of neuroinflammation that happens in the hypothalamus and resets the circadian rhythm and we need to fix that, and that is affecting not only your ability to focus and potential ADHD and insomnia and sleep, but it can also affect your hunger mechanisms, your hormone cycles, everything else… The third thing is, not only did I give the protocol that I had used in clinic, we tested and refined the protocol in over 1,000 high-functioning, high-achieving adults… and so that’s why I feel like this book is different. It gives you a researched roadmap.”

Most of the advice that’s out there to treat chronic stress, burnout, anxiety, and insomnia is outdated. Our brains have changed in structure, function, and wiring in a post-pandemic world.”

To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.”

Known as the first Paraguayan American poet to publish in the United States, Báez’s poem’s are written in English, Spanish, and Gaurani, the indigenous language of Paraguay. As for why he decided to incorporate all three languages into his debut collection, he explained, “It took me awhile to become comfortable writing in anything other than English… I do recall quite well, a senior seminar course during undergraduate at Illinois Wesleyan, I started to experiment with mixing some Spanish words and phrases into memory poems about Paraguay, and it felt natural, it felt comfortable, but it wasn’t until I spent a lot more time just really… visually looking at Guarani. It’s an interesting language visually because there’s these compounds of consonants and all kinds of diacritics that we don’t have certainly in English and not even in Spanish, and from that place of curiosity I wanted to learn more about well, how are these words working and how do they correspond with whatever minimal language I do have at my own disposal.”

I have such positive associations with those languages, right? Like, this book doesn’t get written without that background – the ambient Spanish, the ambient Guarani.”

What happens is that your wretched memory remembers the words and forgets what’s behind them.”

Even with her busy schedule working as a NICU doctor, Ghazirad still finds time to write. “I think it’s the love of writing. I really enjoy my time writing. I feel like it gives me a sense of satisfaction and pleasure the days that I write. I was an avid book reader. I’m still an avid book reader, and words are my world even though I felt like I took a different path. Maybe if I… continued to live and study in the United States, I would have become a literary academic…”

To say what I wanted to say, I created a fictional character and I set her free. I let her do what she wanted to do in that story rather than just saying, ‘Oh, this is what I did. You have to do what exactly I did over there.'”

A library of books is the fairest garden in the world, and to walk there is an ecstasy.”

For Hiranandani, writing this story gave her the chance to go back to a world she wanted to return to. She also explained why she shifted her attention to Amil this time around. “About a year after I wrote The Night Diary , I really missed the characters and I wanted to come back to them and revisit the world, but I didn’t want to write a direct sequel. I didn’t necessarily want to continue it exactly the way it was. I wanted to try to do something a little different. So I wanted to focus on Amil. A lot of the students that I would visit at school visits wanted a book from his perspective so I wrote this, sort of, companion novel where it does follow the story a few months after, but it has a very different feeling and a very different point of view, and it’s really looking at, what happens after the survival story? …Are they going to survive this horrible situation or not? And then they do, but as we know from either our own personal difficulties or going through a global pandemic… if you’re ok after the immediate crisis of it, ok isn’t always ok. There’s things to process. You have to put your life back together after that, kind of, trauma or disruption, and so that’s what Amil and the After is looking at. It’s looking at Amil and his family trying to rebuild their lives on, with this very unsteady feeling, and so that’s the story I wanted to tell with this new book.”

Food, I think, is really important to me and is a way for me to connect clearly and solidly with both of the cultural identities in my family.”

We may not all be the same, but we’re all connected by our humanity. When we harm each other, we harm ourselves. So when we support and help each other, we make our own lives better.”

Regarding the looted art, Santlofer noted that between 20-30% of all the art artifacts in Europe were stolen by the Nazis during World War II. He explained that Hitler had been planning to open a museum in his hometown stocked with all the stolen art. Additionally, the Nazis were not only seizing the art, they were also destroying and burning some in bonfires. Because of this, important paintings were hidden and people risked their lives trying to protect these valuable artifacts. As Santlofer said in his book, “Every lost artwork, every stolen artwork, was a stolen life, because most of the people’s artwork that was stolen were murdered. The Nazis murdered them to get this work, unless they managed to escape, and they escaped without the work. It’s really astonishing; it’s a crazy thing to think about.” And while much of the art has since been recovered, “…there are at least, at least, 100,000 works of art that are still missing and we don’t know where they are, and these works are still traded on the dark web. That’s what my book is about, really. I did a lot of research and a lot of reading to discover how these things could be traded and sold nowadays. It’s very diabolical, very dark.”

There was a time when I would’ve said I was an artist who also wrote, and now I would say I’m a writer who also paints.”

I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.”

As readers delve into the story, they learn, along with Kat, that Kat has a deep, violent anger that lies within her. Kahler explained that adding that dark, twisted element to her stories is something that drives her writing. “Give me a seedy underbelly and I will crawl beneath and look around. I love subversive characters. I love examining people’s dark impulses. I love when people triumph over darkness, which I think happens in this book, there’s definitely redemption art… and I really just think that’s also part of the twin trope. People are fascinated by twins because there’s a darkness in literature pertaining to twins… I think that twins sort of necessitate a dark story. You can’t read a bright and happy story with twins.”

For those thinking of pursuing writing as a career, Kahler offers some insight on the publishing process. “…you get your foot in the door, and I think people out there, if there are any aspiring writers, a lot of luck plays into this. So, don’t think you don’t have talent, you have the drive, you have the talent, you keep working on your craft, a lot of it’s luck. You have to hit the right editor on the right day, the right agent on the right day, the right publishing team on the right day, the right marketing group on the right day, and it all comes into play… It’s not an easy business. I feel very, very fortunate to have had whatever success I’ve had and it’s not an easy business and you only write because… you don’t write expecting to make money. Don’t go into publishing thinking you’re going to make money. Go into publishing because you don’t know what else to do with yourself but write.”

Man is not what he thinks he is, he is what he hides.”

During the conversation, Howe debunks a few myths that many believe to be true of piracy. In popular culture, pirate life is portrayed as romantic and alluring. True accounts of piracy, however, prove otherwise. Howe explains, “In one way, for instance, most pirate crews were actually multi-ethnic. If you watch Pirates of the Caribbean , that is not the picture that you would get of a pirate crew, but you would have people who were… French, or who were from West Africa or who were from Spanish holdings in the Caribbean or things like that. There were few examples of self-liberating people who ended up joining pirate crews… and of course there were few historical examples of women disguising themselves as men and going pirating. The most famous examples are Anne Bonny and Mary Read, who were two working class women… they both were in disguise in the same pirate crew that was raiding off of Port Royal, Jamaica… I feel like our picture of Golden Age Piracy tends to be monolithic and the truth of the matter in Golden Age Piracy is much more complex and I think much more interesting, and I explore some of those things in A True Account .”

We have a very romantic picture of pirates. They represent total freedom. They’re the greatest condition of freedom that is available in a time period that is otherwise very rigidly controlled by class.”

Now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates.”