Writer's Voices

Within the augmented reality portion of Voidopolis , Mustatea also wanted to incorporate the idea of loss, just as she did when eliminating the letter “e.” She decided to create her book in a way that the contents disappear, or “decay,” over the course of a year. A reader would first buy the physical book and as they are reading, the images and words become masked and unintelligible. In order to continue reading, the reader would have to use an agumented reality app. With that app, the text and images can then be read and seen, but only temporarily. Eventually, the digital components of the app begin to fade over several months and what’s left are words that are obscured and that continue to decay over the rest of the year until it can no longer be read. Fortunately, the book does reset every year on July 1st, which is the date Mustatea started telling her story, and the text is legible again for a short while, and then the decaying process begins all over again. She explained, “Your book is doing this, you know, it’s a kind of digital performance… it’s like decaying for you in front of you.” After experiencing the book in its entirety, Mustatea hopes readers will walk away with “…the idea that even in the middle of collapse, there’s a way of resisting collapse by speaking about it, by describing it, by believing in the power of language to change reality.”

I felt that the Inferno could be a kind of guidepost for how to move through a situation that felt like it was really quite terrifying.”

He who sees a need and waits to be asked for help is as unkind as if he had refused it.”

Throughout the book, readers can feel a sense of melancholy as they navigate through Tommy and Sarah’s relationship and then through the trial. Even the title itself, A Glooming Peace This Morning , evokes sorrow and desolation. Mendenhall reflects, “I think people struggle with loneliness and sadness, but I don’t think those are necessarily bad things. I actually think the ideal state for a human being is melancholy because happiness can lead you to be delusional… I really dislike how our culture is always chasing after happiness, happiness, happiness because happiness is not a constant… You can’t be happy all the time. If you were, there would be no such thing as happiness. There can be no happiness without sadness… I think that our culture is so obsessed with happiness without saying, ‘You know what? Sadness is ok. It is not just ok, but it’s good.'”

Young boys spend their entire boyhood wanting to become men, and then having become a man, they spend their entire manhood wanting to be a boy again.”

You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you odd.”

The idea for Down the Steep was inspired by Nauman’s own family and childhood. While the story is a historical fiction, a few of the facts were picked up from her family history. “My father was a minister, my mom grew up in Minnesota, they moved to this small town in Virginia during the civil rights era, and we were living there. We lived there for about four years and then moved back to Tidewater. I mostly grew up in Tidewater… every now and then, through the years, my mother would say to me, ‘There were Klan members in that church,’ and that’s all she’d say and that sort of sticks with someone in their head and honestly, one of my earliest childhood memories is of a Klan march, so my positionality in this book is of that little girl in the Swanson family… we have that family history and it was sitting with me for many decades and I started to get a bit nostalgic for the Tidewater area… I thought it would be fun to write about Tidewater and I actually began writing this book during the second Obama administration when people were going around saying, ‘Oh, we’re in a post-racial society. There’s no racism anymore…’ and I felt like, you know, I don’t think that’s true. I’m feeling a little undercurrent of racism and sexism here in our culture despite Obama’s presidency.”

Racism and sexism and these other kinds of tribal hatreds affect the people who hold them.”

Everyone makes mistakes, sometimes bad ones, really bad ones. We just have to learn from them. Forgive yourself, but don’t forget, learn from them.”

Just as in Recipe for a Good Life , Crewe’s novels often center around family and friendships. “My stories are basically about… what makes the world go around. I mean, some of my books have romance in them… [but] they’re certainly not romance kind of novels or anything like that. Some of them don’t have romance at all. It’s just basically a woman growing up in some circumstances and trying to get through her life kind of thing. So, they’re all different and they all take place in different communities…” Additionally, it was also important for Crewe to create characters who were relatable, ones that her readers could see themselves in. “I find that our hearts are the same, doesn’t matter what country you live in… we all have the same feelings, we all go through the same things… when readers read these books, they recognize themselves, and they recognize their families and they like knowing that other families are exactly the way yours are. We all deal with the same kinds of issues… maybe people can’t write them down, but they sure do recognize it when they read it. ”

As for her writing process, Crewe begins only with a title in mind. “…that’s my beacon. That’s my little, kind of, nugget, my shining light, that I can go back to… because when you write for days and days and days, you can go off course very easily. So I have to keep remembering the title to bring me back to where I started, but [it’s] the characters that tell me what’s going to happen. I have a vague idea of what the story might be about, but I never know how it’s going to end… sometimes the best characters come in halfway through a story and I never thought of them… “

My recipe for writing works for me, but it doesn’t mean it would work for anybody else. So you have to take everything I say with a grain of salt.”

Canada is not so much a country as a clothesline nearly 4,000 miles long.”

Gale’s novel was inspired largely by historical events and also her own personal experiences. After some research, she found that there was an enormous gap between scientists who have made contributions to the medical world and the medical establishments themselves. When asked what the reason was for this huge divide, Gale said, “I attribute it to the inconvenience of so much of medicine being undermined during a terrible time in our economy… that would have put so much of traditional medicine at risk…” Therefore, many of the medical-related methods discovered by scientists past and present were, to a great degree, suppressed by those involved in healthcare services. Gale’s personal experiences also contributed to this novel and it stemmed from an unconventional treatment introduced by her veterinarian that prolonged the lives of both her 13-year-old, aging Golden Retriever, and her cancer-stricken father. Their treatments were a science-based approach involving sound therapy to heal their illnesses. “[My father] was the third step in a long line of serious interactions I’ve had that keeps bringing me back to this science until I finally couldn’t let it go….” Additionally, with all the scientific information presented in this book, Gale also made sure that her story was understandable to her audience. “…my biggest challenge was to take what [the scientists] know and put it together here because that’s what the science was about, the meeting of those two disciplines, and put it in plain English…”

The basis of our health and diseased states is an energetic electrical phenomenon. You’re going to be hard-pressed to patent anything that addresses that.”

Who knows what might be possible in the future for medical discoveries if everybody would work together?”

The book is comprised of 5 essays, each one a chapter, and while they can be read independently, their topics build on one another. Every one of the essays tackles a central, philosophical question that relates to twins. de Bres elaborated, “…each one has a question as a title that’s meant to refer to the kinds of questions that twins get asked all the time by non-twins in their everyday lives. The first chapter is called, ‘Which one are you?’ and it talks about this habit we have of binarizing or polarizing twins, so one for instance will be the good twin, one will be the evil twin… The second essay is called, ‘How many of you are there?’ and it talks about this question of the degree to which twins combine personhood. People often treat twins as somehow less than two people…. Essay number 3 is about love… it talks about two contrasting images of the twin relationship, one as being perfect and ideal, one as being pathological. Next one is, ‘How free are you?’ It talks about this question of the relative role of nature and nurture and human life, and how that relates to our ability to act freely…the final essay is about the singleton fascination with twins. Twins are often used… in the market as advertising tools. They’re used to sell things. Also, just for entertainment. People love watching things about twins, so twins are put to use, scientific use and intellectual use. I’m using twins in this book to think about human life.”

Twins are just a really useful narrative device. They’re often used to represent different ways of being, different diverging paths. It’s a way of exploring the role of fate in human life.

There are two things in life for which we are never truly prepared: twins.”

Despite the sheer volume of pages, Brother Ludovico decided to keep the story within one novel rather than breaking it into several books because he felt that, while all the chapters are complete on its own, they are all interwoven and should be kept together in one larger work. He explained, “It’s a hard thing, you know, to actually talk about… it has strands that go throughout the whole book…I know that they’ve approached a number of authors and the authors kind of take my side. They’re vehemently against it because it’s one, basically, one thought and the author doesn’t really want it to interrupted sharply… there’s an invisible, intangible building that occurs, or at least the writer wants to occur in the reader… and there are other things about Brother Maria that if I was to adapt a modern mentality to, would not be Brother Maria . I want it to be wild and raw. I want it to be a wild, poetic opus of the soul… reach for its depths and so on. I want it to be unlicensed. I think that’s why… It doesn’t come out true with me thinking that I’m going to be writing three novels that have to fit together. It doesn’t happen, it doesn’t happen.”

I knew what, you know, I wanted to do before I took the chisel to the marble.”

What’s true of all the evils in the world is true of the plague as well. It helps men to rise above themselves. All the same, when you see the misery it brings you’d need to be a madman, or a coward, or stone blind, to give in tamely to the plague.”

Regarding her writing process, Lynn prefers to plot out her work first. “I at least know where the end is, but I much prefer having an outline. It’s a lot quicker. If I spend a few days to work out that outline and then I sit and write, it’s a lot quicker and it also means that not so much goes in the trash bin when I’m editing it, whereas I find when I pants it, I’m like, ‘It was beautiful, it’s gotta go, it’s gotta go…’ Plotting does avoid that for me.” Although Lynn has written many pieces of work, she felt only some of her writing were worth a second or third draft. She remarked, “I’ve got many books, some first draft, some second, that have not made the cut in publishing, but I don’t believe every book is for publishing. Some are for learning, and I have a couple of books that were learning books.”

For those aspiring to become full time writers, Lynn has some words of wisdom. “For starters, you can’t give up on it so if this is what you want, don’t expect it to come immediately… when I started writing Amendments … 8-9 years that it took me. If it’s what you want, you just don’t have expectations. Don’t think that this book is going to be the next big thing because I’ve had so many moments where I’m like, ‘This is it. This is it. This is it. No it’s not, no it’s not!’ …Don’t place all your eggs in that basket. If your first book doesn’t do as well as you think it’s going as you wanted it to, as you thought it was going to, then you write the next one. And if the second one doesn’t do as well as you thought, then you write the third one… know that it’s completely possible, but you just can’t give up on it. If you give up on it, you’re never going to get there.”

I write dirty first drafts that no one is allowed to see, ever. I just need to get it down. A minimum of probably four thousand words a day, but aiming for like six.”

In mythology, the Medusa can petrify people with a look, which is a good thing, I think. But the Medusa is a unique symbol – something strong. It’s about going all the way.”

One of the chapters that Boyers includes in his book is about a time, back in 1990, when Steiner invited him to attend one of his classes on Shakespeare at the University of Geneva. These classes were given about once a week in a large auditorium and focused on one Shakespeare play each semester. Boyers recalls, “…in that auditorium, many, many, many hundreds of people were present, only a small number of them were students at the University of Geneva. Most of the people there were people who traveled to Geneva each week to attend George Steiner’s Shakespeare class. Many of them were middle-aged or older business people, stockbrokers, doctors, lawyers, politicians, and they were coming in on trains and planes from different places in Europe to attend this class. Many of them that I had met had been attending it for 10 years already and they hoped to go through all 37 Shakespeare plays with George Steiner. He was just regarded as the Great Maestro and he was always interesting, scrupulous at going through the text. Can you imagine an entire semester devoted to one play? Very close reading and that seemed to all of these people… completely thrilling, and Steiner seemed the perfect teacher… I just thought George had grown tremendously as a teacher and, in many ways, as a human being in the 25 years between the time he was my teacher in graduate school and the time I saw him do this class, and I just felt I had to include that chapter in the book.”

As for the reason why Steiner and Sontag may have had such an intense dislike for one another, Boyers speculated that it may have been due to their competitive natures. He remarked, “They were in their ways, I think, very competitive with one another. They often wrote about the same things almost at the same time… there were parallels of that sort all through their careers in spite of the fact that they were also very different, and had in some cases, [had] very different interests… They were different, they weren’t the same, but nevertheless, they were highly competitive and they were certainly, for a period of about 30 or 40 years, they were two of the most prominent writer intellectuals in the world. They had a following, both of them, that was quite enormous and this was easily measurable. When either one of them gave a public lecture, a vast audience would arrive to be there and their books sold large numbers of copies… They really were similar in certain ways, profoundly different in other ways, and always very competitive.”

Both of them had the capacity to write not just for scholars and intellectuals, but to write for everybody, and that’s a fantastic gift.”

Relationships should make us feel better. Why else bother? But there are different ways of feeling better.”

As far as what to include in her memoir, it took Saferstein some time to decide which pieces from her journals to use. Additionally, she also felt the need to write about her experiences in a way that was more relatable to her readers. “When I first did the marriage chapter, when I went back and read it, it was really lovely and it was a lot of… fluff, and I thought anyone who reads this, who has been married… or any relationship for a long period of time knows that it’s not just all cherries and wonderful… I started pulling some of the real stuff… I realized that people are going to read this book, hopefully they will learn and see the humanness in all of us and be able to relate… if it were all positive, people would not relate the same way because no one’s life is all one way, all good.”

Going forward, what will Saferstein do with all her completed journals? “In my will, it’s that they’re to be destroyed upon my death. No one is to read them and my kids know that and my husband knows that, but I do have a friend who’s an artist and she is really wanting to do some kind of art project with them… I don’t know whether that will happen, but it’s possible… I would like to not destroy them, truthfully, and I’d also like to be able to read them one time without all this craziness… just sit down… Sit down and just read them from cover to cover and just, kind of, re-live my life.”

The first thing I would do would be to talk to them about journaling because learning about the Holocaust is such a heavy experience and I wanted the teachers to be able to process.

I started reading, and then I find out I had to go back and read it again because there’s so much in this book. This book is fantastic, really. I have a lot of things I could say, but I can’t even put it in words because it was so amazing. It really was.”