Writer's Voices

The initial idea for this book came from Thompson’s previous thoughts of social media and the content people post everyday, such as comments, photos, and stories. Sometimes what they think is a good idea to share ends up being a regret and they delete those photos and posts, in hopes that others will forget what they just divulged to the world. Thompson then went on to consider what if the opposite happened. He thought, “What if somebody just wanted to be remembered and they were unable to be because of something being, something that prevented that from happening and it just kept on happening, constantly, and that if it built up enough that they’re able to establish a bit of a life for themselves, across a year, and then it reset. I thought, ‘oh that sounds pretty tragic! That sounds like a pretty good story.’” While the book starts off quite grim and is filled with many heartbreaking moments, Thompson says, “It’s actually a very hopeful, very positive, very optimistic, kind of story… It is a love story, after all. This is the thing… love is the motivator, really. There is a lot of acceptance for what Tommy is going through and love is the thing that pushes him to go, ‘ok, I’m going to find a way around this. I’m gonna try and fix this,’ and that’s kind of where it all takes off.”

You can go from forty-two rejections and then end up in an auction for the rights for a book. Doesn’t that just show how subjective that is?”

As he’s creating poetry, Pollock often finds that working in solitude helps him focus solely on the words he’s assembling for each piece of writing. “For me, what’s most important is the words on a page. I look at it as word art and that’s the most important thing is to make the poem as good as possible, both on the page and off the page, when it’s spoken. So when I’m writing, you’ll also hear a lot of sounds coming out because I’m testing out what sounds good in the air… form is critically important to me… not only does form inspire me but it also, I find it paradoxically liberating. I come up with ideas that… I would’ve never thought of it if I was writing in free verse.” For Pollock, the significance of poetry in society is also more than just conveying artistic expression. He reflected, “I think it does provide insights into the human condition. I think poetry provides so many different perspectives on so many different topics that in a way, it also teaches empathy, and it helps us understand more about our world and about the nature of our existence. So it is an art form and it’s enjoyable and I love the beauty of it but also the craft of it, but it does, I think, have a role in society as well…”

There’s no safety net to fall back on [when writing free verse poetry]. It’s still important to have rhythm and cadence and to manage the tone, but all of that has to be created organically from scratch.”

You must have a certain amount of maturity to be a poet. Seldom do sixteen year-olds know themselves well enough.”

In her book, Cornwell also details her challenges battling an eating disorder. While the experience itself was difficult, writing about it was not. “It was easy to write about. I wanted to write about it. It was not difficult at all and I will say the reason is that I’m not ashamed of it. The reason that I did not get help for so long is I was ashamed and embarrassed and I felt like a failure, and what I learned through therapy was that… not only was I human, but I had overcome this really challenging obstacle in my life and so I’m proud of it… We all have issues in our lives… we’ve all been through things, and I guess that I, for some reason, there is no longer a stigma for me with having an eating disorder, and I think that it’s because I realized that we all have our own demons that we have to battle, but the question is, do you really take it on the right way and learn about yourself and, sort of, let that stigma go and be ok with who you are? …I was thinking while I wrote it of all the young girls who may be where I was when I was going through it and I wrote it with the intention of, I want them to be where I am one day because everybody can get there… realize that you’re not a failure. There’s nothing wrong with you. It’s just life…”

These days, Cronwell works for PGA Tour Entertainment as an announcer and feels very fortunate to work in the peaceful, productive environment that the company promotes. “…they’re living proof that in this, sort of, male-dominated environment… you can still have fairness and equality if you have the right people running the show, and so it’s been such a wonderful experience on the heels of what I experienced at Golf Channel that was the exact opposite. There was a lot of screaming, a lot of yelling, a lot of egos, a lot of tempers, and PGA Tour Entertainment, they don’t put up with it. They would rather sacrifice the product a little bit to create a good working environment and it’s really been a blessing for me. I’m very grateful for that.”

I’m ok with that part of who I am. In a way, I’m grateful that it happened because I don’t think that I would have this understanding that life is really hard and it’s ok to have stumbling blocks had I not gone through that.”

Being free from anger is a beautiful gift, but one that we can only give to ourselves.”

With over 100 published titles to her credit, Hill writes anywhere and any chance she gets. In addition to writing novels, she’s also an assistant professor at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn, New York, and with her busy schedule she has little time to sit down in one place for very long to just focus and write. “My writing routine sort of revolves around how I feel, where I am. I can write essentially anywhere. So, I can be on a bus going downtown and I’ll start writing… I was always a working mom and so I was going to work every day, coming home, and taking care of the kids and family, etc., so I would have to write when I could, and I would write late at night. I wrote Rooms of the Heart , my very first novel, going back and forth on the subway everyday. So I took a notebook, I wrote on my way to work, I would come home, I would write on my way home…I can write on the plane, in middle of a conference, whatever… it was just something that I’ve always been able to do.”

I write on my iPhone, I write on my laptop, I write on my desktop, I write on my iPad, I write on my notebook, I write on index cards, so my writing is chaotic. No one should follow what I do, but this is what works for me.”

Love is the human family’s most precious legacy, its richest bequest, its golden inheritance.”

Many of the other details in the story were also pulled from Milas’ real-life experiences as a Marine. While writing about that time in his life proved to be quite challenging, he found that incorporating the militia house within his story helped to ease some of the negativity and resentment he felt when writing about war. “I’ve struggled to not think about my experiences in the war, so all through college, I tried to write about the military… that work came through only as angry ranting. I was still too close to the experience… there’s something about being out of the military and having some distance between that and being in Afghanistan and, I guess, implementing gothic horror seemed to just give me enough distance to write about it in a way that… it really just tempered the, kind of, the ranting aspect that some of the earlier military writing I did… I guess adding this flavor, adding this genre into the mix with war writing, I think, also is a way that I convince myself that would be more compelling for readers…”

As for his future plans, Milas plans to continue writing but doesn’t anticipate pursuing it full time. With a BA and MFA in creative writing, he’d prefer to teach other aspiring writers. “I would like to teach writing because I think I derive a sense of purpose from working with people and helping people and it’s purposeful for me to write my own work, but I would like to supplement that with actually fostering the talent and efforts of younger writers and give back, honestly, the way that I came up as a young writer with all the people helping and guiding me. I think that would be really rewarding.” For now, he is content with discovering what life will be like after the release of this first novel. “Really, I want to write another book. That’s kind of what I’m thinking about. As an artist, you’re always most excited about the newest thing that you’re working on…”

When I write fiction, what I’m doing is putting a magnifying glass up to questions that I have.”

All war is a symptom of man’s failure as a thinking animal.”

For as long as she could remember, Turnbull was always a writer and storyteller. She recalled, “My parents would tell you that I was making up stories from the time I knew what stories were.” Never thinking writing was a career option, she resisted pursuing the craft for a long time and worked at a desk job instead. Eventually, with the encouragement of her parents, she finally decided to start her first book. “… I worked really hard and I was incredibly fortunate in that this book, my first book, got picked up and I’ve been writing ever since and I’m onto number four now that I’m working on it and I am so, so conscious of how incredibly fortunate that I am to be able to tell these stories of these characters that fascinate me…” Regarding her preferred genre, historical fiction, “one of the things that really draws me in… is the stories of women caught in the cracks of history… I really find myself drawn to that, drawn to being able to tell women’s stories and tell these stories of a historical time that we might think we know but from that different perspective.”

History, for the vast majority of a part of time, has been written by the victors, and the victors have been men, and I think historical fiction allows us an opportunity to insert women’s voices back into that historical record.”

One of the major issues with water pollution in Iowa occurred back in the 1970’s in Des Moines when high levels of nitrate were found in their water systems. Jones explained, “…So soybeans came in in the 60’s and displaced other crops… and so when soybeans came in, that intensified the production system and that also brought in commercial fertilizer, and so in the 70’s, the Safe Drinking Water Act was passed by Congress and signed by President Nixon in 1974 and nitrate was one of the original regulating parameters, and nitrate gets into the water from fertilizers being applied to corn primarily, and so in the mid-70’s Water Works saw that nitrate levels were increasing and sort of knew they had a problem then, but kind of had hoped it might go away, but it didn’t. During the 80’s, they violated the standard for nitrate multiple times and then had seen a consent decree from EPA and Iowa DNR that they had to construct nitrate removal treatment there… and they did that and they began removing nitrate in 1992… more than a generation ago we’ve had this problem in Des Moines and it’s still not resolved.” Since then, two new treatment plants have been constructed and development of shallow wells have helped to reduced the amount of of nitrate found in the river waters.

While the topics within the book may seem intricate and complex, most readers will find The Swine Republic not only educational, but quite entertaining, and the information told in a way that is easy to understand. Jones remarked, “That’s one of the issues that I think we have with solving this problem is that there’s a lot of complexity here, the confluence of politics and culture and science and economics and all that stuff… all of those are dense topics for most people, then you combine them all, then it becomes really intimidating to try to learn and so if we’re going to solve this, general audiences have to be engaged and to engage general audiences you’ve got to speak to them in a way that they’re going to enjoy being spoken to… I deliberately did try to write in ways that general audiences will enjoy.”

Problem isn’t that farmers are evil. The problem is they’re human beings and so they’re making decisions that many of us would make if we were presented with the same set of circumstances. What that means is we need policy change.”

We never know the worth of water till the well is dry.”

One of the motivations for writing this book came from Steiner’s curiosity of what someone’s life is like after a big event unfolds. “I’ve always been really interested in that idea of the after. That idea of after a lifelong dream is realized, what happens next? And so I knew I really wanted to tell, to look at, what was life like after the huge success of Anne of Green Gables and to explore what happens in Maud’s life that lead to this tragic end for this writer of such life-affirming characters to take her own life… I was so moved to really dive in and understand that question.” Regarding the structure of the novel, Steiner centered the events around the papers that Maud burned towards the end of her life. Steiner was intrigued with what would have been in those papers that Maud felt so compelled to burn and destroy. She wondered, “What would a famous writer have chosen to excise from her life record and really I’ve always wanted to know, what will really matter to me at the end of my life? What matters in the end? So I landed, after many edits and many iterations, on a structure that really centers around Maud burning papers of her life and having scenes that are most significant to her replay that are related to those papers that she’s burning.”

Although Maud wrote many other books, Anne of Green Gables is by far her best known work. Set in Prince Edward Island, Canada, the series chronicles Anne Shirley’s life beginning as an 11- year-old orphan and follows her journey into middle age. What does Steiner attribute Anne’s popularity and staying power to? She reflected, “Anne just has this vibrant openness about her and really saying what she means and also being so open with her emotions… she just has this enduring precociousness and verbosity, and is so much herself in the world, and I think there’s something in each of us that wants to be more that way… I also think that Maud had such a gift for relationships and so much of what endured readers to her to the Anne character were her relationships… the way she related to different people in a small town…that’s so much the appeal of Anne as well, which is about that sense of place.”

I had such a fondness and connection and Anne was such a big part of my childhood dreams, to write myself and to follow creative dreams.”

In her book, Dr. Braaten discusses the term “flexible goal” as a motivator for children to stay on track. Rather than settling on a fixed goal where one has to meet the goal within a certain time limit, a flexible goal eliminates the rigidity and allows an individual to adjust and make changes to the goal as circumstances change. She explained, “When I talk about goal setting, we tend to think in our culture that goals are a static sort of thing… so a flexible goal really plays into something of what we call a growth mindset and that’s a term that was coined by a psychologist and a researcher, Carol Dweck, who was interested in thinking out why some kids develop resiliency and some kids don’t… think about the fact that having a fixed mindset, thinking about a goal as being fixed, can often lead us to feel helpless because oftentimes we don’t meet our goal. It’s really common to set a goal that we don’t meet, at least not in the time that we expect to meet it…. So if you go through life thinking, ‘I set a goal, I didn’t meet it,’ [then] you don’t want to meet new goals. You also don’t ever reach the goals you set out to do. So having that kind of a mindset helps kids who are unmotivated because it helps them realize what they need in order to be more successful and that’s a way of helping us feel more empowered…”

Regardless of what obstacles our children face or how they deal with those challenges, Dr. Braaten wants parents to reflect on one final thought, “I think the one thing I would like them to think about is to love the child you have, not the child you wish you had, and that’s a really hard thing to do as a parent but I think a constant, ‘this is who they are, this is who I am and I love them for who they are’ is the best way to help them find the bliss and the pleasure and the motivation in their life.”

Does the goal need to change? Do I need to ask for help? All of those things help a child and even us as adults build in this growth mindset that use challenges as opportunities.”

Success is not final. Failure is not fatal. It’s the courage to continue that counts.”

Concerning the fake dating romance trope, Winstead reflected on how she was able to create a novel that stood out from others in the genre. “…I wanted to do something, try to make fake dating fresh and so… what that means to me is it’s going to be really high stakes. If Alexis and Logan… if they mess up or act unprofessionally or reveal that they’re not actually dating, it will have major repercussions not only for his campaign but the political future of Texas… To [Alexis] it’s a new adventure, an empowering, kind of zany, thing. She’s asking the universe to expand her horizons and it’s put Logan Arthur in her lap and this opportunity. So it’s a lot about Alexis’ development as a person and growing outside of her shell… but every dimension of it becomes real, not just her relationship with Logan, but her owning the political platform she chooses and becoming an advocate for herself and her colleagues, who, you know, educators… that was how I tried to make it fresh.”

Winstead, who initially set off writing murder mysteries and thrillers, eventually transitioned to writing romantic comedies during the pandemic. While she was working on her thriller, In My Dreams I Hold a Knife , she needed the catharsis of writing something sweet and light amidst all her dark emotions. She explained, “… With Fool Me Once , which was my debut romantic comedy, it was in middle of the pandemic and In My Dreams hadn’t come out yet, so I was sitting with a lot of pre-publication anxiety about how that was going to be received… and it was, again, in middle of lockdown and I needed to live mentally in a happy place with a guaranteed happy ending, a place where the tone was comedic and light and sunshine-y, so I started writing this book about this chaotic woman and her love story, and I was like, I’m pretty sure I’m writing a romantic comedy and this is going to be news to my agent and hopefully she doesn’t… kick me off her list or something for being so chaotic with my writing choices… Those books were what I needed at the time for myself and because they sold, they kind of set the path for my writing career now going forward.”

I do very deep character work, first and foremost, with using Story Genius by Lisa Cron. I’ve written all my books using that as prep.

Perfectionism is not a quest for the best. It is a pursuit of the worst in ourselves, the part that tells us that nothing we do will ever be good enough – that we should try again.”