Writer's Voices

Near the end of her life, Moreland’s mother was eventually moved into hospice care and then finally to memory care, where she eventually passed away. Moreland elaborated on her misconceptions of hospice and how much hospice care helped her and her mom feel at ease when the disease became a struggle to manage. “I always thought hospice was only when you’re on death’s door, but what I learned with Alzheimer’s, you can actually qualify for hospice before that and in fact, a lot of people who lived on her floor had been on hospice for awhile… when hospice finally came in… they just came in with so much knowledge and advice and hospice is also not only for the person who’s ill, but it’s also for the others too and they were very helpful to me…[my mother] stopped eating, she stopped drinking, I didn’t really understand what was going on with the body… but they were very helpful in explaining to me what was going on, what to expect, how to make her most comfortable. “

Things that would have been helpful for me to know, and that is how I came up with the themes because I thought, ‘What would the younger Mary Moreland, like, what would be very helpful for her?'”

I would advise everyone to have this book in your personal collection because it’s a great reference with information and sources about Alzheimer’s. Alzheimer’s can impact any family so you need to know about these things. So just get this book, ok?”

Considered a crossover novelist, Sepetys’ books are enjoyed by a wide range of readers. Her goal for this book, therefore, was for it to be accessible and user-friendly to her readership, including those who don’t necessarily know that they have a story to tell. “So the structure is very simple… the chapters break down the building blocks of story – plot, character development, voice, perspective, setting, dialogue, research, revision and input, and then there’s a chapter on creative courage, and in each chapter, in addition to a recap at the end of the chapter, there are writing prompts and there are, there’s a section, a page called “Stories to Uncover and Discover” …I’m hoping that if the reader doesn’t know what the answer is to something I’m asking in the Discover and Uncover, that they’ll research it. So that’s kind of how the way the book is put together.”

Sepetys, who has presented to NATO, The Library of Congress, European Parliament, and Embassies worldwide, firmly believes that if we each took the time to learn more about one another, to listen to each other’s stories, then we would have more unified communities and stronger human connections. She explained, “What I’m speaking to them about is that knowledge of story facilitates human understanding. If we don’t know each other’s story, we’re constantly misjudging each other…Think about how much progress we could make if we know, if you have a better sense of one another, how we might be able to bridge the width between us as countries, as community members, so that’s also part of the inspiration for writing You: The Story …I truly believe that people want to be compassionate, but sometimes they just, they don’t know the story… Maybe we wouldn’t be frightened of people wandering into our yard. We would know one another! It would make our community safer, and more compassionate, and more supportive, so this is what can happen if we share our story.”

Conflict creates friction in a story. It not only moves the story forward, but it deepens the story and pulls the reader to the page and keeps them there.”

A day is a story. A year is a story. A life is a story. You are a story.

Set during an age when women were reputed to have very little power, there were, surprisingly, other female leaders ruling during this period of time. Puhak remarked, “I’m really surprised to find out that there are all of these female political leaders in the 6th century. So there are six female heads of state ruling at the same time during the so-called Dark Ages… this is a real high point for female political power but also for every female at the top. We get this glimpse of all of these women just below the surface. So we have not just these other powerful queens that are advising them and positioning them, but all of these other women that are… business owners and healers and we have women taking one another and men to court and suing them, we have women engaged in political plots, we have nuns participating in armed rebellion. So I was really heartened to see the degree of cooperation and support between women and these networks that they were able to build even in this time period…”

This is essentially a story of one failed project, for all the writers out there, leading to another project and sometimes you don’t know what is ceding the next success.

Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition.

The idea for Making Art in Prison came after Paul met Alexander and decided to move to Michigan to be with him. “I actually had the thought, previous to meeting Buzz, that I wanted to do some kind of work in prisons. I had spent most of my adult life teaching art to marginalized people …and I moved to Michigan and he had just founded the Prison Creative Arts Project, which is a project at the University of Michigan that sends faculty and students into prisons to do arts workshops… he said, ‘Let’s organize a show, an exhibit of art from Michigan prisons,’ so we did and it was an amazing experience. We just went to prisons locally …we met with the artists and we were kind of mind-blown at the talent that we saw and we organized an exhibit and it was very successful here. People loved it and so we decided to do it again and then it became The Annual Exhibition of Artists in Michigan Prisons… and now we’re going into our twenty-eighth year, so this exhibition has become a major phenomenon in the state prison system and in our community here and is well known around the country.”

To these incarcerated artists, art is so much more than a hobby. It’s a way to find hope when their future seems bleak. Paul remarked, “What I’ve come to see is that it’s a way of creating meaning and purpose for people who are locked up, either for five years or for a life sentence or anywhere in between. …if you’re making art there’s always possibility for the future…” Moreover, “[The Annual Exhibitions of Artists in Michigan Prisons is] not only an exhibit… one of our goals is to really support the growth, personal and artistic growth, of incarcerated artists and the other goal is to bring the work out into the world so that we humanize incarcerated people for people who come to the exhibit and they start to say, ‘Wow, this is amazing! These people are so talented! Who are these people that are in prison?’ We can start dialogues and conversations about why the United States is the most incarcerated country in the world, and what can we do about it, and what should we be doing about it.”

The very act of making a painting or drawing or sculpture involves so much freedom.

While it may seem as if creating a 72-year-old protagonist is unconventional, Keller needed someone who was elderly and also knowledgeable about medicine. She remarked, “I wanted to write a morally complicated character and I was interested in the idea of somebody who just has had to swallow the mundane injustices of the world, as we all do, and gets to a certain point [and] just says, you know, she acts on perhaps her worst impulse but it’s informed by a fundamental anger at people in power getting away with stuff, especially in the case of… the villain in this book, who kind of pose as these morally upright people full of rectitude and, sort of, pomposity, but never really stop to examine the wider repercussions of their actions. It struck me wanting to have somebody who might step outside this straight and narrow… I had to make her alive on the page and also make it believable that she would do this and having done it, make it still forgivable, that you’re still in her corner… they also have to be less fearful of consequences… the situation of older people in this culture, they’re kind of invisible… so Frannie realizes that in that invisibility… there’s freedom, and also Frannie’s like, ‘I’m not likely to get caught because who’s going to look at me? Who’s going to suspect me?’ …in some ways, the stakes are different for her.”

A stone thrown in a pond, the person throwing the stone only sees a little bit of what happens and I really wanted to explore the idea of culpability for all of your actions.”

Similarly to Aster, Sherbrooke’s mother also left Hollywood, divorced and with a young child. As she was writing this book, Sherbrooke was intrigued by the idea of how differently her mom’s and sister’s lives might have been if her mom had continued down her own artistic path. “My mother came back from Hollywood, a divorcee with a young daughter, which was pretty scandalous at the time and then met my father… The second part of the book, the 1970’s timeline, I wanted to reimagine what might’ve become of my mother and my sister had my mother not remarried and had a whole second family… my mother… I think she could’ve had many careers in the creative world, became a full-time homemaker and so part of the creative launchpad for me was what and whom might she have become had she not remarried and also for my sister, who was quite a bit older than the rest of us and always felt like a little bit of an appendage to our family, what life might have been like for her had she and my mom just remained a duo, kind of focused on each other and supporting each other and so that was sort of my creative launchpad for the second part of the book.”

Something that runs through all my fiction is this idea of strong women who are swimming upstream but not willing to give up on finding their place in the world.

As Selah later discovers, she is neurodivergent, a term used to describe people whose brains process information in an atypical way. Once she learns that, she is able to accept, manage, and celebrate the differences she often struggles with. Kuyatt explains that autism, a condition within the neurodivergent realm, can often be misdiagnosed, especially in females. Certain behaviors, such as picky eating or sensory sensitivities, tend to be diagnosed with other things, including ADHD, social anxiety disorder, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder, among other things. According to Kuyatt, “There are a lot of misdiagnoses that can happen. In part because there is just still so much we are learning about how brains work and a lot of these categories have a lot of overlap…” As a society, we tend to group people by normal and not normal and a lot of stigma is attached to those individuals who deviate from what’s considered normal. Kuyatt remarked, “I think it would do such a load of good if we tried to complexify that a little bit more and not just have those categories because I think it puts a lot of people into a fear of having to try to fit a normal mold. It’s just not sustainable and doesn’t work for them.”

Going forward, it’s Kuyatt’s hope that Good Different will not only be enjoyed by a wide range of readers, but can also function in schools and classrooms. There are a variety of ways her book can be used for teaching. For instance, Kuyatt suggests using it as a creative writing tool or as a launching pad for students to write their own stories. It can also be utilized in book discussions to learn about and examine neurodiversity. Moreover, it can help to encourage students to step outside of their comfort zone and write their own poetry. “We have all these weird preconceptions about what poetry is and I love when we can open that up… students can see that poetry can be for me. Poetry can be a way that I can process the world around me. I can reflect, I can slow down, I can discover. Like, it is such a cool tool… somehow we have set this message that [poetry has] to have all these complicated meanings. It’s like a puzzle and it shouldn’t be a puzzle… It can be whatever you want it to be.”

I think it’s beautiful that we have all these different types of brains and these different ways we can contribute to the world.”

Mom, why do we have to care so much about normal?

For Nuila, listening to patients’ stories goes hand in hand with being a physician. “Medicine gives these moments with people, these precious moments with people where there’s an honesty that occurs often with patients. There’s a vulnerability that is revealed and hopefully you can reciprocate, you know, your own vulnerabilities with patients and forging that trust. That’s really precious and special and I think it really helps with the understanding of these stories and the desire to depict them.” In addition, he wanted those intimate portraits of his patients to help move the story along and keep the audience captivated. He remarked, “I feel like the stories were the foundation. The initial thought was, ‘I just want to write patient stories and I want to write these stories about people that have not been told before. We don’t know how hard it is for some of these people to live and to get through life and to find healthcare.”

I feel like a writer who happens to practice medicine and I can write about other things, but medicine is very, especially in America, is very captivating.

If someone is suffering and there is a capacity within the community to help in a way that doesn’t harm anyone else, then we not only owe it to that person we also owe it to ourselves to help.

Regarding the women, Zernike remarked, “I’d always remembered these women and what they taught me… and because my father was a scientist, my grandfather was, that whole side of the family, they’re deeply invested in physics and math, this was really a labor of love for me. This book took me… I started reporting in January 2018 and I finished in January of 2022… I really felt like I stewed in this, I marinated in it… So I really felt like I wanted to do these women justice. I wanted to do the science justice…” Additionally, “I thought that if I could tell this intimate story of what it’s like to live with this on a day-to-day basis, as these women did, that I could, sort of, contribute to the larger conversation about discrimination against women and what it looks like now in the 21st century.”

So I really wanted people to understand that science can be thrilling and that that’s what drove all of these women was this thrill of science, really voracious curiosity.

If you know you are on the right track, if you have this inner knowledge, then nobody can turn you off… no matter what they say.

For those unfamiliar with cozy mysteries, the genre of A Midsummer’s Night Scheme , Kincaid explains, “So cozy mysteries, the… Cliffs Notes or SparkNotes version, is an amateur heroine sleuth, although it can be a hero, an amateur sleuth who has wonderful, almost cottage core hobbies, solves mysteries in their spare time and there’s no sex on the page, no violence, no profanity.” While some cozies are very sweet and charming, others, like her books, push the boundaries… “we’re still abiding by the rules, but we’re going as close to the edge as we possibly can. We just want to play with it a little bit, but it’s still cozies.” Although Kincaid initially started out as a romance author, she eventually shifted to writing mysteries. Luckily for her, she found a supportive publisher in Crooked Lane, a publishing house that specializes in suspense, mystery, and thrillers. “Crooked Lane, within the cozy mystery community, is very well-respected. I mean, there’s a few houses who are known for taking care of them and so this is one of them…. They were willing to take a chance on me because I was not a mystery writer, I was a romance writer… and we’ve been growing together and they fostered my career, which I really appreciate and they loved it from the start… that’s how I found them and they found me and it’s been a really happy marriage so far.”

I really became entranced by, first of all, just as a writer the idea of restraint and yet still being just as effective.

The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together.