Writer's Voices

As he was doing his research, Hobbs decided to focus on juvenile detention centers in three different cities – Wilmington, San Francisco, and Manhattan. First, he chose Wilmington, Delaware, because of the familiarity of growing up near there. “I think Wilmington, Delaware… it’s Delaware so obviously it’s small, but I just know from personal experiences… I would say it’s a small city, but the problems of the city, of Wilmington, Delaware, are America’s problems…” Next, he turned his attention to San Francisco. “The reason I chose San Francisco… A is because of the contrast between San Francisco being one of the wealthiest, prettiest cities in America… and then literally on top of the city, on the top of a hill in the Twin Peaks neighborhood, you have their juvenile hall, and if you’re in the waiting room you can look down across the neighborhoods and the Golden Gate Bridge and see the bay and it’s gorgeous and yet, you’re in jail. I thought that contrast was really… troubling, I guess… If you try to put yourself in the shoes of a kid walking across the bridge between the courthouse and the juvenile hall in shackles and looking out the window and seeing all this below him, I just thought that must be an extreme version of that experience.” In the last section of his book, he puts a spotlight on a life skills/professional skills program in Manhattan for kids who have just come out of locked facilities. This detention center serves as a transition program to help kids adjust as they return back to their normal lives. Programs here include practicing for internships, learning computer and interview skills, and acquiring other essential knowledge needed for the real world.

Although Hobbs has written fiction books before, he plans to continue writing nonfiction. So far, he’s completed three nonfiction books with a fourth on the way. While many of his stories are hard to tell and rarely have happy endings, it’s the personal relationships he builds that inspires him to continue the work he does. “I just love it… I just love being with people and sitting on porches and in cars and just taking walks and learning people’s stories and always being the person who knows the least and just learning… I just love it.”

The intention is just to describe people who are living and working in systems that they had nothing to do with designing and they’re just trying to do their best to do a decent job.

Let your hopes, not your hurts, shape your future.

As a native of Chicago, Clark plans to continue writing stories set in the Windy City. Every location she uses in her novels are all places she’s walked through and is familiar with. “I’ve walked the streets… I know what it smells like down there because I’ve smelled it for twenty-some years. So it’s good to know the streets that you’re writing about. It’s not necessary, but it lends a level of authenticity and reality that you can’t get from just sitting at your writing desk and figuring out or imagining what it might look like and smell like… It’s all real, it’s all Chicago, and it’s all gritty.” She also doesn’t anticipate setting her books in another location until farther down the road. For her, Chicago is suitable for all the mysteries that happen in her stories because of the long history of crime and corruption that has occurred there. “We’ve had gangsters, we’ve had Al Capone. We’ve had gangsters in politics. I mean, the last four governors of ours have gone to prison for corruption. Everything happens in Chicago. There’s nothing, crime-wise, that we do not know about, so to find a crime story in my city, which is, sort of, inundated with crime, built into the brick of the foundations of our city here, I don’t have to look far. But on the opposite side of that, we have the most wonderful people here too. We have seventy-something neighborhoods, each one is different, each one is vibrant. It smells different, it sounds different, it has a different movement… All of that stuff, juxtaposition… Chicago is where I live. This is the city I know. I can find a million stories to tell here. When I run out of that million, then I’ll consider someplace else.”

When I got to the point where I realized that books were things that people did and that maybe I could do it too, that’s all I could think about. So I wanted to write the kinds of things that I enjoyed watching and reading with my old folks and so I gravitated to crime fiction and mysteries and stuff like that. So that’s my niche. That was my drive and I just kept at it until I got good enough at it to get somewhere and that took years. I’d like to say I’m an overnight success that took more than twenty years…”

If you live long enough, you see everything at least once.

As a writer, Regan found that being relatable, genuine, and real helps her connect emotionally to her readers. “You know, writers don’t write books to make money. If you set out with that intention, you’re not going to land with anyone. What I’ve discovered is that…the more intimately you can allow yourself to be seen and the more specific you are to your own story, the more it lands with the people who read it, and that has been such an amazing, magical learning for me and it’s connected me to my readers in such a beautiful way… if people do reach out and get this book, I really want to say I would love for you to reach out to me either through social media or through my website, nancyregan.ca , and talk to me about what your reaction to the book or how it landed with you…” Regan also pointed out that she deliberately wore Converse sneakers on the cover of her book because she felt her story was was about “starting a ‘Converse’-ation.’ It’s the intention. I wanted them on the cover because my intention was to connect with other human beings and to make us all feel like, you know what, we’re all going through this adventure together. So many of us are feeling those insecurities and doubts and if we could all just say, ‘hey, we’re in this together. Let’s have fun and be in the joy,’ and as I say to my kids when they leave the house or when I finish a conversation with them, I like to say, ‘have fun, stay safe, be LOVE.'”

I know myself much better now than I did when I started writing the book and I would encourage every listener out there to just think about putting your pen to paper whether or not anyone ever sees it.

Comparison is the thief of joy.

Luckily for Taylor, she had extraordinary teachers who saw something remarkable in her and were there to provide her with what she needed. “They gave me everything from Mark Twain and Hemingway and William Ernest Henley to Margaret Walker and James Baldwin and these literary icons, Nikki Giovanni. They gave me all of these things and when I had absorbed that they gave me more. So I was receiving an education that I don’t think many of my peers [were] getting. For some reason I had been plucked out as something special.” Later in life, she was able to use the writing she learned from those teachers to help her through deep-rooted, recurring trauma and depression. “[I could] write a new essay and sell it to a local magazine, write a new press release and sell public relation services to a local company. I was able to write myself out of trouble more often than not and it was because of the basic competency that I’d been given in middle school that never left me and… I’ve built an entire career off of that. So I’ve been on MSNBC, and CNN, and NBC News and places that I could not have imagined for myself as a child and today I’m Chief Communications Officer at a world-renowned cancer institute where I work alongside heroes every day. I would not be here but for the diversity of those perspectives that I received…”

“Sometimes we’re capturing people at their very worst moments. It’s easy to forget what was good about them, what was loving about them. I didn’t want to miss that in this book.”

Trauma in a person decontextualized over time looks like personality. Trauma in a family decontextualized over time looks like family traits. Trauma in a people decontextualized over time looks like culture.

For McLeese, Alcoholics Anonymous was incredibly instrumental in helping him through his recovery process. Part of the reason he told his story was for others going through the same issues to know what to expect when participating in the program. “It’s just more a helping hand and empathy… Within AA, you were encouraged to not judge people by how they dressed, how they talked, what they’d been through, you know, to recognize that we’re all there because we had some sort of drinking problem, some sort of living problem, and the connection we make as part of the human condition… that we’re looking for something outside of ourselves to complete ourselves, to make ourselves whole, and just the sharing… I think that until one goes to AA, it’s anonymous, you’re not supposed to talk about it. It’s a secret society or somewhat and so most people don’t really know anything more about it than what I knew… this is kind of my way of taking somebody who was in the same position that I was and saying, ‘It’s ok, let me bring [you] in. Let me show you what it’s like. You can decide for yourself whether you want to hang around or not. Nobody is going to make you do anything or say anything or believe anything or whatever, but you might find some answers here. I did.'”

I really think that as human beings we are all in some way broken. We have this emptiness inside. I spent a lot of my time…trying to fill that hole with alcohol and not realizing that I was just digging the hole deeper [and] that every drink just contributed to filling that hole.

Please release me of the bondage of myself.

For Wilson, switching from historical romance to contemporary romance was a natural transition of her progression as a writer. “When I looked at doing indie books, I did a couple of indie books, and they were YA and they were contemporary, and it was because, literally, this heroine showed up in my head and would not stop talking and, like, she’s so funny and I loved her and I’m like, this is hilarious, I have to write this down. I would get up and just write it down, whatever I was hearing and I really enjoyed it. I thought this was very different than what I normally do, but you know, let’s see what happens and I had a lot of writer friends who read it and I had one of them come back to me and she’s like, ‘Sariah, this is your voice. I like your other books, but this is something special. This is where you need to put your focus.'” With the encouragement of her friends and the ease she felt in writing in this particular voice, she made the switch to first person, contemporary romance, and has written twenty books in the genre since.

Concerning romance novels, Wilson explains why their characters often feel the hesitation in revealing their true emotions to the one they love or yearn for. While it can be frustrating to the reader, it’s also what makes the characters real and relatable. “It’s the push and pull in romance novels and people say that it’s very logical, but then we take it to our real lives and how often have we done that in our real lives? That we have stayed quiet because we’re embarrassed and we’re afraid of rejection and I think it’s very human and very honest to actually do that and it’s easy to step back and look at someone else and say, ‘Well, you should just tell him,’ because your heart’s not involved. You don’t have, you know, a dog in the fight so… but I think when it is you, I think it feels differently.”

I was kind of praying about it and meditating on it and ‘what do I do, how do I get this money? What can I do to help my son?’ There was a very clear answer… it was, write a book. I’m like, ‘Well, that’s stupid. I’m not going to do that.’

There is a song, ‘Love is a Many-Splendored Thing,’ and I think this book illustrates that completely.

Although he worked in technology, Riedel always wanted to be a writer, starting from a young age. In college, he decided to attend his first fiction workshops and began completing short stories and from that point on, he wrote anytime and anywhere he had the chance. At the time, a lot of his writing had magical/realist elements, but as he moved into the tech world, he became surrounded by people who were trying to invent the future and constantly asking “what is this” questions. “That time I spent working after college really influenced my fiction and made it more speculative, more sci-fi in that there is invented technology… so like, having a dating app in my novel is a way for me to experiment with inventing my own app but also finding a really straightforward way to say like, ‘Hey, how can we bring two people together in real life?”

My background in technology is, ‘How do we use technology, like apps or social networks, to bring people together?’ I’m really interested in exploring that in my fiction as well.

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.

Before taking on detective mysteries, Bleiweiss had a full-fledged career in music and he explained how he transitioned from one creative outlet to another. “I’ve written in one shape or form or another most of my life… for my bachelor’s degree, I studied filmmaking so I was writing scripts for my student films and then even while I was in the music industry producing records… I still liked writing and I did nonfiction writing. I wrote some magazine articles, some newspaper articles, music and other things… After I retired from the music industry in 2002, and I moved from New York City to this small rural area of Ashland, Oregon, I started writing columns for a local news magazine, but again, it was all nonfiction. What really drew me into writing novels was when I moved to Ashland, my next door neighbor was a poet and we became friends and she told me one day early on, she said, ‘You know, I’m in a writing group here… and I think you’d like the people who are in the group. I think they’d like you and maybe it’ll stir your creative juices to be around other people who are writing… and so I joined the group and it totally got my juices flowing… and I started writing fiction and that’s how it started.”

For Bleiweiss, the excitement of going after a story has always been part of the allure and challenge he sought out as an author. “One of the things that has kind of defined my life is chasing the pot of gold at the end of rainbows. I’ve done that my whole life. I get bored easily so, you know, I love doing that so even though I was working in what I’d called regular jobs, I was still doing independent ventures and I always found that the chase was more exciting than when I found the pot of gold or didn’t, and I found the pot of gold sometimes and I didn’t others but I loved the chase and writing to me is part of that chase. Especially now that I’m older, and it’s ‘ok, I’m still chasing another rainbow…'”

I sit down at my computer keyboard and the book plays out in my head like a movie and my job is to sit there and capture what I’m seeing play out.

It has always been my belief that you should treat everyday of your life, today for example, the same as you would a goodly amount of money that you unexpectedly received. Enjoy it and spend it wisely.

For Baldwin, writing was not only a cathartic release from her past, it also became her passion. Whether it’s telling stories through magazines, documentary film production, or writing novels, “Writing is something I do… it’s one of those things, not unlike painting… where I can lose all track of time and I just, I find that I love it. I love getting lost in a story and I feel, what’s funny is, even if I haven’t had any measurable success as defined by the outside world or anything like that, everyday I’ve ever spent writing I have felt unbelievably productive at the end of it.” Furthermore, “Part of the beautiful thing about storytelling in general is that it illuminates the plight of humanity… Different circumstances, we’re illuminating the human experience from different points of view.”

“One of the things that is important to know in the story…we see this with Pearl. It’s not about that she loses the weight…Yes, the weight is important, but it’s about her realizing she’s worth it and it’s about the power that comes from knowing we’re all just one decision away from a totally different life, and that is the real message… Whatever our vice, I mean, we can make one choice right now and our life can be transformed and that’s a story that anyone can relate to…”

Dreams are the seeds of change. Nothing ever grows without a seed, and nothing ever changes without a dream.

At the age of 13, Cupolo was diagnosed with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis and while this kept her from participating in many things, it did have a great influence on her writing. “So I had, a really, a lot of time alone, a lot of time for introspection and before that I’d been an athlete and had no sense of writer… I mean, my family read books but it wasn’t a literary house, and so I didn’t have anything to do all day so I did start to read a lot… and then I started to go to library more and get more into reading and so what it made me do was to be an observer of people, more than anything else, because I had to sit out… I sat out at a lot of life during my teens and also in my 20’s, although I was lucky enough to travel but I learned to look at people in a different way and I think that’s what illness does…so that really shaped me as a writer and I was able to, kind of, have empathy for other people and see what they were struggling with because everybody is struggling with something.”

When putting together her collection, Cupolo chose pieces based on a range of stories. Initially when she was first signing her book to agents, they described her stories as too different from one another, but it was those differences that ultimately made her book unique to her audience. “There are a lot of women characters and a lot of locations but I kind of liked that. I liked that it was.. I don’t have the same story that I’m trying to tell over and over again.” Additionally, her decision to write short stories over novels came from her preference for those small moments in one’s life that can create a huge impact. “I like vignettes of people in their lives and people taking one direction or another and I’m always fascinated by the choices we make that shape the rest of our lives… I really love the craft of a short story, and novels you can be a little bit more expansive, I guess, and as a writer… they’re very staccato in the delivery… so you get the shape of it very quickly and you get the trouble very quickly because it’s very important to get trouble straightaway in the story.”

Writing’s always been… It’s really like a, for me, a spiritual practice, right? It’s writing my pages in the morning about what I’m really thinking, feeling, what’s on my heart, but then transitioning into a character that I’m thinking about… It’s a real privilege to be a writer, right? You really are lucky to write and spend the time doing it.

Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place.