Writer's Voices

Fans of Hartnett’s may also notice her frequent use of fifth graders in a couple of her stories. “I love that age group as a fictional device because they’re at the cusp of…they know so much…They have this real internal struggle going on… they both want to be, kind of like all of us, we want to be babied but we’d also would like to be treated like adults. What I love about children in general is that they’re often, like, real experts in something…fifth graders just, they crack me up in a lot of ways, but they’re also very wise.”

One thing that I think that I’ve learned is that you don’t need a full day to write. You don’t need really any longer than an hour at a time to write. You just need scheduled time to write… it’s not that you need to write everyday. Having some sort of routine really helps creative people…So I have become a person who is super into scheduling my creative time.

Until one has loved an animal, a part of one’s soul remains unawakened.

In the novel, there’s a pivotal, opening scene where a young girl goes missing, which was inspired by an real event that happened in Winn’s own life. “So there is, in the book, there is a lake called Deer Chase Lake and 4-year-old Sally Baker, she and her family have moved from Boston to this small town of Hammend, and my main character Bee, she’s a rising seventh grader and her sister, Audrina. It’s summer of 1985 and they decide to go swimming at the local lake and that is where 4-year-old Sally Baker goes missing and the novel centers on really what happens in the aftermath of that…” Deer Chase Lake is loosely based on an actual lake named Sunrise Lake that Winn swam at when she was younger. “We were there one summer day in the 80’s and I resurfaced and I saw everybody exiting the lake and I wasn’t sure why. There was a lifeguard there but I hadn’t heard him blow the whistle…so I followed everyone out and there was this, kind of, a chaotic energy on the beach and I was trying to find my mom…she was standing with the lifeguard…he was literally grabbing little girls and saying ‘Is this her? Is this her?’ and then I realized that they had emptied the lake looking for me because my mom couldn’t find me because I was underwater… it was one of those memories, those visceral memories that you have in your childhood that are seared in you, and I just thought… in the aftermath, wouldn’t that be a great starting point for a story? Like, what if I or someone else had gone missing that day?”

Winn, who has a doctoral degree in nursing and worked as a staff nurse and a nurse practitioner for many years, drew heavily on her nursing experience for this book. For instance, there were several medical conditions that appeared throughout her novel that Winn had to research to learn how the condition would’ve been treated in the mid 1980’s. In addition, she relates to her characters as if they were her patients. “I kind of think of my characters like my patients and I think that the idea of character sketches is akin to almost like taking a patient’s medical history… I would like to think that I care for my characters like I care for my patients too.”

I grew up in the 80’s and the 90’s, so I didn’t grow up with Internet and all of that… I don’t know what it’s like to be an 11-year old in today’s world…it’s so different…I really wanted to strip away that and set something in a time without that and I loved the idea of controlling the suspense, like controlling the amount of information these kids received when Sally disappeared…it felt like I was able to slow down time.

Having written over 50 children’s books, Sutherland is no stranger to entertaining young audiences. Her favorite age group to write for is the middle grade range, from ages 8 to 12 or 10 to 15. “They’re the best age… I just love them. They’re like the best kids and I’m so happy right now because my children are there. They’re 10 and 12. They are so fun to hang out with. I just find them endlessly entertaining. I also feel like that’s when you can change the world… as the writer affecting those kids…in terms of shaping me as a person, most of that happened when I was a kid reading children’s books. They’re also just the best kids to meet… and ask you any kinds of questions with no fear!”

Starting out, Sutherland never imagined how successful she’d become. Her hope from the beginning was simply to write books that did well enough for her to continue writing more books. She also wanted to write books that made kids happy. “I think that’s why I write, is for those moments where you meet a kid and they’re like, ‘This is why I read, because I started with your books’ or ‘your books helped me through something that was stressful’ and so I feel that’s why I became a writer and then it’s just been this amazing experience to have the books succeed the way they have and get to meet more kids like that.”

If the sky could dream, it would dream of dragons.

Come not between the dragon and his wrath.

She also discusses her struggles with addiction early on, her path to becoming a writer, and the differences between writing a novel versus a memoir. “I could write fiction if I wanted to. I could push it into the realm of invention if that felt right, but it just almost never does. There is something about being bound to what happened… honestly, I think it is about boundaries in a way where it’s like, the limited nature of experience…pens me in artistically in a way that makes the writing a kind of puzzle, right? I can’t just invent my way out of a difficult thing. I have to work with what happened and I have to figure out how to make meaning out of what happened, and the side effect of that is that it gives me insight into my own experience, and however painful that is, it always feels worth it to me, it feels incredibly precious to me… and so I just can’t stop doing it.”

It’s not the most talented people that publish books. It’s the people who never give up.

It is not possible for girlhood to be represented wholly – girlhood is too vast and too individual an experience.

For Benoit, her own mother suffered from Alzheimer’s and passed away at the age of 85. Watching the disease steal her mother’s mind was very difficult for her and she decided she would honor her mother by being an advocate for Alzheimer’s research and sharing with others what her mother went through. Benoit recalls the day she came up with the idea for The Eighty-Year-Old Sorority Girls . “One particular day my mother was very confused…when I got home that night from being with her, I told my husband about it and I said to him, just in passing, ‘If I ever have Alzheimer’s, my mind is probably back in college and my sorority house,’ and that was where the light bulb went off and I thought, ‘I can do this! I could put a positive sorority story out into the world and fight those negative stereotypes of what sorority girls are and I can honor my mother and try to be an advocate for Alzheimer’s research.'”

There’s 5.5 million initiated sorority women in the United States. It’s a huge group of people, women, and I love that support network, and I love that business networking opportunity, and just the friendships and the relationships that come out of it.

In the conversation, Rouse also discussed why he writes under his grandmother’s pen name, his brother’s death at the age of seventeen, and using humor as a way to cope. He remarked, “I do believe in humor to, really, I think, you can write about serious topics and you can only preach at people and wag your finger so much… humor is a way to really, when you’re talking about things that are very tough to hear or very tough to remember, it’s a way to lift people, kind of, up out of that ditch and provide some levity and some clarity, and so I use it as kind of an after dinner drink… to let people out of how they’re feeling…a lot of the times it’s a way to bring people in, but it’s also a way to keep people at bay sometimes… My mother taught me a great deal about faith and resilience but also about the importance of humor and being able to laugh at yourself, and if you can’t do that, you’re not going to get very far in this world.”

I truly believe that it’s the minute moments in life that matter the most. You know, most of us aren’t going to scale Kilimanjaro or do anything like that. It’s just the tiny little things that unite us that are beautiful and painful and that’s what I like to write about.

Life is like the game. It isn’t just happenstance. You make decisions inning by inning. That decides the outcome.

Fremont also explained what drew her into writing about Lalique. “I was actually creating stories for my blog and I had written some other stuff. I was working on some other writing pieces and I had started to research for a novel about ancient Egypt and what happened was I had this dream one night about meeting this guy sitting in a chair behind a counter and he was talking to me…when I woke up, I’m like, ok, who was this guy? And then he appeared to me again in a dream three months later and he actually told me to promote him. I was to write a book and promote him…and then another six weeks and I was like, who is this guy and why is he haunting me? And then about eighteen months after the first dream, one of the people that I was researching in ancient Egypt was Thutmose III.. and one of the things that Thutmose did…what he would do is he’d bring back artisans to Egypt and then learn all their ways of stuff, how they made stuff, and so glass making really became elevated during that time…and I stumbled across Lalique’s picture on the Internet and it was exactly how I saw him in that first dream, the way he was dressed and sitting… I just figured out who this mystery man is and then ultimately, as I delved into get to know him, then he became the story, and Thutmose and his friends actually became another story.”

As far as seeing Lalique’s work, Fremont had initially planned a trip to Lisbon, Portugal, to the Gulbenkian Museum to see Lalique’s famous jewelry, but the trip was canceled due to COVID. Fortunately, she has plans to visit New York this fall, where she looks forward to experiencing New York’s fall colors with her husband and seeing all the deciduous trees there that she never gets to see in California. In addition, “we’re going to go to the Corning Museum of Glass. They have a rather large collection that was donated to them and so we’re going to go check those out.”

Almost all my stories have an animal. There are animal characters in my stories…. the other short stories, like I might have a cat or a dog. In Magician of Light , there’s actually a couple of dogs, a cat, and a horse, and they serve as characters too. They’re little entities in themselves. As a veterinarian, you know animals have personalities just like people do.

Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.

During the conversation, which was held prior to the overturning of Roe v. Wade, Stewart discussed one of the main agendas of the religious right, which is to ban abortions nationwide, and its serious repercussions. “This is something you don’t hear the so-called pro-life movement talk about, the anti-choice movement, talk about. They don’t talk about the fact that child birth and pregnancy is dangerous. I think it’s 10 to 15% of known pregnancies end in miscarriage and some number of those are going to require medical care, medical treatment, so that the women don’t get, or girls don’t get sepsis, or hemorrhage, or bleed out, or have some other health complications. In addition, women will die trying to self-abort or die in child birth as a consequence… there are all these complications in pregnancy that mandate miscarriage care or abortion care in order to save the woman’s life or health. This law is going to mean that women will die.” Stewart also shared her own personal story, going through a life-threatening miscarriage, in which she was able to receive a delayed abortion that ultimately saved her life.

Luckily for Stewart, the response regarding this book has been overwhelmingly positive. For many, this book spoke to them and helped them understand the political moment we’re facing. They felt comfortable sharing their personal stories, but like many, are deeply concerned about the effects of this movement. However, Stewart assures us that the religious right and those who follow the movement are only a minority of the population. “Those of us who reject their agenda are a majority and we really need to act like it. We need to vote as often as they do, if not more. We need to act in unity when necessary.”

…There are things we can do as individuals and things we can only do when we join together with others and look, you’ve got the most important one which is, not just, vote, but hold folks in your circle accountable to vote. I used to think of it as like a, kind of, plus one strategy…there’s no shortage of avenues for engagement.

We are strongest when we see the most vulnerable in our society, bear witness to their struggles, and then work to create systems to make it better.

When Clavin and Keith were planning and organizing the structure of the book, Keith suggested the idea of each author taking a captain and writing in the point of view of that captain, that ship and their crew, and that side of the war, and when they were done, they would then come together to merge the two parts. Initially, Clavin didn’t think that would work, but eventually decided to give it a try. He took the side of Raphael Semmes of the CSS Alabama , while Keith wrote from the point of view of John Winslow of the USS Kearsage . Clavin explained, “As the reader is reading the book, you’re getting the two different sides. The Kearsage is trying to chase down and sink the Alabama . So as this chase around the world is going on, you’re getting that perspective of each captain, and it’s also, not knowing necessarily, from each author…” When they had completed the story and turned in the manuscript, neither one mentioned to their editor that they had written the book in this way. Their editor’s response was, “You would never know. It fit together seamlessly enough. You would never know that each author was taking each side of the story.”

As far as original source materials, were they used in writing this historical nonfiction? Luckily, Keith and Clavin were able to include actual writings from these two captains of their adventures and experiences that could be drawn upon. Semmes, who had enjoyed writing, had written several books that were published during his lifetime, while John Winslow had written hundreds of letters to his wife over the course of his naval career that had survived. In addition, details from journals of junior officers from both sides were also integrated in the story. “We were fortunate, there’s quite a bit of what’s called contemporaneous sources to draw upon, the actual eye-witness accounts of people who were part of these adventures.”

…I didn’t see myself writing another book about Antietam or writing another book about Chickamauga or Shiloh or some of these more well-known battles. To me, they’d already been covered by very good writers very thoroughly, but when something like this came along that was a unique story about the greatest sea battle of the Civil War… look the only sea battle of the Civil War, so it couldn’t help but be the great[est], but it was a great one.

We must all either wear out or rust out every one of us. My choice is to wear out.

One of the critical parts of the story involves the authentication of a valuable painting, which Berry describes as a fairly new and intricate procedure. While it is not illegal to reproduce a painting in the style of the original artist, it is illegal to give false credit. So to determine if a painting is a forgery, it needs to go under scientific analysis. Berry had to understand this procedure well enough to incorporate the essentials in her story. She explains that since the testing of one of the first atomic bombs in the 1940’s, radioactive isotopes have been found in everything, from our bones to pigment, etc. Therefore, if traces of radioactive isotopes are found in paintings before that time, it would be a clue that the artwork is fraudulent.

As far as creating mystery novels, what is Berry’s writing process? “I have plot points that I know throughout the book, maybe major plot points. I don’t necessarily know how I’m going to get from point A to point B to point C to point D, so things sometimes change, and sometimes it’s unexpected to me when things change and then I have to go back and make sure everything lines up from what I’ve written before.” Berry’s books are even more complex because she delves into multiple time periods that have to intersect at some point to uncover the mystery. For her, the payoff is getting to revise her work and going back to fill in plot holes. However, “even with all that, there are in just about every book that you find there is some mistake there that somebody didn’t catch…”

It’s very difficult to have a perspective on your own writing. I can see things in their work and it often occurs to me, ‘Golly, I think I’m doing the same thing. I better go back and change it.’ “

My mother always told me, ‘Do the right thing and the right feelings will follow eventually.’