Writer's Voices

Throughout his long career, he’s published over 300 books. He remarked, “It’s a lot of work to bring a book into the world… People who don’t know me, they think that my lifelong passion is to have been a writer and it was, but there’s something about being a book publisher for other authors that has sort of brought out, I think it’s just a skill that I have… I feel it’s valuable.”

When asked how independent publishing has changed in the past 30 years, Steve said, “Thankfully the one thing that hasn’t changed for me is the production and creation of tangible objects, but there’s times that you feel like that might not be part of it anymore.”

If you were to say, ‘If you had a year left to live will you regret not having written another book?’ .. I would say yes, but I also won’t look back and say, ‘My god, you wasted 30 plus years helping other people be writers.’ I would never think that. I think that it’s probably one of the most exciting things that I’ve ever done is take ideas that come into me out of the blue and give people, like, sort of their goal or their dream come true.

During the conversation, he discussed the immense claustrophobia that comes with being paralyzed, journaling his progress throughout his nine-year recovery, and the lingering effects of his paralysis now. In order to push through recovery, he said, “I needed two words to never enter my brain, and those two words were ‘I can’t.’ So I wasn’t going to let that in either.”

His words of advice for those who have gone through a similar situation – “Your life is still worth something. You do have things to offer. Keep going with what you’re doing, no matter where it takes you. Stay positive with what you’re doing, and if you ever have the opportunity to help somebody, do so.” Additionally, “always take time to thank your caregivers and thank your therapists. It’s not an easy job for them to do what they’re doing and they do it for the love of the job and helping somebody else. You know, take time as often as you can and stop and look them in the eyes, and just stop everything going on, and thank them sincerely for everything that they do for you.”

There’s no instruction book for what I’m supposed to do now that I’m paralyzed. You know what? When you are able, you ought to write about this and talk to everybody about what you went through and maybe that would help them with what they’re going through.

Just because something happens that changes the course of your life does not mean it’s over. You can alter your course, create a new path, and live a brand new life. The only requirement of which is opening yourself up to your own imagination.

When describing his transition to writing, he thought, “I really liked the writing more than I liked the acting.” He also talks about the harshness of being critiqued by other writers, self-publishing his first novel, and his love for his late, beloved poodle.

Writers are really hard on writers, and for the most part, that’s a good thing because you’re not going to learn by being given soothing words of ‘oh that’s nice’, ‘that’s very nice’ when it’s not.

Time is too slow for those who wait, too swift for those who fear, too long for those who grieve, too short for those who rejoice, but for those who love, time is eternity.

To counter the serious tone, Sal entertained with lighter topics, including kayaking, Facebook, and sneezing dogs. He also described his travels to Cambodia and Vietnam while creating this collection. “I actually felt that I got a feel of the culture… you learn a lot. You learn culture to people.” One local remarked, “Right now, the people are happy… we’re the first generation in centuries that are not at war in Vietnam.”

It’s a title that sounds funny, Sneezing Coyotes, and it has almost a folk art cover to it and once we decided on the title and then we decided on the cover… like a folkart cover… and it gives the impression it’s going to be nice and happy and light and everything.

Poetry is a spontaneous overflow of powerful theories. It takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.

During this spirited discussion, Charlie goes on to talk about her passion for writing, her hobby as a song writer, and her personal difficulties in 2019. She remarked, “It’s ironic that this book revolves so much around light because it helped pull me out of the dark place. I’d gotten into the habit of running before walking and stretching too thin and it broke for me a bit in 2019.”

Her sequel to this novel is Star Father, which is available now. She is currently working on a historical novella for charity.

I always just felt like if I keep trying, I’m going to make it. Like, cause that’s how America works.

Love, Theodosia, Goldstein’s historical fiction debut, tells of the romance between Theodosia, the daughter of Aaron Burr and Phillip, the son of Alexander Hamilton. The idea for the story came to Goldstein while watching the musical, Hamilton, on Broadway. One of the songs, Dear Theodosia, is about the first-born children of notorious rivals, Burr and Hamilton, and became the inspiration for this love story. “The idea of a Romeo and Juliet story just popped into my head. You have these two rivals, you know, families, and they each had a child, a girl and a boy born less than a year, about a year apart and the idea of what would happen if those two developed, had a romance and it put their families at odds.”

In the course of the interview, Goldstein talked about what it was like to shift from writing young adult novels to adult historical fiction, the controversial presidential election of 1800, the lost letters between Aaron Burr and Theodosia, and the differences between politics then and now.

The better one is educated, the more they are right. A knowledge of books cannot replace a knowledge of light. Not that anyone with their wits about them would want it to.

During the conversation, Suman goes into detail about the historical events occurring during that time, the burning of Smyrna, her fondness for 100 year-old narrators, and her day job as a yoga instructor. When asked about whether she translates her own books to English, she commented, “Language is a very funny thing… you don’t translate word by word, you’re translating an energy of a sentence and that energy of the sentence you need a certain grammatical structure to give the energy… the time, the possibilities, a lot of things are hidden in the grammar that we don’t notice when we speak the language as a native speaker.”

“It really doesn’t matter how many books we read in one life; it does matter how many times we read a book that we really liked.”

“A library of books is the fairest garden in the world, and to walk there is an ecstasy.”

I knew I was really interested in turning points in American history, where I thought I knew the story of what happened but there was something else or at least more than one thing going on. I wanted to tell the story from the perspective of women.

In history, we wonder whose stories get told over time, who gets believed, and subsequently, who gets punished and we find out sometimes and sometimes we don’t.

Women’s history has been so neglected and it’s women historians that are often recovering these stories. That’s been really exciting as a reader, myself, but of course also as a novelist to see this renaissance blooming of history about women’s lives.

One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you’d be stricken blind. To live a visual life is an enormous undertaking, practically unattainable. I have only touched it, just touched it.

“With poetry and short fiction, you get to have some communication with the world, and some publication rewards, before the whole thing is done”

Recognize yourself in he and she who are not like you and me.