Writer's Voices

In The Subtle Art of Folding Space, metaphysical science fiction writer and microprocessor architect John Chu presents his debut novel about Ellie, a young Chinese girl, whose mother is in a coma while her sister, Chris, who is caring for their mother, is also trying to assassinate Ellie on a regular basis. According to Chu, Read More

In "The Subtle Art of Folding Space," metaphysical science fiction writer and microprocessor architect John Chu presents his debut novel about Ellie, a young Chinese girl whose mother lies in a coma while her sister Chris tries to assassinate her on a regular basis. As he explained, "Every universe has something called the skunkworks that generates the physics of that universe... at the start of my novel, my main character, Ellie, she's not in a great place... it turns out that weird things are happening in the universe... She has to go into the skunkworks to figure out what is happening and she finds a device that is intended to keep her mother alive... while it might be keeping her mother alive, it's also causing other weird things to happen in the universe... she removes this device and in doing so she sets off a chain of events that is going to have to force her to confront her past... and at the end of the day, she has to decide between honoring her mother's final wishes or saving the universe."

In terms of his writing process, Chu took an unconventional approach to crafting this novel. Rather than outlining before he began writing, he created the outline only after completing the manuscript. He elaborated, "A bunch of writers whom I love and admire have talked about this, but I wrote the novel and then I outlined it to see, well, did I get everything? Is there anything missing? And then I rework the novel to some extent based on the outline, but the novel came first." As for his success in short fiction, he is uncertain whether it helped him find his publisher. He remarked, "A certain amount of short fiction success doesn't guarantee a sale. I mean, I don't think it hurt, but I don't know how much it helped and I will point out that plenty of people sell novels without having a short fiction track record."

In Two Truths and a Lie, former reporter and award-winning author Mark Stevens delivers a gripping crime thriller that follows journalist Flynn Martin as she pursues a killer copying the crimes of PDQ, a serial killer she helped put in prison in her previous book, No Lie Lasts Forever. Set in Denver, this novel is Read More

In "Two Truths and a Lie," former reporter, television news producer, and crime fiction novelist Mark Stevens delivers a gripping thriller that follows journalist Flynn Martin as she pursues a killer copying the crimes of PDQ, a serial killer she helped put in prison in her previous book, "No Lie Lasts Forever." This time around, Flynn is investigating a new mystery involving the disappearance of a family of four and their connection to New Hope Church. With regards to creating his characters, Stevens has been known to feature strong female protagonists in his books. In addition to this series, he also writes about a female hunting guide in his Allison Coil Mystery series. "I think it's my job to get any human being right on the page. Sure, it's daunting to write across gender, there's no question, and if you're featuring the opposite gender, you've got to do your homework... trying to understand your specific character and her background and her point of view and what she's trying to accomplish in the world and all that stuff that creates a character... and we all write about everybody, it's a matter of who you're featuring."

Concerning his transition from reporter to crime novelist, Stevens recalled that his interest in the genre sparked when someone handed him his first mystery novel. From that point on, he focused mainly on writing crime fiction, with the exception of one baseball novel. He remarked, "I'd been reading fiction for years, but somebody finally handed me a mystery and it just opened up this whole world to me and I started consuming mysteries at a very rapid pace... and I thought, this is an interesting format because there's a beginning, a middle, and an end... so I started writing. It took me a long time to get published, but I just kind of just kept at it for twenty plus years until I got published and knowing, as I continued to write, that crime fiction was my... I loved crime fiction. I just loved all the varieties of it."

After reading her novel, Meeropol hopes readers will become more mindful of the changes affecting our environment. “…I want people to think about what’s happening with the environment, I want people to think about migration and immigration and what it means that people all around the world are fleeing their homes not only because of climate change, but also because of famine and drought and hunger and war and violence, and these are big things in our world today… so I hope people will consider them, but I think that what fiction does best is to help us feel empathy for lives very different from our own, to help us see things from a different perspective, and that’s what I try to accomplish in my books.”

‘The way to write a novel was to jump off a cliff and develop wings on the way down,’ so I write the first draft essentially to discover the story.” -referencing Kurt Vonnegut’s strategy for writing fiction

Twenty-five years ago people could be excused for not knowing much, or doing much, about climate change. Today we have no excuse.”

Geared toward students in grade 5 through high school, Cochrane hopes the book will spark readers’ curiosity about science and deepen their understanding of the natural world. She remarked, “I think in this world where, in this current environment… it’s important to let children understand how to go about forming fact-based opinion and learning truth about the world around us. To help that happen I am developing lesson plans that I will provide for free on my website, and teachers are more than welcome to download them and use this book either in science classes or in English classes. I taught… one of my most enjoyable ones when I was a teacher was teaching English language learners and this book also adapts really well for the English language learner, and it’s told pretty much in the present tense and it is very accessible with vocabulary and structure for the English learner.”

A seventeen-year-old girl in an airplane over the Amazon that was struck by lightning and she was thrown two miles in the air above the jungle strapped to her seat.”

We don’t even know how strong we are until we are forced to bring that hidden strength forward. In times of tragedy, of war, of necessity, people do amazing things. The human capacity for survival and renewal is awesome.”

While Harman’s book centers on the changes many of Earth’s creatures experience, he believes their transformations also help humans make sense of their own development. He remarked, “…we do science… to find what we call truth, but we also do science to encounter metaphors in nature and in the universe that help us explain ourselves to ourselves and one of the… underlying themes of this book is that by looking at all of the wonderful examples of change in nature we can learn something about ourselves… We’re all connected on a tree of life, and while we have hoped to separate ourselves from the rest it’s actually a good idea to remember that we’re all on the same tree.”

It’s extremely expensive energetically and in time and in every other way, you know, you become vulnerable when you’re metamorphosing, so why would evolution find that solution for a creature’s development?”

Human life runs its course in the metamorphosis between receiving and giving.”

While part of Dr. Hoffarth’s book does discuss quantum physics and includes some background on other related sciences such as genetics, anatomy, physiology, and chemistry, he stresses that the typical reader doesn’t need to have a background in science to understand this guide. “My style has always been, pick up this book, if you’re in a New York airport and you need to fly to California, you can finish the book in that time with some really good seeds of thought and put the book down and go, ok, and go on to your next book.” As for his role in medicine today, Dr. Hoffarth explained where he sees himself. “…let’s say there’s a door in medicine, and the door behind the medicine is traditional way of thinking, and behind the door is thinking a little bit beyond traditional. I see myself as the person who is greeting people at the door and holding their hand and stepping across to the other side… I feel that’s been my role my whole career is helping people just bridge a little bit beyond their typical thinking, and that was originally from traditional to functional, now it’s functional to biological.”

I want to try to be the physician that helps completely reverse someone’s condition if it’s humanly possible.”

Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.”

Something that Shulman noticed when working with students is that they tend to be the most resistant when beginning their first draft or making revisions once they had started. She reflected that while some students loved their first draft and resisted making any changes, others felt frustrated with their initial draft and wanted to give up entirely. “So this black-and-white thinking – getting them to let go of that and give their essay a chance and ‘let’s go through it and save that first draft. You can always go back to it, you know? It’s not lost forever… let’s play around with it…'” And for those who feel overwhelmed or defeated by the process, she offers some encouraging words of wisdom, “Trying is the victory, so let’s try. Trying is the most amazing, bravest thing you can do, so let’s go for it!”

The main criteria is that you find a topic that only you can write about, and you’re excited to write it because enthusiasm is contagious in college admissions as well as life.”

The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make one.”

As for why he decided to write a memoir about growing up around heroin addicts, he recalled reading a book he had come across titled Flying Over 96th Street: Memoir of an East Harlem White Boy by Dr. Thomas Webber. In it, the author had moved from an Upper West Side apartment in New York City to East Harlem in the 1950’s. While there, his father founded a church, his mother worked in a literacy program, and the kids he grew up alongside were black and Puerto Rican. Although the setting differed, the book resonated with Tepper’s own childhood. “It felt like reading some of my life… and I just thought, no one’s really written a book like this about my friends and… I wanted to write a book that would honor the memory of my friends and it would capture a time and place in a story that hadn’t really been told, so that was the motivation for writing it was that random discovery of the book at Barnes & Noble in the Upper West Side.”

…not only to inform, where you can learn a lot of interesting things, but also to generate connection. That’s one of the great beauties of libraries and books and reading is to be able to connect to others.” -on the importance of books

Every man can be the sculptor of his own mind, if he sets himself the task.”