Writer's Voices

Growing up, Wald had the joy of visiting Provincetown yearly with her family and writing The Bayrose Files gave her the opportunity to write about her experiences of this beloved place. As she described it, “It’s known as a haven for gay people, but that’s not all it is. What it really started out as is an incredibly colorful fishing village and a place where artists and writers from long, long ago have always gone because it’s so isolated, it’s so quirky and interesting… it has amazing, really interesting history to it… so then it became a place where gay people could go or any people could go and be accepted, that’s what I loved about it… they don’t have to put on airs or try to be something they’re not and it’s very, very accepting… I just found it to be a very compassionate place to live, not to mention beautiful.”

It’s also a case of going from the word to the sentence to the paragraph to the story, starting from the small things and getting larger.”

There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”

While the book was inspired by Knight’s family situation, it’s not an exact version of his parent’s relationship. Additionally, he emphasized that none of the characters in Likeness are fully based on anyone in his own life. He explained, “It’s me trying to imagine this period where everyone has different versions, but a collective set of particular facts around one very dramatic point and trying to understand if I was in everyone’s position, how does this make sense… in some ways, I feel like everyone should write a novella from the perspective of people in their parent’s positions… it’s very… sympathizing with a lot of very complicated aspects of what I imagine the pressures that they faced and the details of how they made sense of themselves in those decisions…”

Writing is where my identity resides, my eye, I feel like, lives more in that world, but I’ve cultivated over time a deep enjoyment of a lot of those other quantitative things, but nothing’s as fun as writing.”

Marriage is not a synonym for monogamy any more than monogamy is a synonym for ideal love. To live lightly on the earth, lovers and families must be more flexible and relaxed.”

With regard to the past, Clark urges everyone to keep up with history, whether it’s world history or their own. “We need to keep reading our history and keep grappling with it, and listen to the stories of our grandparents because they have a lot to tell us, they have a lot of wisdom to pass down… look at your own family’s archive, don’t just throw it away or keep it in the attic… These are really important historical documents that can shed light on the past and I think we’re kind of living in this post-truth era where people think history doesn’t matter… so I just think we need to pay a lot of attention to our national histories, our collective histories, as much as we do our personal histories…”

Most of it is made up, but I’m very interested to see what happens in this space where biography and fiction collide. I come to this novel as a biographer.”

“That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.”

In addition to writing novels, Gold also teaches creative writing at GrubStreet, a writing center in Boston, as well as leading retreats that help foster writing communities. What would be her advice to new and aspiring authors seeking to publish their work? “…I’m not going to say you have to read a lot, but you do have to read a lot, but the other thing you have to do is learn about the industry… It’s not just about writing. It is about marketing and how books are acquired… There is so much about the business of publishing that shouldn’t be a surprise if you’re trying to actually make it as a career… so start following other authors, follow these agents, to really learn about the business of publishing.”

In order to understand how AI would change the role of an author in publishing, you need to first understand the role of an author in publishing.”

Some people worry that artificial intelligence will make us feel inferior, but then, anybody in his right mind should have an inferiority complex every time he looks at a flower.”

As a former writing instructor, Leedom-Ackerman was often asked by her students how she knows when she’s done with a piece of work. “My answer to them was always, ‘When you’re published.’ Until you’re published, the book is always alive in your head and so I would go back and then I would rewrite, and I’d see new parts of it and I’d pull it together and in writing the next book, and the next, I became, of course, a better and better novelist along the way, and I could see how to edit and shape it, so any current writers or aspiring writers listening to this, just keep writing because you do get better and you do learn, and you do see things, and the book finds its shape and its voice, and it works…”

As a reporter, you’re looking at the world from the outside in, and what always interested me was the inside, with the people who formed what the news were and what that was inside, and that’s what led me to fiction.”

The victims of terror are not only the dead and injured, but the very values on which a free society is built: trust, security, civil liberty, tolerance, the willingness of countries to open their doors to asylum seekers, the gracious safety of public places.”

For Bialosky, the key takeaway she learned from her mother’s life was the importance of maintaining her own independence. She saw how instantly Iris’s world changed after losing her first husband at such a young age, and how greatly that affected herself and her family. “I think that that really, I saw more so when I was a teenager how difficult that was for my mother and that was something that I never wanted for myself. In other words, it was very important to me to be independent and to have my own livelihood and not to depend on anyone because I grew up with this idea that anything could happen at any minute that could disrupt one’s life, and that was my message from my mother’s life.”

I took a poetry workshop by a prominent poet, Stanley Plumly. The way that he talked about what a poem is and what a poem could do, and how we can explore our inner lives through poetry really opened the door for me.”

It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death.”

In regards to her writing process, Hugo said that every so often, she gets story ideas from the news and then uses that to center her plot. “…the one I’m working on right now is on medical ethics and that comes straight out of the newspaper… so then you construct a scenario and then you create… I construct a story arc with an opening, rising action, climax, falling action… I do it as almost as if it’s a theater piece, then I divide it into chapters…” She also prefers not to write endings that are always happy or pleasant. “…life is just not, I write realistic fiction, and there’s never, ‘ok, that’s the end and things didn’t change after this, and it was all happy.’ I wish it were… but it’s not… I never leave a reader without real hope. I never do a hopeless ending, but I never tie up everything so you know exactly what’s going to happen and exactly the whole future.”

So, I’ve kind of given up plotting out the ending because, I mean, I think I know where it’s going and then the characters just say, ‘Oh yeah, good luck with that! That is not what we’re doing.'”

Giving birth does not make a mother, placing a child for adoption does not make her less of one.”

While some may find poetry challenging to understand as compared to other works of literature, Marchetti assures readers that poems can be interpreted however they’d like. “The thing about poetry that’s great for the age we live in is it’s easy to read, it takes but a minute of your time, and I always stress to people… you don’t have to get a certain meaning from it. Whatever you’re able to glean, whatever stands out to you… that’s enough, you know? That is more than enough… I do think that when we’re writing, part of the delight of the process is that we surprise ourselves. There are things there that we didn’t expect to be there… I really think most poets would tell you, like, whatever you’re getting out of it is just fine… especially readers of poetry, they want to make their own meanings, they want there to be a little bit of mystery. If you’re hitting the nail on the head and hammering it home, it’s probably too much…”

Poems reveal themselves to us and sometimes, I think, even as the writer, you want there to be some mystery there, but what I think of the poem really doesn’t matter. It’s what the reader makes of it, that is the meaning.”

At the end of my suffering there was a door.”

For Kelly, the inspiration to include a book club in this novel came from her mother’s friends and their reading circle. “I really feel like book clubs are more than just reading a book. It’s women bonding, it’s what they do while they’re talking about the books, and in this book, they as a group… talk about no richies allowed, they want a book club that’s just their friends and normal people, but it turns into that little group of people while they’re reading the books and doing things… in my book, they make the first of those little books to give to the soldiers… they also as a group get caught up in this mystery of what is happening with this mysterious person that washed up on shore, so a lot of their time is taken up with that, but they also bond together through this group of women and that’s what sees them through. Books really saw people through in the war… it was a way for them to take their minds off of it and be together and have a positive thing to talk about.”

There’s an incredible amount of hidden history that happened here during the war that just kind of got lost.”

Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.”

From hanging clothes to dry, to buying fresh ingredients daily and eating together at the dinner table, The Italian Soul offers a plethora of recommendations that readers can incorporate into their own lives. Valente said, “…most of the houses [in Italy] don’t have any dryers, clothes dryers… and that’s because… electricity is expensive and dryers use up a lot of electricity, and so people hang their clothes out to dry and I found that this became a contemplative practice for me… you not only get out in the fresh air, but you get out and you see your neighbors…” And as far as preparing meals and eating together, she suggested, “…maybe we need to just get back to the simple, everybody sits down at the same time, everybody eats together, everybody chats together, talks about their day, and that’s very common still in Italy, you know, that reverence for the meal table… [also] the idea of, there’s a real push in Italy for farm-to-table… shopping for the day…I love that idea of having a meal everyday, of preparing a meal everyday, and preparing it with fresh ingredients, if possible.”

Seeing beauty, I think, has an effect on our mood and our soul, and I think it’s in no way a waste of money.”

Let us come alive to the splendor that is all around us and see the beauty in ordinary things.”