Writer's Voices

As far as who should read her book, Dr. Eckert said it’s not only for medical professionals, but for anybody concerned with women’s health. “It’s really geared for the general public, and so I think that I’m continuing to work to get it out into general public audiences… I see this as a way for, especially now… as a general public, we really need to figure out ways to arm ourselves with accurate information and so I really see this as a book that anyone can pick up and read and get some understanding about a problem, you know, HPV-associated cancers and also about the vaccine, but also then the stories are just so, they’ve inspired me. Knowing these women has changed me.”

…these women that were willing to tell me, a perfect stranger, their story… they are so compelled because they don’t want other people to suffer the suffering they’ve had, and they just really want to get their message out there and they want people to know about this so that there can really be fewer people that have to go through cervical cancer, diagnosis and treatment, and life after treatment.”

Communities and countries and ultimately the world are only as strong as the health of their women.”

What does Mustian think is the reason behind society’s captivation with those they view as freaks? “…it’s maybe, it’s like the overused car crash example, that people really don’t want to see but can’t help but look and so I think people are, you know, if you’re a farmer and you’re in the 1930’s and you’re spending all day in a field behind a mule and suddenly here’s this thing to go to and it’s all strange and weird, and it’s exciting to some degree. It brings some excitement to what otherwise may be a not an exciting life so I think… it’s probably that as much as anything.”

We’re all a little weird, and life’s a little weird. And when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall in mutual weirdness and call it love.”

After Gessner had written The Book of Flaco , he had an urge to see an Eurasian eagle-owl in the wild, so he chronicled his search in the epilogue of the book. “The interesting thing about this is it could lead you anywhere. Where it led me was to Finland. I’d written the book, basically, and then… I thought, I really do need to see an Eurasian eagle-owl in the wild. As it happened, strangely, a Finnish nature writer had visited me a month before… we went out west in Finland and this guy took us up to a cliff… and as we were walking in, a young eagle-owl flew by… then we climbed up the cliff and saw this big owl with glowing orange eyes from up close and saw it diving, and at the end of the night it dove down 100 feet down into the valley, and my friend got a picture, and what it was diving for was to scare away a lynx. I was like, ok, here it is… it was a great week. I mean, I could’ve written a book just about that week.”

In my land, we call it the Eurasian eagle-owl, known for its great size and strength…The owl looks beautiful, but also bulky and strong. His power is obvious, power and repose. He grips the tree with talons that would not look out of place on a grizzly bear.”

In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks.”

In the story, the AI that Liv programs is named Breck, who readers can find on Schafer’s website. His intention was for the character to be interactive and have an engaging experience with the audience. According to Schafer, “…I started eMortal before conversational AI existed. It was just this weird parallel path that happened with this story, and when it came out we got to a place where there were tools where we could create a conversational AI that, it kind of goes back to that old adage, ‘show, don’t tell.’ Well, this gave me the opportunity to give readers the opportunity to have more of an active, as opposed to passive, experience with this, so just like Liv has the opportunity to talk to Breck in the story and try to assess how real he is, Breck, on my website, the website is steveschaferauthor.com… Breck is programmed to be on the website just like he is in the book, so readers can try to assess for themselves, like how real is he? …If you really want to swim in the deep end, you can try to convince him that you’re real because it’s not so easy to do, which you get a couple of sentences in and you’re like, oh my god, this really is so subjective. It’s based on my experiences, so it’s been a really fun tool to have along for the ride.”

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.”

As far as what writers can do to create the perfect personal essay, Aronie believes vulnerability is the key. “I have to know that your broken heart is just like my broken heart. Your story is going to be different from mine, but I want to be able to relate to it. Your details are going to be different, but I also want to know that we have experienced what it feels like to be absolutely at the bottom and thinking, ‘What am I doing here? How can I manage?’…It’s not like a journal entry, it’s a complete, this is what I went from here to here, so you are giving a bit of a map of, you can make it, you can do this…” While personal essays can often be serious, Aronie says that funny anecdotes can be included as well, but in a mindful way. “You can write funny stuff, but I still have to know who’s in there. I can’t just have it be light-weight. There’s got to be something that transformed you. The transformation is what we want.” And finally, “Just tell the story as if you were talking to your best friend who didn’t know you, who didn’t know anything about you and this is what happened and you just start talking and it will flow out of you. Just don’t worry about structure and don’t try to sound like a writer, sound like you. Use your language, your rhythms, and tell your story from your gut and your heart.”

The beauty of the personal essay is you’re kind of giving a map: this is what happened to me, this is who I am and I’m crawling out of the hole, and this is where I am now.”

How did Howard, who’s half-Chinese, bring her own personal experiences into this novel? She explained, “…a lot of mixed people will probably relate to this idea of belonging and struggling with belonging… while it’s for very different reasons, I think Gene and his family, kind of, struggle with belonging in India and figuring out their place in this society, and then Arthur is also, he has that perspective between figuring out his true self and his pure self, not influenced by the way people think of him, and then the way that others do think of him and that, kind of, external influence over his own identity. So, I thought that was something that I could see in myself and use that to, kind of, bring my own perspective to this book because I totally could identify with that… mixed people could also be, you aren’t enough of one thing, you aren’t enough American or you aren’t enough whatever country or nationality is, and I think that there are levels of that that you can see in the book…”

Lastly, for any aspiring writers who are first starting out, Howard encourages all of you to keep writing no matter how challenging or overwhelming it may feel. “One of the sayings we would say in my MFA program was that writing a novel is like driving a car at night… you can only see as far as the headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way, so I thought that really resonated with me in terms of, you know, this novel feels so daunting, and like I said, it took me six years and you can only look so far ahead, but I think that, just keep going and you will get to the end someday, and you will finish it…”

Write the scenes that speak to you the most, that you can picture so vividly and just could write it right away.”

What colonialism does is cause an identity crisis about one’s own culture.”

One of the recurring themes throughout the book is flowers, particularly poppies and roses. Robins explained why she included these specific flowers in her novel. “Poppies are a really interesting flower because they in grow places that no other things can. They will grow on battlefields, they will grow in lands that no other living thing can grow. You have this beautiful, bright poppy, and there’s something about the idea of something beautiful growing in the midst of devastation that I had on my mind while writing this book, and I think it’s a lot of what this book is about… [that] even in the worst possible moments there is something tenacious and beautiful that is coming to life at the same time… It is the symbol of WWI, Remembrance Day… and so it is a really powerful symbol for a lot of people because of that… roses, for me… I’ve never been interested in roses before, then I started reading about them… both of these are names, Rose and Poppy, so they can be embodied by human beings, but a rose has in itself that combination of the thorn and the rose, the pain and the beauty, and I just think these things are inextricable…”

Grief is foreign to us humans even though we’re all going to experience it at some time or other. It still feels like this completely destabilizing emotion, so how might something who’s not human cope with grief?”

Can the absence of words tell a story? Like a pattern in lace, the holes as important as the threads?”

With so many stories that could have been created around the Six Day War time period, what inspired Bukai to write this particular story? “So, I started this book 10 years ago, and I hadn’t expected that it would come out now at a time where it’s really, really so difficult… So, I’m hoping that the book is an antidote to that, that in a sense, the Romeo and Juliet story is… [about how] people from two different cultures come together… I really feel like this is a story about a marriage, about people keeping secrets from each other, about small betrayals that chip away at trust… and what family means and how outside forces could affect families… and also, I wanted to see what it would be like for a mother who’s desperate to hold on to her marriage, is desperate to save her daughter from what she perceives is this terrible threat because she saw her own sister-in-law die… I also wanted to look at the years 1967 during the Six Day War, which really changed everything on the ground for Israel, and the 1973 War… and so those two wars bookend. The relationships bookend… as well as these wars.”

I don’t think love conquers all. I think compassion and empathy, the people who are supposed to be our enemies but are human like us, conquers all. That is, kind of, what I was trying to get at in the book.”

Exile is more than a geographical concept. You can be an exile in your homeland, in your own house, in a room.”

During her research, Campbell came across some surprising discoveries, not just about the four women, but also about the European science community as a whole. “I think I was surprised by how, sort of, tight-knit these scientific communities were. I think it’s hard to fathom as an American, like, how tiny European countries are and just how interconnected the scientific community was, how long scientific studies were taking… there’s a lot of stops and starts, and the fact that these incredible scientists could also be stumped by things… there were concepts that they didn’t understand either, and I thought that was really interesting and really refreshing that it wasn’t just me, that this was over my head, that even someone so advanced in physics there were aspects of what was being discovered that were really out there.”

I love coming to these topics with a really open mind and no preconceived notions. I feel like I could be a really great stand-in for an average reader.”

Life need not be easy, provided only that it is not empty.”

Regarding her writing process, Brock described how her stories end up with dual timelines and why she tells them from multiple points of views. “…typically, I think for a long time… I usually know the place, and once I have a person in mind and I start to have a voice to that person… I will then know the end for the story… So I’ll write the end scene, and it’ll shift and change through drafts to some degree, but mostly it holds up… and then I know where my story starts… I think, ‘Ok, I’m going to have three characters, one main point of view, some secondary characters in this straight line,’ and then I start to write, and what happens inevitably is it will split into a dual timeline and the reason it does this… is because this is how I learned to tell a story… I have to know where [the characters] came from, who they were, why they’re where they’re at… so I will inevitably have this event that happens in the past, and then my secondary characters, sometimes I just like them too much for them to just be a secondary character. They’re giving me more information about the question that I have.”

And when you grow up where I grew up, this is how your story goes: you start out telling the story, and then you say, ‘But, you remember when…”

Folklore is the boiled down juice or potlicker of human living.”