Two book groups have hosted me. I have appeared at local bookstores for events and speaking engagements. I speak at writer’s groups and book festivals, I sit on and moderate panels—at the moment I am about to propose a panel for AWP which will be in Seattle next year.
Commenting on blogs that cover issues close to topics I am writing about helps me feel like a part of a larger discussion. Further to this I find people on twitter who have interests similar to mine and network that way. I just took out an ad with a national women’s magazine which I am very excited about.
Recently I set up a Pinterest board that includes pictures that represent places I included in the book.
Is there a message in your novel that you want readers to grasp? I was a little worried when the book came out that readers would not understand what I did in the book. I wanted what I was trying to say about individualism, free thinking, responsibility for the course of one’s own life as well as the inescapable power of grief to come through. For the most part this has been the case.
I think this brings up a larger issue though. To my way of thinking the most rewarding thing that can happen is to find out that someone has read your book and created their own relationship to it, bringing out their own interpretations of events you describe. As readers we bring our own life experiences to everything we read so when I hear that readers have done the same and come away with things I intended for them to find and things I didn’t I am thrilled.
Ii is so interesting to listen to authors talk about books that have meant a lot to me and hear that what they were shooting for was quite different from the experience I had reading their book.
Now I believe my job is to put out the best version of the book I imagined that I can; the rest is up to the reader.
What books have most influenced your life? The Stoned Apocalypse by Marco Vassi has had the largest effect on me in the last few years. I wish I had read it fifteen years ago.
Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates is still rattling around in the back of my soul. I felt like I had lost a great friend when I closed that book. I am still working through the many ways she worked dialogue, structure, point of view and timing in that book, not to mention the wonderful story.
Fear of Flying by Erica Jong verified many of my suspicions about life as a woman, but I was not ready to process it until just last year. Throughout my life I had purchased and given it away two times before I actually read it!
The Talisman by Stephen King and Peter Straub pulled me through two very tough times in my life. The power of words to provide escape should not be underestimated.
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz blew the back of my head clean off. This book gave me faith in people and art in a way that I still can’t really articulate. It made me feel amazement and envy and gratitude and joy and it made me want do everything I could to improve as an artist in my own right.
The Writer’s Portable Mentor by Priscilla Long has had the greatest effect on me as a writer in terms of craft and providing hope for great works to come. It is my Bible.
Have you ever considered anyone as a mentor? You can also see my blog for long answers on this. I use writers I admire as mentors, and examples of what I would like to become or reflections of what I hope I already am. Priscilla Long is the closest to a real life mentor that I have now. I’ve talked quite a bit about her book The Writer’s Portable Mentor in interviews already and I reviewed it twice on my blog. Anyone who discusses writing with me for longer than five minutes will hear about her at length. I’ve lost track of how many I have given away as gifts.
Jack Remick is a local writer and poet. We bonded over his novel Blood. He reminds me to be a writer first and stop worshipping all my idols. Through his example, I imagine that I might be doing something important with all these words!
I feel extremely grateful for the teachers I have had along the way and continue to find.
When I was a teenager there was a woman who was several years older than I who took me under her wing. I was at a precarious place in my life, my mother was not doing well, home was a scary place and I really believe that her presence in my life was what kept me out of trouble in my later teen years.
Who is your favorite author and why? That is almost impossible to answer, but I would say Marco Vassi is the one who embodies the qualities I admire the most. I really felt like I had been changed by reading him. There are better writers as far as technique, but nobody else manages to make me think about the world in a different way like he does. What he did for me is what I hope to do for my readers.
Vivianna Post is the family anomaly. Daughter of a Pulitzer Prize winner and an academic, she has never quite fit her parents’ expectations as a free-spirited erotica writer.
When Vivianna encounters the award-winning author Jasper Caldwell at a nightclub, all she wants is to blame him for blowing off her brother at a writers’ conference the year before and possibly causing his suicide. But as the night—and then the weeks—wear on, Vivianna finds herself drawn to Jasper in ways she cannot understand.
When their differences—literary and sexual—threaten to pull Vivianna and Jasper apart, Jasper rediscovers Alejandro, an old friend who just might have the power to complete them both in every way.
Using quotes and references to classic erotic and literary icons, Sex and Death in the American Novel is on one level an unconventional romance and on another a discussion of the merits of erotic literature.
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Genre – Literary Erotica
Rating – X
More details about the author & the book
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Website http://www.mywildskies.com/
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