Category / Publishing

by Michael

History of Pastoral Care in America

Thanks to Patrick Fore

Thanks to Patrick Fore

I finished E. Brooks Holifield’s A History of Pastoral Care in America: From Salvation to Self-Realization. The book has been a grounding or a re-grounding for me since my seminary days. As the title tells, it is a history of pastoral care and pastoral theology in the United States of America.

Holifield walks through several Christian theological lanes, surveying and summarizing some of the major figures in pastoral theology broadly and pastoral care more specifically. He intends the book to be narrow in the sense of covering Protestant pastoral counseling and ministry.

I found it broad in how it went about telling that history. The author named several primary voices in pastoral work, drawing out the thoughts and conceptions of thinkers and preachers and teachers who shaped the practical ministry of pastors and the academic institutions who trained ministers. Holifield wanted to show specifically how the “self” was revealed in history, how attitudes about the self developed in American religion, and wrote in that direction.

Any history that covers centuries has to be clear in its scope and intention. Holifield told of theological traditions and how they dealt with (i.e., defined, taught, and constructed meanings for) sin and spiritual development, two primary foci of pastoral care and those seeking such care throughout history. How a church defines sin directly relates to how a person in that church develops him/herself, whether they develop at all.

I appreciate learning names and dates that I was not thoughtful of. Holifield named preachers and leaders who framed debates that I know of but didn’t know the progenitors. One criticism is that the historical debates were framed around churches and communities which regularly disallowed the names and thoughts of non-white people.

That lack of voice is loud in Holifield, and I found myself wondering why he wrote about the influence of Jonathan Edwards but didn’t discuss with equal precision the thoughts and impact of Richard Allen or Alexander Crummell, the Episcopal priest who started what was essentially a society for African American intellectual and theoretical development. The omission is both honest from the historical perspective–since Allen wasn’t “invited to the debate” in his time–and discouraging because I don’t note Holifield walking through his work with the sense of loss with which I read him.

He presented a lot of philosophical material that made me feel informed, and he made the connections to keep me interested because he used several local church pastors to offer what could have been, simply, heady stuff. A central event in American history of the Protestantism Holifield writes about is the Great Awakening. He writes of the psychology of the Awakening and how with the best of intentions, leaders disagreed (meaning argued) about conversion and cure.

He notes the remark of one historian who says that the central conflict of the time was not theological but psychological, about opposing views of human psychology. Holifield points to how misleading that comment was, but it as helpful as it is misleading. As he says, “the theological context of any clerical assertion about psychology profoundly affected the interpretation of the psychological claims” and “the antagonists had far more in common than any such dichotomy might suggest.” Both are true then and seem true still.

The book covers material that can’t, or shouldn’t be covered in a review. There’s stuff about will and affections, comfort, cure, accountability, capitalism, and urban culture which I hardly would relay as urban in contemporary sense. He develops in solid detail the early therapeutic movements which we see but don’t see in pastoral counseling and therapy offices. He documents the beginnings of the Emmanuel Movement, explains less popular figures like Harry Stack Sullivan (whose work I appreciate), and points to how clinical focus moved from adjustment to insight.

He opened up for me a connection between mainstream culture in the US post-Civil War and the accompanying shifts of emphases in counseling and ministry and which established the primary contexts for the 20th century pastoral care movement. The same was true after World War 2. National violence, world violence directly impacted the needs for, methods of, and providers for pastoral care and mental health. Power and achievement and success were foci. Warlike metaphors abound from that time in clinical history, and the residuals of that period are still with us.

The last half of the book was much more relatable. He employed names and methods I have been introduced to, and the book did a good job unearthing the nuanced theories from which today’s approaches in pastoral theology stem. He dealt with the ever popular client-centered therapy and its large reception among pastors, as well as the derivative therapies thereafter. He mentioned early to mid-twentieth century pastoral heavy weights like Hiltner and Boisen and Oates and Wise.

I remember thinking about something one of my Bible professors said. Perhaps they are words I put in a professor’s mouth: the people who write our texts are the people whose stories stuck. Their stories endured. In other words, those we quote continue to be those we hear.

I felt Holifield reminding us of good historical stuff while also, in my view, choosing certain voices and neglecting others relative to a history of United States of American pastoral care. I certainly am developing a personal project to augment Holifield’s good work, thinking through whose voices are missing but shouldn’t be.

In summary, as good as this history is, it is short-sighted in the direction of white, male perspectives which is nothing surprising. Most of theological scholarship bends in that direction. Certainly most recognized histories bend there too. I could see more complementary texts coming alongside this book in order to illuminate the less-told stories of women and people of color. Indeed, I know the work of folks like Carroll Watkins-Ali and Archie Smith should be read with Holifield’s book.

Now, I’m on the hunt for another pastoral theological history that captures and enriches the story by adding the voices that Holifield didn’t include. That said, this quote, pages from the end, summarize well the good ground the author did cover and offers a kind of vista into the next places historically minded theological scholars may next dig:

Pastoral conversation–whether understood as counsel or as counseling–has never been a disembodied activity, isolated from social and cultural expectations and ideals. The strategies of pastoral discourse, the tone and vocabulary of private communication between the minister and the person in distress, always have borne the dim reflection of a public order. One begins to understand something about pastoral counseling by looking closely not only at prevailing conceptions of theology and psychology but at popular culture, class structure, the national economy, the organization of the parishes, and the patterns of theological education. And one must also look at the past.

 

by Michael

Seth Godin on Credibility

Thanks to Luis Llerena

Thanks to Luis Llerena

You believe you have a great idea, a hit record, a press release worth running, a company worth funding. You know that the customer should use your limited-offer discount code, that the sponsor should run an ad, that the admissions office should let you in. You know that the fast-growing company should hire you, and you’re ready to throw your (excellent) resume over the transom.

This is insufficient.

Your belief, even your proof, is insufficient for you to get the attention, the trust and the action you seek.

When everyone has access, no one does. The people you most want to reach are likely to be the very people that are the most difficult to reach.

Attention is not yours to take whenever you need it. And trust is not something you can insist on.

You can earn trust, just as you can earn attention. Not with everyone, but with the people that you need, the people who need you.

This is the essence of permission marketing.

When I began in the book industry thirty years ago, if you had a stamp, you had everything you needed to get a book proposal in front of an editor. You could send as many proposals as you liked, to as many editors as you liked. All you needed to do was mail them.

In my first year, after my first book came out, I was totally unsuccessful. Not one editor invested in one of the thirty books I was busy creating.

It wasn’t that the books were lousy. It was me. I was lousy. I had no credibility. I didn’t speak the right language, in the right way. Didn’t have the credibility to be believed, and hadn’t earned the attention of the people I was attempting to work with.

Email and other poking methods have made it easy to spew and spray and cold call large numbers of people, but the very ease of this behavior has also made it even less likely to work. The economics of attention scarcity are obvious, and you might not like it, but it’s true.

The bad news is that you are not entitled to attention and trust. It is not allocated on the basis of some sort of clearly defined scale of worthiness.

The good news is that you can earn it. You can invest in the community, you can patiently lead and contribute and demonstrate that the attention you are asking be spent on you is worthwhile.

But, no matter how urgent your emergency is, you’re unlikely to be able to merely take the attention you want.

 

Read Seth’s blog. Daily.

by Michael

“A Deeply Awkward Position” & Reading

The arts, entertainment, and books desks at every major publication and outlet are flooded with them, and an entire ecosystem of critics, producers, and editors is involved in compiling and signing off on these lists. Narrow reading is a less passive activity than some will claim.

As a writer and critic, I am not just bored with this conversation. I am sick of it. I have written these sentences before. I will write them again. Discussing diversity in publishing is the worst kind of Groundhog Day. What’s more, these lists put writers and readers of color in a deeply awkward position. We don’t want to take anything away from the writers who have been included on the list.

…The problem is and has always been the exclusion of writers of color and other marginalized writers who have to push aside their own work and fight for inclusion, over and over and over again.

Please read the full article here.

And make your own summer reading lists to look the beautiful, colorful world that the world is.

by Michael

“Writing…an often painful task”

Michael Eric Dyson’s brilliance with many things glows in this and other paragraphs as he writes about the fractures in his relationship with Cornel West. In this quote, he’s talking writing. If you’re interested in what else he says, visit here. Among our other impressions of his overall critique, we should pray for the folks mentioned here. They are part of an intellectual community that shapes and influences the opinions of our best practitioners. My point is to underline what Dyson says of the work of writing.

The ecstasies of the spoken word, when scholarship is at stake, leave the deep reader and the long listener hungry for more. Writing is an often-painful task that can feel like the death of one’s past. Equally discomfiting is seeing one’s present commitments to truths crumble once one begins to tap away at the keyboard or scar the page with ink. Writing demands a different sort of apprenticeship to ideas than does speaking. It beckons one to revisit over an extended, or at least delayed, period the same material and to revise what one thinks. Revision is reading again and again what one writes so that one can think again and again about what one wants to say and in turn determine if better and deeper things can be said.

by Michael

Author Interview with Courtney Miller Santo

Elders often go unnoticed.  In your book, the elders of Kidron (and around the world if the clippings and news items within the novel come to mind) are central.  How did you come to write a story underlining people who are generally so unrecognized?  I’ve been fortunate to be surrounded by elders for most of my life. One of the reasons I wrote this particular book is that none of the fiction families I read about had many of their grandparents, or great grandparents around and yet my experience growing up was one of being surrounded by people who not only had a few years on them, but were delightfully funny and interesting. Not that I’ve got anything against grandmothers who bake cookies or knit, but that wasn’t my experience.

 

Tell us about your research process, particularly how you developed multiple characters of varying ages.  Again, your characters weren’t exactly typical for contemporary fiction.  I was fortunate to have my own great-grandmother in my life until a few months after the book was published. She was 104 when she passed away and although in the book, Anna is a few years older, she is modeled very much on my own great-grandmother. The other women, who are older are also based on people in my family. If I needed to know what particular phrase an almost ninety year old woman would use, I just started a conversation with one of my relatives, or read their journals.

Courtney's Five Generations

The more difficult characters where those who were closer in age to my own mother. There’s always a barrier between mothers and daughters and the frankness that my grandmother’s talked to me isn’t the same. I also have an extraordinary group of women who I’ve come to know through my church community who were very valuable in that respect.  Are there elders, living or dead, who you believe we should remember?  Any notables for you?  I am fascinated by Jean Calment, who makes a brief appearance in the book and was in fact the oldest woman to have ever lived. But mostly when I visit with bookclubs and talk about this book, what I encourage people to do is to ask the elders in their lives to share their stories. Some people are lucky enough to still have grandparents and great grandparents living, but if that isn’t the case, look to your neighbors or your work community and start asking questions about their lives. I am particularly interested in stories beyond the typical where were you during a war, or a historical event. One question I find that always gets great (and sad stories) is who do you know who drowned. I believe that people live on through their stories. It is the way we echo through generations. Storytelling is vital to our identities.

 

You dealt with many things in your work, one of which was the way stories of our forebears are kept hidden, shared, remembered, rehearsed, or, in some cases, lost.  Choose one of the Keller women and give us a sense of something she’d want us to know.  What an amazing question! I always wanted Bets and her daughter Callie to have a conversation where they allowed themselves to be honest with each other. Bets in particular kept so much from her children—especially about their father and the type of relationship she had with him and that damaged Callie in ways I don’t think she understands. I always thought that those two in particular would have benefitted from an airing of grievances and secrets. I think that if Callie understood her parents and the secrets they had to keep that she’d have found love much sooner in her life and that might have changed what happened with Deb.

 

Courtney Miller SantoYou acknowledge the community of writers around you.  How did that community support you as you worked on your novel?  My writer’s group has to be some of the most insightful and encouraging people in the entire world. Throughout finishing this novel, we met monthly and each time I read a bit of the work, they found ways to push me to make it better. I also was lucky enough to have a fantastic mentor in Cary Holladay, whose own work I deeply admire. I always wanted to write so-called Southern fiction, which Cary does so well, but the rub of it is that because of my Western pedigree, all I could do was write bad imitations of southern stories. Cary helped me to find my own authentic voice. I also want to say that I have so many poets in my life who have helped me to learn the value of a single word among 100,000—in particular Heather Dobbins has been an incredible support to me.

 

What did you learn while writing?  What did you find out about families, aging, death, and life as you developed the book?  One of the biggest revelations that happened while I was writing this book is that I began to see my own mother as an individual. The more I spoke to my grandmother and great grandmother about their lives, the more I was able to see my mother as somebody other than my mother. I also have learned buckets about olive trees. They are incredible trees. I only wish I could figure out how to keep one alive. I’ve killed at least three. The other startling connection I made while researching this book is how many of mankind’s myths deal explicitly with aging and the idea of immortality. Every community has an idea of how to get past mortality—and yet scientifically we’ve sort of reached an end road of sorts.

 

Did you come across any notable remedies for aging?  There are more wives tales than remedies. Everybody ages, what you hope for is those genes that make you physically less old than your actual age. My great-grandmother could touch her toes until the day she died and yet for the last twenty years of her life, she had M&Ms and Mountain Dew for breakfast. That tells me it was mostly genetics that kept her flexible and the science backs that up. However there’s common sense nobody wants to hear it, but it’s true stuff that helps you if you don’t have extra long telomeres—basically keeping active and eating well.

 

What are you reading these days?  I’ve just started Rebecca Makkai’s The Hundred Year House, which I adore and since I just wrapped up vacation, I recently finished Wolf Hall, a fabulous nonfiction book that tells the history of Paris through biographical vignettes, called The Parisians, and I devoured my daughter’s copy of Divergent on the plane ride home. I’ll be going to my twentieth high school reunion in a few weeks and have bought the Hurricane Sisters for the plane ride there.

 

How can readers support you and are you working on words you can tell us about briefly?  My second novel, THREE STORY HOUSE, comes out on August 19 and I’d love for anyone who enjoyed THE ROOTS OF THE OLIVE TREE to check it out (Anna makes a special cameo in the book). Set in Memphis, the book delves into the relationship between cousins who find their lives coming apart as they work to renovate a spite house. There’s going to be a fun contest starting August 28 where readers are invited to post their own versions of my cover on my facebook page at www.facebook.com/courtneymsanto There will be prizes! I’d love to hear reader’s stories of their local spite houses.Olive Tree for CM Interview

by Michael

Interview with Lisa Takeuchi Cullen, Author of Pastors’ Wives

Lisa Takeuchi Cullen

Lisa Takeuchi Cullen

Before getting into things with your book, tell us who else you are.  A bit about you.  I used to be a journalist…now I make things up. I was a longtime staff writer at TIME magazine, where I wrote an article about pastors’ wives that led to this book (more on that below). I left TIME in 2009 to write fiction. “Pastors’ Wives” is my second book and first novel; my first book was called “Remember Me,” about the year I spent crashing weird and wonderful funerals (HarperCollins). To put food on my family’s table, I write TV pilots.

Your novel has an interesting origin.  How did Pastors’ Wives begin?  I was assigned to write a feature about pastors’ wives. Growing up Catholic, I knew nothing about the pastor’s wife, except that our pastor wasn’t allowed to have one. But whatever preconceptions I had about them were blown out of the water when I began meeting and interviewing these women. They were smart, funny, and not at all okay with being just the woman behind the man behind the pulpit. The article published in 2007, and the women somehow stayed in my mind. I first pitched it as a TV series, but when that ended in disaster my agent told me to just write it as a novel already.

You say that you prevailed upon many pastors’ wives in researching for this book.  What did you learn in your prevailing?  So much from each and every one. I learned what it’s like to be married to a man who’s already married to God. I learned about their faith and about my own. Something I learned from the lovely Becky Hunter of Northland Church in Florida became a mantra in my marriage: “Be nice to your husband on purpose.”

There is marriage and friendship and fear and a host of other relationship realities in your novel.  In what ways are the lives of pastors’ wives different from the wives of non-clergy?  The scrutiny they endure from the congregation, for one. Imagine your every choice picked apart by people who barely know you: your style of hair; your musical skills; your husband’s make of car. For another, these women have to accept—not always happily, mind you—that the church and God often come first for their husbands.

Pastors' Wives

Pastors’ Wives

You wrote about women married to clergy, women who had ministries of their own.  What does that mean for how you tell others about the book?  Do people assume it is Christian Fiction, which it isn’t?  Do they assume things about the story itself?  What should readers know going into their reading of Pastors’ Wives?  “Pastors’ Wives” is women’s commercial fiction—a page-turning story about marriage, faith, and what we do for love. Though it is set in a church and revolves around Christian characters, it is not strictly Christian fiction. Its publisher, Penguin/Plume, is secular, as am I. But I hope I told this story with the respect I felt so deeply for these women. I’m delighted to report that the vast majority of the many Christian reviews I received embraced the book. I’ve noticed that some Christian reviewers point out the use of some language, a bedroom scene (between a husband and wife), and the sordid history of one repentant character—so reader, beware!

Can you talk about the uniqueness of your novel’s development from an article to a book?  What did the “revisioning” and “reviewing” of your earliest conceptions do to you as a writer?  This is my first novel, but I spent almost 20 years as a journalist, interviewing people both ordinary and famous. So I found I relied a lot on my reporting skills to come up with dialogue and story lines. It’s really hard to make stuff up!

The stories of characters in the novel were interrelated.  Talk about why or how you chose to write the book that way.  It added a richness and a social engagement that could have been absent had it been written differently.  Thank you so much. I started out with two voices in my head, that of Ruthie, the reluctant and doubting pastor’s wife, and Candace, the ruthless, brilliant senior pastor’s wife. Then I started to hear Ginger, a more typical PW…except, of course, for her secret past. I wanted to give them equal weight, but this turned out to be difficult. I hope I did them each justice, as I loved them equally.

If your characters gathered at your home for dinner, who would bring what and why?  Ha! That’s a great question. I’m sure Candace would bring something elegant and absolutely perfect, like a beautiful cake and gifts for my children. Ruthie would bring wine. Ginger would bring homemade cookies that are burned but still delicious.

What are you reading these days or what good books would you recommend to new friends?  I read a lot for my other work as a writer of TV pilots. I’m always on the hunt for books to adapt into a drama. So I’ll ask your readers instead: if you’ve read any books you think would make for a great TV drama, please post it on my Facebook page!

How can readers support your work?  Please “like” my Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/LisaTakeuchiCullen)! My website is www.lisacullen.com, where I blog about the daily indignities of writing TV pilots and novels. You can read there about my crazy experience filming my CBS pilot “The Ordained” with Sam Neill, Hope Davis and Audra McDonald, right down to its rejection for series in fall 2013. I am also working on a second novel, a legal thriller set in Okinawa, Japan. Thank you so much for your interest!

by Michael

Interview with Dina Nayeri, Author of A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea

A Teaspoon of Earth and SeaWhat did it take from you to create A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea, and what are a couple things the creative process gave you?  In addition to an engaging book.  The process of writing this book gave me an entirely new perspective on my life and my purpose. I became a writer while creating this novel. I had other published projects before, but this was the first time I threw myself into a work completely, immersing myself in research, in my characters, and in the imagined world I wanted my readers to inhabit.  In some ways I lost myself in the process, spending days just listening to Iranian music, reading books on the region, watching videos.  I certainly let my personal life falter, and there were days when I barely did anything but work and drink espressos.  So this novel took a lot from me.  But it also made me who I am as a writer.  In addition, the process taught me to value rigor and brevity and detachment in my writing. It taught me to dig for the most important details and to present them concretely and imaginatively. These skills will always be valuable to me.

You describe yourself as an exile.  How has your exilic condition impacted your writing?  Mostly in the themes that capture my attention. I often write about home, about displacement, and fear. These are familiar topics for me because of my experiences as an exile. They are like obsessions. I can’t get away from them.

To quote Saba’s reflection, “This story is about fathers and daughters.”  As much as the novel is a large story between sisters and their mother, isn’t it as much about a father and daughter?  I think it’s even more about a father and daughter, because theirs is the only relationship that isn’t already dead. With the other members of her family, Saba has only memories and her imagination. She can turn those over in her mind, but she can’t have anything new.  With her father, she has a flesh and blood person who loves her and wants to be allowed into her world.

Part of my experience reading was in learning Saba’s opinions about the differences between American and Iranian men.  How might American fathers be different from Iranian fathers?  I think fathers are fathers. To love and protect your children are universal instincts. The cultural differences seem minor compared to that.

Talk about how Saba’s life became an echo of her twin sister’s.  Where did that come from in your writing process?  How did you connect with both Saba’s experience and Mahtab’s?  I consider their stories representations of the two ways that my own life might have gone.  I was raised in America and so the Mahtab stories mirror my own. But the Saba stories are the Iranian experiences I might have had, if I had stayed behind.  To parallel them seemed like a natural exercise, and something I took great pleasure in.

Where would Saba call “home”?  Cheshmeh, Iran

Dina NayeriThe novel returned to themes of desire, hunger, memory, and love.  Did you learn particular things about such themes in writing or revising?  Did you develop a love or appreciation, for instance, of your own family history?  Absolutely. The research alone gave me a great appreciation for the richness of my own history and roots.  But, obviously, I also used many of my own emotions and experiences in writing Saba and Mahtab’s stories. In doing so, I deepened my understanding of the themes you mention.

What are you reading these days?  “The Woman Destroyed” by Simone De Beauvoir.

How can readers connect with you and support your work?  You can like my Facebook fan page:  http://www.facebook.com/dinanayeri

And you can visit my website: http://www.dinanayeri.com

by Michael

Interview with Tara Conklin, Author of The House Girl

The House Girl Cover

The House Girl Book Cover

How did you come to this story?  Or how did it come to you?  The story definitely came to me.  About 7 years ago now, I was reading a biography of Virginia Woolf and came across the term “slave doctor”.  The words described one of Woolf’s long-gone relations and no further explanation or description of the man was given. I found myself wondering what kind of person would occupy what to me seemed an inherently conflicted role: to dedicate your life to healing and yet your patients were destined only for more and graver harm.  From that initial spark of curiosity I wrote the story of Caleb Harper, a doctor working for a slave catcher, and two women appeared in his story: Josephine Bell, an artist and enslaved woman living on a Virginia tobacco farm, and Dorothea Rounds, a young white woman active on the Underground Railroad. And I was off.

You draw from the perspectives of two very different women, but both Lina and Josephine were searching.  What connections do you see between these two women?  They are both very strong willed, smart and adept at hiding how they feel, both from others and from themselves.  Of course, the circumstances of their lives could not be more different; Lina enjoys all the privileges and freedoms that Josephine does not.  I see Lina and Josephine as vertically connected rather than horizontally, if that makes any sense.  Josephine is Lina’s predecessor, her mother, at least symbolically.  Dresser has a line about enslaved people “They were as much our founding mothers and fathers as the bewigged white man who lay a whip upon their backs.”  And that idea resonates with Lina, both historically and personally. She has very few memories of her own mother Grace and knows very little about her, but Josephine shares many of Grace’s characteristics: a talented artist, a disappearance, a lost child.  At the beginning of the novel, Lina is too afraid to really search for her own mother, and so she searches for Josephine instead.   Josephine gives Lina the inspiration that she needs to move forward with her life, the courage to confront her own past.  And of course in the process of finding Josephine, Lina finds herself.

Mansfield PlantationThe novel weaves compelling insights about slavery into Josephine’s personal decision to run.  What are some reasons slaves ran while others didn’t?  It’s more difficult, I think, to understand the decision not to run because most slave narratives were written by (or about) those who were able to escape.  But fear must have been a huge component – fear of capture and punishment. The cutting of the Achilles tendon (as happens to Nathan in the book) was commonly done to slaves who had tried to run and been recaptured. To escape also meant leaving family and friends behind, loved ones who in all likelihood you would never see again. At a time when families were routinely torn apart, to voluntarily leave one’s family must have been a very difficult decision to make.  Women ran much less frequently than men because they were more likely to be caring for young children, and fleeing with a child was much harder.  There were also the practical difficulties of not knowing where to go – certainly after the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850, the northern US no longer offered any real prospect of ‘freedom’ and the road to Canada was very long.

You do a lot with images and art in the book.  I wonder how, with the hard work behind The House Girl, you see images of slavery, historical and modern-day.  It’s requires a kind of resilience and courage to know the things you likely learned in your work on the story and keep at it.  Yes, there was a point at which I had to stop researching.  It became very overwhelming – the scope of tragedy, the individual horrors.  Antebellum art generally tended to depict idealized visions of peaceful plantation life – the myth of the benign master, the happy Negro. Many are very pretty pictures, but I couldn’t help seeing them as quite sinister given what they omit. More realistic images were created for the abolitionist movement, and these are generally horrifying.  Their intent was to provoke outrage and increase support for the abolitionist cause, and I presume they were very effective.  More contemporary artists have grappled with slavery in a variety of ways.  I’ve personally been most effected by the work of Kara Walker who makes intricate cut-paper silhouettes of antebellum life – shocking scenes of violence and sexual exploitation, but rendered simply, starkly, with black cut-outs against a white background.  They are very powerful.

Lina’s experience was peopled with men like her father, her legal mentor, and the potential lead plaintiff.  What characteristics equipped her to navigate such diverse relationships?  Lina is very independent and very driven.  She grew up in a single-parent, poor, urban household with a father who suffered from severe depression and has never been traditionally “responsible”.  As a result, she’s had to parent herself in many ways.  I think this self-sufficiency, learned at an early age, helps her to operate successfully in these diverse worlds – with her father and his artist friends, in the more conservative world of the law firm, and with Jasper Battle, a musician whom she finds both very foreign and also oddly familiar, given that his world is so similar to her father’s. The corporate law world and professional art world are very different of course, but they are both arenas traditionally dominated by white men, so I think growing up in one prepared Lina in unexpected ways to succeed in the other.

In a sentence, maybe two, imagine how Lina would explain her case to her mother, how Josephine would explain slavery to her son.  What a great (and really tough!) question.  First, Lina to her mother: “I’m working on a lawsuit that’s seeking to repair the damage done by slavery, at least in some symbolic way. And Mom, it’s more about memory than money.”  Josephine to Joseph: “We live in a world where some people own other people based on the color of their skin. But things won’t always be this way, and you don’t have to let it define you.”

Slave Quarters

Slave Quarters

Your book made me think of the many ways people experience loss—of a hope, a relationship, an ideal, a role.  On the other hand, the story is one of motivated, resourceful people moving forward.  Is that a fair reflection?  Yes, very fair, and thank you for it. For me, the characteristic that binds all the characters together is their willingness to face and ultimately overcome their fears.  For Josephine, the fear of running, of leaving everyone and everything she knows. For Lina, the fear of discovering the truth about her mother and, by necessity, the truth about her father as well.  For Caleb, his fear of caring, of investing himself in another person; and Dorothea, fear of rebelling against her father and of once again putting her faith in something large than herself.  So they are all moving forward, as you say, trying to push past these fears as best they can.

There are two very striking things I’d love you to say more about.  First, the musical list of names in Lina’s index.  Second, the notion of celebrating and honoring slaves who have died in slavery.  The list was particular, poignant, thorough, and considerate.  The comment, a summation of the novel.  Say more about how those emerged.  Thank you for them.  The list was culled from the more than 2,000 names of some of the last surviving slaves whose testimonies were taken in the 1930s under the Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA).  The testimonies are available on the Library of Congress website; it’s an amazing resource that I would encourage readers to explore.  I included the names for a couple of reasons. First, Josephine’s story is very circumscribed – one day in the life of one woman on one small farm in Virginia.   Her position as a house slave and the close relationship she has with her mistress, Lu Ann Bell, makes Josephine’s experience somewhat uncharacteristic, I believe.  Given Josephine’s exceptionalism, I thought I would be remiss in not acknowledging, at least to some degree, the vast scope of slavery’s tragedy.  I wanted the reader to be hit with the physical presence of those names – a solid page of text – and feel, for a moment, disoriented and overwhelmed.  And second, before I started researching in earnest, I believed that there was a national monument or a national museum dedicated to memorializing enslaved Americans.  I don’t know where this belief came from – I just assumed that such a thing must exist, and I was surprised to learn that it doesn’t. There is no national memorial or museum (although the National Museum of African American History and Culture is slated to open in 2015).  I was thinking of the power of naming and how important that is in honoring the victims of a particular tragedy – for example, the inscriptions on the Vietnam War Memorial, or the reading of names after 9/11.  I wanted Lina’s chart to serve as something similar, although of course on a much reduced scale.

Tara Conklin What are you reading these days?  The pile beside my bed is groaning – I’ve got so many waiting in line. I just finished two wonderful novels: A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra, which I loved and The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer, which I also loved.  Now I’m just about to dive into Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie – I’ve been waiting for this one for awhile.  I still remember scenes from her Half of a Yellow Sun, which I read a good number of years ago.

How can readers follow you and support your work?  You can find me at www.taraconklin.com, on facebook and twitter @TEConklin.  I love to hear from readers and regularly participate in book club discussions via Skype or phone so feel free to get in touch.

by Michael

LaValle on People We Idealize

Victor LaValle in an interview with Books and Culture, answering a question about how a meeting with Norman Mailer, how meeting other people whose wrote work people loved, changed the reading of them:

Everyone is going to disappoint you if you get to know them well enough. I don’t mean that in a dismissive way, but to say that it’s important to think about why we ask so much of the people we idolize. Why must they pass the test of perfection? Or even just amiability? This is certainly the case with artists, but it applies to my priest and my postman, too. I don’t know how I would’ve reacted if I’d known Mailer stabbed his wife before me and my friend showed up at his house. Would it have stopped us? I doubt it. Mailer sure wasn’t a wilting violet, but I’d hate to disqualify artists simply because their personalities were remarkable. Caravaggio was a scumbag and a street fighter, Flannery O’Connor a racist, and, from her letters, a bit of a pill. I love the work both produced though, without reservation. The saints weren’t even saints.

Read the full interview here.  It’s good.

by Michael

Interview With Brian Kimberling, Author of Snapper

Give us a view into your life as a novelist whose book was recently published. What type of work does the novel call forth from you on this side of publication? I did a ten-day, ten-city tour in the US in April. It was exhilarating and exhausting. Have had some events in England since then, I have loved all of it. Also now getting requests for comments and blurbs on two kinds of book: Midwestern memoirs and bird books. Enjoying the Midwestern memoirs much more than I expected to. Now that the tour is over and the events over here largely done, I should get back to work writing fiction. Well, I have. Intermittently. Publishing does take over your life for a while, though.
Brian Kimberling
Did you draw from your own experiences as a birdwatcher in writing your story, and if so, in what ways? For me it was a summer job I did as an undergraduate. Nathan, the narrator and protagonist of Snapper, makes a sort of eight-year career out of it. I embellished and exaggerated some of my own experiences, borrowed some others, and made other things up. I did not do much bird research — I tried to stick to what I was pretty sure of from experience.

Making fiction entertaining must take work. Making it funny must be either natural or laborious. How did you gauge your great humor’s effectiveness as you wrote? Actually took a lot of jokes out of the MS. Underneath Nathan’s irrepressible drollery some sad things are going on. I always tried to find a balance between the comical and the melancholic. One thing that helped was reading everything out loud. Some things that looked OK on the page didn’t quite sound right, so I struck them.

This novel is as much about Indiana as it is other things. How did you come to write about Indiana? It’s what I know. A few years ago (a bit pre-Snapper) I was there and someone asked what a certain plant was. I knew, and I knew various things about it, but I didn’t know how I knew or when or where I had learned what I knew. In England I can’t identify plants or birds or much of anything else. When I’ve written about England I’ve written less vividly. I could feel Indiana coming alive as I wrote, so I ran with it.

Indiana becomes visible geography for us readers. How have people began responding to learning about the state that by the main character’s perspective is overlooked or misunderstood? Have you heard from residents of my neighboring state? Nathan’s pretty savage about Indiana, but most readers as far as I can tell take him with a grain of salt. In general, responses have been very positive. (A number of British readers in particular have said they wanted to go to Indiana when they had finished the book). I’m sure there are or will be a few offended Hoosiers out there, though.

Nathan’s experiences are detailed with a researcher’s specificity. How did his appreciation and knowledge of his town and his work areas express his love, his devotion? He seemed to like his work. It is a pretty nostalgic book, underneath the jokes and the disparagements of Indiana. He details it not just specifically but lovingly, I think. He doesn’t quite appreciate just how free and fortunate he is at the time of doing the job — it is only in retrospect that he suspects he may have had it pretty good for a while.

Will you talk about your process of becoming a writer? Were you always a writer or did you become one? I’ve been writing since high school at least. Prior to Snapper I wrote and produced several plays at a theatre five minutes’ walk from my house in England. That was very helpful preparation for Snapper as I began to enjoy writing
dialogue, setting scene, et cetera.

What are you reading these days? Currently on Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton. Never read her before; glaring negligence on my part. I just finished The Distancers by Lee Sandlin and Leaving Rollingstone by Kevin Fenton — the Midwestern memoirs I mentioned above. I enjoyed them both very much.

How can readers stay aware of your work? I do have a website, briankimberling.com. It’s due for some changes. I’ll get around to that pretty soon.
Snapper Cover