Signal Fires could only be written by Dani Shapiro- and only now when she’s at the height of her powers. One gets the sense this is the story she has been building toward all these years; a parabolic family drama about the way certain moments echo through time. I’ll never stop thinking about it.”

That quote is from another talented writer, Mary Laura Phillipot. Signal Fires is a book that sticks with you. Not just because of the exquisite writing and unique story that is both haunting and hopeful, a story that crisscrosses time in a purposeful way. But the novel is also unforgettable because of what it implies about death and the universe, the stars, how when we die, it’s not the end. We’re all somehow connected.

The story opens in 1985 on a summer night with a teenage car crash in which one person dies, and the other two are culpable. This accident will become a guarded secret for the respectable Wilf family, shattering each of their lives in different ways. Several years later another family with no knowledge of this tragedy moves in across the street. Events ensue involving that family’s gifted, brilliant and lonely son Waldo that somehow bring grace and forgiveness to the accident that happened decades earlier.

 Here’s my Q&A:

 Dani, can you tell us about the fascinating genesis of this book and its connection to your memoir Inheritance?

 I began Signal Fires a long time ago, before I was really ready to write it. A cast of characters materialized for me who I loved and to whom I felt very attached, but I lost my way in the writing, and after about 100 pages I put the manuscript in a drawer. I was heartbroken, but never thought I’d return to it. I really believed it was the one that got away. But as the years passed, and I wrote more books (Still Writing, Hourglass) some big changes happened in my own life. Perhaps the biggest of these changes occurred when I learned, in 2016, that my dad had not been my biological father. He had raised me, and I adored him. I lost him when I was quite young in a terrible car accident and have missed him every day since. This sudden loss informed much of my work as a writer.

I also had the sense that my parents kept secrets – and I wrote a great deal about the corrosive power of secrets – but never did I entertain the thought that perhaps I was the secret. And this is what turned out to be the case. I was able to meet my biological father and wrote the memoir Inheritance about my discovery. It wasn’t until I completed Inheritance and brought it into the world that I returned to the Signal Fires manuscript. I re-read it and understood for the first time how the story needed to play out. It was as if the characters had slept in that drawer all these years, needing me to grow and evolve into the writer who deserved them.

You begin your story with the word And….

And it’s nothing, really, or might be nothing, or ought to be nothing, as he leans his head forward to press the tip of his cigarette to the car’s lighter. It sizzles on contact, a sound particular to its brief moment in history, in which cars have lighters and otherwise sensible fifteen-year-olds choke down Marlboro Reds and drive their mothers’ Buicks without so much as a learner’s permit.”

 The reader is immediately propelled into the scene that’s already started, knowing somehow, it’s not going to end well. Can you discuss your choice of the word and to start your novel.

When I returned to the novel after my long absence, I hadn’t yet written that very opening scene. And I knew I needed to do so before moving forward. The only thing of which I was certain, though I couldn’t have explained it at the time, was that the first word of this novel had to be “And…” because it felt to me as if it was a world already in motion, and I wanted to convey that to the reader.  I wanted the reader to step into a universe in which past, present, and future all existed at once.

You can read the rest of the interview here on 26’s September newsletter.

September, 2023

The post Q&A with Acclaimed Author Dani Shapiro appeared first on Elena Bowes.

William Schwalbe begins this story of a great and improbable friendship by telling us in chapter one “Nerds and Jocks’ that by the time he was a junior in college in the early 1980’s, he’d met everyone he wanted to know- the gays, the lesbians, the theater geeks, everyone in his eccentric major- Latin and Greek- and ‘an assortment of other obsessive quirky characters.”

He also knew exactly who he didn’t want to know, the jocks. He found them obnoxious, loud and smug. He wasn’t sure they thought about him much at all – a gay guy with permed hair and a lot of Matt Dillon posters in his room. Then he met Chris Maxey, better known as ‘Maxey’ to his jock friends. “From the start it was clear that Maxey and I should not be friends.”

But friends they became thanks to a little-known secret society at Yale where 15 rising seniors were chosen each year precisely because they were so different. They had to meet twice a week for a year for dinner and give a full unabridged ‘audit’ of their life to the other members. There’s also a lot of drinking involved, but hey they were young and thirsty.

Here are some of my questions for Schwalbe:

I loved your quotes at the beginning of the book:

All friendships of any length are based on a continued mutual forgiveness. Without tolerance and mercy, all friendships die.” – David Whyte

When during your 40+ year friendship with Maxey did you really understand that tolerance and mercy are a vital part of the equation?

Maxey and I understood the full truth of this quote only in the last few years, partially because finding the quote itself caused us to talk about tolerance and mercy in a way we hadn’t ever done before.  But in doing so we realized that we had been forgiving each other over and over again, right from the start. At one key point in the story, Maxey utters a fairly common (at the time) homophobic slur that saddens me hugely. But I realized over the course of just a few weeks that I didn’t want to be mad at Maxey. So, I didn’t let it interfere with our growing friendship.

As for Maxey, it rankled him that I had trouble letting go of my first impression of him—obnoxious jock—long after it was clear that he was so much more than that. Still, he never let that interfere. There are so many more examples, almost all of them unconscious. And that’s the one of the great things about tolerance and mercy: you don’t have to be conscious of them for them to work their magic.

I also liked this quote:

The only way to have a friend is to be one.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Sounds so simple. What was your biggest challenge in being a friend to Maxey? Beyond the hugging.

Ha! Yes, the hugging is a big challenge. Maxey still insists on hugging me and his whole family does the same. They all give me huge bear hugs. Even though I still hate it, it also always makes me smile.

Beyond that, my biggest challenge has been simply one of energy. Maxey is an extrovert and is like the Eveready bunny. He just keeps going and going. I’m like the other bunnies in those commercials, the one powered by inferior batteries. It’s no longer that much of a challenge because I’ve learned to be honest: I tell Maxey right away when I need to relax and recharge. This has the huge benefit of allowing me to be fully present as a friend whenever we’re together.

You can read the rest of my interview with Schwalbe here in 26’s July newsletter.

Happy summer

July, 2023

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In the spirit of  saying yes to adventure, author Alisha Fernandez Miranda hit pause on her career for a year to sample possible careers missed in the race to be ‘successful’. Her memoir My What If Year raises lots of questions about the meaning of success, fulfilment, careers and pivots, rethinking failure and what it means to be alive. Really alive.

For anyone looking for a change in their life, this laugh out loud book about a harried 40-year-old CEO with eight-year-old twins who decides to become an intern for a year will inspire you to give it a go. And an intern during Covid, no less. A Harvard and LSE grad, plus perfectionist and control freak, Miranda worked as a CEO of a social impact company she had founded with her adoring husband. As good as her life looked, she was overworked and exhausted.

After a drunken night out with girlfriends brainstorming their dream jobs, Miranda took the plunge. With the tentative blessing of her husband and twins, she interned for a Broadway theatre (mostly filling water jugs), a London art gallery (where she learned catalogue raisonné had nothing to do with raisins) a luxurious Scottish hotel where she realised it’s ok to be really bad at something and helping a sassy ‘we got you babes’ on-line fitness class which Miranda compared to oatmeal raisin cookies;

On the outside, you might mistake them for chocolate chip, but once you took a bite, it was clear it was misery masquerading as joy, pain pretending to be pleasure.’

I caught up with Miranda who lives in Scotland on the remote island of Skye.

I loved your straight-talking humour. One of my favourite examples is at the end of your memoir when you compare the need for a new life to a pair of jeans that have become saggy- ‘they no longer make your tush look really cute.” Can you expand on this analogy?

Yes, I love any opportunity to talk about my rear end.

Seriously though, I love this analogy so thank you for noticing it. I remain a devoted fan of skinny jeans (which I realize are the new mom jeans, but I am who I am), but the same thing always happens. They start out fitting great. You look amazing. Everything is working and you walk down the street feeling like a million bucks. But after a while, the stretch in them becomes more of a sag. A fresh wash might do the trick for a day or two, but eventually the fabric stops fitting as well as it did once.

This is exactly what happened to me with my career. There was a point where it was exactly like those brand-new jeans – a perfect fit. But over time, I grew (or shrunk) and eventually it became too comfortable. So comfortable that I didn’t have to try, I wasn’t stretching (neither were the jeans). In the case of my professional life, I wasn’t as challenged as I once was, I wasn’t learning as much as I had before. That’s how I knew it was time for a new challenge. And also some new jeans.

You are a second generation Cuban American, how did your year-long stint change your definition of success?

I had always felt like success was a state I would one day achieve: I would get the job title, or the money, or the house, or the husband. And then that would be it. I didn’t realize that maybe once I had all those things, I would still be craving more.

Growing up, success for me was also about being the best, in every circumstance. It occurred to me during my what if year that I had avoided doing things I might have loved because I couldn’t be the best – singing or painting or stand-up paddleboarding. But in doing so, I narrowed my path so much that I felt like I had nowhere to go.

Now it’s about more than being the best or winning. I tried new things and failed at many of them, and the world didn’t fall apart. Those things are no longer as important metrics to me as things like learning and joy.

Tell us about your spin-off podcast Quit Your Day Job? How did that come about?

My amazing publisher, Zibby Owens, also had a podcast network and she emailed her authors: does anyone have any show ideas? I was not a podcast “person” but I did have an idea for a show called Quit Your Day Job; for me it was basically a way to continue one of my favorite parts of the internship experience without leaving home: learning what dreams jobs were really like by talking to people who worked in them.

I have done nearly 50 interviews and each has been a true joy, and a beautiful opportunity to peek into a different life. I chatted with a former spy for the CIA, a gardener, a pair of ballroom dancers, and a tv director. It was too much fun and never felt like work.

One conversation that stands out was with Bianca Horn, an actress who had been in the cast of Assassins which I interned on. She talked about the challenges of acting, the rejection, the fact that she had kept up a restaurant job to pay bills between gigs, but she never gave up. And now she has just recently made her Broadway debut!

Click here for the rest of my Q&A with Miranda on UK writers’ s site 26. I also highly recommend reading articles by Miranda

They’re funny, topical and wise. She got a pap smear during Covid just as an excuse to leave the house. That article is called  “I Was Desperate to Leave the House and then I Found the ‘Wild Women’.

Happy Reading!

May, 2023

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This Tender Land, is an epic story that will draw you in and take you away to a different time and place in America’s checkered past – just what the doctor ordered for these lockdown days. Inspired by The Tales of Huckleberry Finn and The Odyssey, Krueger’s book will immerse you in a world both loving and cruel, depression era Minnesota where four orphans escape the merciless Lincoln Indian Training School  in a canoe along the Gilead River, all four searching for home. If you liked Where the Crawdads Sing, then this American saga full of captivating characters and gorgeous prose is for you. If you want to get lost in a story – and who doesn’t right now – This Tender Land will do it. It also will make you fall in love with America again- its beauty and vastness, and the wide cast of personalities who inhabit it.

I’m curious about your writing process. You book is 450 pages long, (I wish it was longer) much of it written in a notebook at the crack of dawn in your local coffee shop in St Paul, Minnesota where you live. Can you tell us about your process? How much of it is planned before you set pen to paper?

 My approach to writing a manuscript depends largely on the type of story I’m creating. Before I began composing stand-alone novels, I was best known for my long-running Cork O’Connor mystery series. Because a mystery is such a tightly woven fabric of storytelling, I generally think those stories through from start to finish before I ever put my fingers to my laptop keyboard.

This Tender Land is a different kind of story, a sprawling epic, and I took a more organic approach in its creation. I knew very few details of the story when I began the writing. I knew it was going to be, in a way, a homage to Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I knew it would be set during the Great Depression. And I knew I would structure the narrative in the same way Homer structured theOdyssey, that the four vagabonds would have adventures which mirrored those experienced by Odysseus in his long journey from Troy back to Ithaca. Then I began the writing and simply let the story reveal itself to me as I composed. It was an extraordinarily exhilarating experience, creating my own epic tale.

While you wrote about a very painful time in American history, the Great Depression, your book is full of hope and love. We are going through a very difficult time now. Do you see any parallels?

 The setting for This Tender Land is the Great Depression, a time when we had a significant homeless population in the United States. We have that same circumstance today. It was a time when an enormous number of people were out of work and desperately seeking jobs that would pay a liveable wage. Exactly the situation we have here now. It was a time of great social and economic divide in our nation, just as we see today. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

One of the messages I hope readers take from This Tender Land is that as long as we have hope, we’ll find a way to a better place. It’s only when we lose hope that we have no future.

If you couldn’t be a writer, what would you like to be?

The only other job I ever really wanted aside from writing was to be forest ranger in one of our National Parks.

You can read the rest of my interview here on 26 to inspire the love of words in business and in life. Here, here!

January, 2021

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Fortunately, Randi is a gifted and witty storyteller, and there are lots of stories to tell from the London lab where the idea of hormones first came about to  a basement at Yale University filled with jars of bottled brains to a canine sex lab. Randi weaves a colourful tale dotted with clever scientists and scheming hucksters. Hot flashes, vaginal dryness, low libido, depression, rage, irritability and exhaustion, yes hormones have a lot to answer for.

Randi – who lectures at Yale and is an adjunct at Columbia University-  demystifies the role hormones play in controlling just about everything. I caught up with Randi in New York where she lives with her husband and four children

If you had to single out your favorite hormone, which would it be? Why?

Oh, tough question. You’re asking me to play favorites? Well, maybe oxytocin—which helps squeeze the womb to get the baby out and also gets the milk flowing for breast milk (all four of my children were breastfed; my daughters had trouble weaning..) Oxytocin has also been tied to mother-baby bonds in goats and rodents—and recent research suggests it may play a role in human social aspects.

But… there’s a lot of wacky stuff going on, with all sorts of oxytocin sprays and candies touted to help you lure that guy at the bar. Nope—that’s not what oxytocin does. So I’m enticed by how the hucksters are using seeds of truth and extrapolating it to market oxytocin. But I’m also intrigued by the real science in laboratories around the world trying to understand this crucial —and still mysterious—hormone.

You’ve written two history books – Get Me Out about childbirth and your latest Aroused about hormones. Both have eye catching titles.

Similarly, two of your earlier articles for the NYT “So Lucky to Have Given Birth in England” and “The Novice: Hardly Out of Diapers and Now into Yoga” are great, witty titles. How much weight do you put on a good title? And what advice would you give writers in trying to come up with one?

Titles are so important—and that’s not my forte. We do judge books by their covers (thank you to my the team of artists working on my book!!) and we decide whether to read an article based on the title. I think the key is short, snappy but not misleading.

The rest of my Q&A with Randi is available here, on 26, a site to inspire the love of words.

If you want to learn more about hormones, may I recommend this interview with Chelsea Clinton. It’s an hour long so you may want to fast forward.

And obviously, buy the book!

December, 2017

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