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Joshilyn Jackson, Author

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Joshilyn Jackson, Novelist

Titles and Book Covers. They go together like bearded ladies and clowns at a crowded circus. It’s what catches your eye when you’re browsing through the library and Barnes & Noble or scrolling on Amazon and Kobo. It’s what first caught my eye when I came across gods of Alabama by Joshilyn Jackson. Don’t you just love that title (with the small g for gods), and the cover, which showed a retro photo of a woman driving down the road in a convertible.

But, the writing in-between the covers is what made me a fan of this author. It soon becomes obvious to the reader that this is a writer who enjoys her own stories!

Joshilyn Jackson is a New York Times bestselling novelist of five books, and gods of Alabama was her first. According to the Library Journal in their starred review of her first book: “Forget steel magnolias—meet titanium blossoms in Jackson’s debut novel, a potent mix of humor, murder, and a dysfunctional Southern family.”

But, she didn’t stop there, and she has kept on producing novels that exhibit wit, warmth, stories of love and betrayal. Everything you want in a book. Her latest is A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty (pub. 2012), which has recently come out in paperback.  The Atlanta Magazine  calls it… “her latest Southern Gothic joyride, Joshilyn Jackson creates an unforgettable story…brilliant.”

Her books have been translated into a dozen languages, won SIBA’s novel of the year, twice been a #1 Book Sense Pick, and twice been shortlisted for the Townsend prize.

Below is the interview.

1) You were on the February 2011 cover of Vanity Fair with other Southern authors such as Kathryn Stockett (The Help), Susan Rebecca White (Bound South), Karin Slaughter (Best selling Crime writer), and Natasha Trethewey, the 2007 Pulitzer Prize winner for poetry, as well as others. What do you believe sets this group apart as a literary group? Do you feel there is an influence from previous Southern writers like Katherine Porter, Shirley Jackson, Eudora Welty, Alice Walker?

I’m not sure we are a literary group. I mean, you’re looking at the Poet Laureate of the United Freakin’ States right there. And, you know, me. So. That’s quite a spectrum already when you look at just TWO of us.

I think it’s a hugely diverse group, and the ONLY thing that makes us a group is location. We all have our own IT we need to say, and we are trying to say our it in exactly our own ways. But, yeah, Atlanta is chock full of talented women doing a vast array of fascinating things with words right now. That’s  true in music and visual arts, too—-Atlanta has a pulsing, living, visceral female art scene. I don’t say this to discount major talents like David Bottoms or Joseph Skibell just because they have outies instead of innies. But Atlanta is FAT AND GLORIOUS with women  writers who are blowing my mind in a variety of ways—I think the point of the Vanity Fair piece was to show a small selection of us that represented the broadness of female interests, styles, themes, and voices happening right here, right now.

As for the history of Southern women writers—well that’s a rich, loamy patch of earth to come of age in, for all of us.


2) Do your books come out the way you intended them?  Or do they get away from you during the creative process the character goes one way when you thought they should have gone the other way?

They never come out as I intend. That illusion happens, yes, where I feel the book has its own life and is now haring off in new direction without bothering to inform me first so I could pack the proper footwear for the climate… I’m a straight up organic writer, and it is an inefficient and ridiculous way to try and make a book. It’s also the only that works for me.



3) You’ve indicated your first novel is still under your bed, and never to be published. How do you think working your way through that unpublished work led you to your first published book, gods in Alabama?

Two of ‘em, actually. I may at some point make them available for DL on my website, if people are interested. I don’t want to take a year or two to revise them into something more like what I write now—I have too many books I want to write to go backwards and try to re-care about these. They are what they are. They are not perfect, but I love them, and I am grateful to them. Writing them let me learn how to write a book. The only way to learn to write a book is to read a million of them and then sit down and write one. But the learning curve is big. It takes years. Some people write and rewrite the same book for five or ten years and at the end of that time, they know how. I chose to write one book after another, and it took the same amount of time.


4) Writing dialogue is hard enough for writers, but you manage to get that “Southern” voice into your characters so well. Do you have suggestions to others on how to do this in their writing (whether Southern, Northern or Japanese, Cuban, etc) ?


Read aloud! I read everything aloud multiple times. If you want to catch your own regional voice, listen to yourself reading it. Some people can’t hear themselves, so if it doesn’t work for you,  get someone ELSE to read it to you. If you are writing in your native tongue, you can hear where it goes wrong much more quickly than you can see it.



5) Your characters are quirky, likable, intelligent and usually go against the norm of society. When you are starting out on an idea for a book, do you come up with a character first, or the idea of a plot?   For instance,  the character, Ro Grandee in Backseat Saints was a minor character in gods in Alabama so how did Ro come about as a fully developed person hightailing it out of Texas with her trusty dog, Fat Gretel? (Loved that cover btw!)

Oh thank you — That’s so kind. Rose was a pushy little object from the very beginning. When I was first writing gods in Alabama, I planned her as “Jim’s Girlfriend” and felt she would be a very minor character. She did not appear in the draft until chapter 6, but as I wrote what I thought would be her single scene, it kept streeeeetching until the whole chapter was riddled with her. She is such an instigator! Big Trouble loves Rose and Rose loves Big Trouble right back. I realized I needed her energy and drive to start off the action in chapter 1; I went back and revised to make Rose Mae be the push that sends Arlene careening home to Alabama.
 
By the time I finished gods, Rose had insinuated herself all through the book, and I suspected even then that I wasn’t finished with her—or perhaps she wasn’t finished with me. About two years before I wrote BACKSEAT SAINTS, I woke up in the middle of the night. I had been dreaming about her. I shook my sleeping husband and said, “Honey! I just realized, everything Rose Mae Lolley says in gods in Alabama is a lie, and now I know why she is really looking for Jim Beverly.” He said, “Hi! It is 3 AM!” He passed out again, but I stayed up the rest of the night writing little snatches of what would become this book, trying to catch her voice.

6) Do you think your background in theater was an influence on your writing style, and if so, how?

I think my acting background has had a huge effect on my writing. The only thing that has influenced my writing more was becoming a mother. I think the most important tool actors and novelists share is a facility for empathy. Some people are born with a huge facility for empathy, but I was not. I learned it, working as an actor, and I learned it more deeply when I had babies.



7) Your most recent book, A Grown Up Kind Of Pretty, is a mystery with the discovery of a backyard burial and involves the complex relationship of a family of women, the Slocumbs. How do see yourself as evolving as a writer with this fifth book? Does writing get any easier for you?

No, never. It gets harder, in fact, as I want to make sure I am not obsessing and worry warting my same tropes into nubs. Of course, as a writer, I have areas that continue to interest me thematically—redemption, motherhood, brokenness, the mechanics of grace…These are the things I explore, but I want to make sure it is progressive. The questions I try to explore with story have to be the ones driving me now, not the ones that drove me five years ago.

I tell you what, I am more interested in MEN all of a sudden. I have been writing about women, mostly female characters, female relationships, for 5 books now. The last male narrator I wrote was in one of my “under the bed” books.

But in A GROWN UP KIND OF PRETTY there is a male/female best friendship between a weedy little big-headed kid named Roger and the youngest Slocumb, Mosey. I got so obsessed with them. I LOVE all their scenes together, all their dialogue and their interplay makes me SO happy. They crack me up and they break my heart. I think I wrote the whole book, in some ways, for a scene near the end involving Roger and Mosey’s left booby. If you read the book, you know the line I mean. I wrote more than 94 thousand words to get to write that line, writing toward it, waiting for it, hoping it would happen. I still shamelessly adore it.

8: What are you working on now?

The book I am writing now has two narrators who meet when they are caught in a hostage situation. Both are inside a Circle K when a man comes in to rob it. One is a 21 year old college student raising a three year old son; she has experienced a Virgin birth. The other is 30 something geneticist who recently lost his family. He emphatically does not believe in miracles. The girl, Shandi, begins their story, by saying, “I fell in love with William Ashe at gunpoint, in a Circle K.”

Now, each of them has a close friend. Shandi’s is a poet named Walcott. William’s is a divorce attorney named Paula. In a lot of ways, the Shandi/ Walcott, and William/ Paula relationships grew OUT of Mosey and Roger, because I was not finished exploring the mechanics of this kind of friendship. They are possible versions of Mosey and Roger, one pair in their twenties, one pair in their thirties. So this book came out of that book, but A GROWN UP KIND OF PRETTY is really about the search for identity, which is something I have not really looked at since BETWEEN. Meanwhile, this new book, SOMEONE ELSE’S LOVE STORY is about the nature of faith. But the relationships definitely came out of PRETTY, in a “next step” way.




9) What was the best advice you ever got on your writing?  The worst advice?

BICHOC is the best advice. Butt in Chair, Hands on keyboard. This is how books happen. By writing them.

The worst advice I ever heard, and I have heard it MULTIPLE times! “Oh, writers should not READ! If I READ I could have VOICE LEAK and be INFLUENCED!” My answer: Go read Flannery O’Connor and PRAY TO GOD that she influences you. You should BE so lucky.

Every writer I know who is producing interesting things, they are all huge huge huge readers. Addicts. Real writers read. The end.




10) Please give us an Eight Word Description of Your Life.

YARRRRRRRG This is nearly impossible. Everything I write sounds flippant or pretentious or both. I think this is the kind of question only a poet can answer. Lord, but I SUCK at poetry. BUT OKAY! Here we go:
God, kids, husband, dogs, write, yoga, eat. Repeat.

Check out Joshilyn Jackson’s website HERE.   

Her funny blog, Faster Than Kudzu.  and Facebook Page

gods in Alabama

Between Georgia

The Girl Who Stopped Swimming

Backseat Saints

A Grown-up Kind Of Pretty

A Good Author is Never Hard to Find

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I have a gift for you.  One of Flannery O’Connor’s more famous short stories was A Good Man is Hard to Find, written in 1953. It’s about a selfish woman – a grandmother – who finds redemption at the hands of a killer, known at The Misfit, just at the point where he shoots her in the chest. Like most of O’Connor’s writings, there is a moral magnitude to the message, somewhere within the violence. It’s a vivid read.

My favorite line in the story was of course, this one:
“She would of been a good woman,” The Misfit said, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”

Oh yes, that gift I mentioned earlier? It’s a 1959 audio mp3 of Flannery O’Connor herself reading  A Good Man is Hard to Find.  Click on this LINK to go to the site.

In April of 1959–five years before her death at the age of 39 from lupus–O’Connor ventured away from her secluded family farm in Milledgeville, Georgia, to give a reading at Vanderbilt University. It gave me goosebumps to hear her voice telling the story of a family’s trip that ends in disaster and redemption.

Thank you to the OPEN CULTURE website, where I found this nugget. I suggest you check them out, because they have such interesting stuff, like William Faulkner reading his Nobel Prize speech,  or a video clip of Louis Armstrong on The Johnny Cash Show (yes, Johnny Cash hosted a musical variety show from 1969 to 1971!)

And to close out, here are some quotes from Flannery O’Connor:

  • I am a writer because writing is the thing I do best.
  • All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it, but most people think of these stories as hard, hopeless and brutal.
  • I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one.
  • When a book leaves your hands, it belongs to God. He may use it to save a few souls or to try a few others, but I think that for the writer to worry is to take over God’s business
  • The beginning of human knowledge is through the senses, and the fiction writer begins where human perception begins. He appeals through the senses, and you cannot appeal to the senses with abstractions.

Making the Reader Drunk on Words

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“My arms ached, my back was cramped and I was trembling with the prolonged terror of a fall. Besides this, the unbroken darkness had had a distressing effect upon my eyes. The air was full of the throb and hum of machinery pumping air down the shaft.”
THE TIME MACHINE – H.G. Wells

In March, 2012, there was an article in The New York Times – Sunday Review by Anne Murphy Paul, titled, Your Brain on Fiction.  Now, isn’t that a great suggestive title? Fiction as a mind-enhancing drug, one that evokes images of the brain drunk on words. So, what does it mean? Well, I recommend you read the whole article, because it is not only fascinating information (and Knowledge is Power), but to a writer, it can also be used as a guide to improving your own writing. (Click Here for Link to Article)

The excerpt above of The Time Machine by H.G. Wells (which I recently re-read and was delighted to see it still held my interest) gives us a example of how to stimulate the reader’s brain with its emotional “actions.”

There is a feeling of movement to the words, texture and emotions of terror.

Ms. Paul’s article talks about research by a team out of Emory University about how the reader’s brain actively reacts to descriptions with textures, touch, a sense of movement and smells. We can truly live vicariously through fictional characters and their longings, frustrations and trials and tribulations. As writers, we need to remember to be conscious of this fact when we are “moving” our characters through the interweaving fabric of our stories.

According to the Ms. Paul’s article, a team of Emory University researchers also reports that …metaphors like “The singer had a velvet voice” and “He had leathery hands” roused the sensory cortex while phrases matched for meaning, like “The singer had a pleasing voice” and “He had strong hands,” did not.

Which brings me to one of my favorite use of a metaphor by an author. It comes from a John Irving’s book, Prayers for Owen Meany. Read it and weep all you writers, for this has to send your sensory cortex into overdrive!

“You’ve seen the mice caught in the mousetraps?” she asked me. “I mean caught – their little necks broken – I mean absolutely dead,” Grandmother said. “Well, that boy’s voice,“ my grandmother told me, “that boy’s voice could bring those mice back to life!”

Obviously, there is only one H.G. Wells, and one John Irving, but we can tear a page from their fiction on how it should be done. I will leave you with an excerpt of a story I’m working on currently. I can only hope it tickles your brain, too.

Big Doofus is usually right, since his coon dog’s snout knows what curdled fear smells like, and surely those escapees stink from it as they push through the brambles, crawl over rocks, twist an ankle in shallow holes and get bitch-slapped by low-slung tree limbs. They always lose their sense of direction, all the time going deeper and deeper into Catalysta Woods. Wheezing hard and bloodied from their efforts, the prey arrives at the Clearing. There is no getting out of the woods.

If you want, please use the comment section to give me a brief example of your own efforts to engage the reader’s imagination.

Writing Advice from Stephen King and Oscar Wilde

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Imagine being in a writing class with Stephen King and Oscar Wilde. What a class that would be….  To get the unique flavor of this unprecedented class, here are some quotes from these authors.


“Fiction is the truth inside the lie.”
― Stephen King

“The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple.”
― Oscar Wilde

_____________________________

“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”
― Stephen King, On Writing

“This morning, I took out a comma and this afternoon I put it back in again.”
― Oscar Wilde

_____________________________

“Books are a uniquely portable magic.”
― Stephen King

“If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.”
― Oscar Wilde

_____________________________

“Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.”
― Stephen King

“I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works.”
― Oscar Wilde

_____________________________

“His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language.”
― Oscar Wilde

“I am the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries.”
― Stephen King

_____________________________

“If you don’t have the time to read, you don’t have the time or the tools to write.”
― Stephen King

“One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.”
― Oscar Wilde

Prototypes and Tributes

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Prototypes for fictional characters come to a writer in many ways. The man who became the basis for Sherlock Holmes was Dr. Joseph Bell, a distinguished Scotch surgeon. Sir Arthur Doyle was a student of Dr. Bell’s at the Edinburgh University school. It was there that he became impressed by Dr. Bell’s remarkable powers of observation and deduction, through which he could diagnose illness almost on sight. Sir Arthur transferred these same abilities to Sherlock Holmes when it came to solving crimes.

We bring all this up because back in December, we did an interview with Naomi Hirahara, author of the Mas Arai series. (click Here for interview) 

The character, Mas was based on her father, who was a gardener, like Mas, (and in fact, his name is her father’s spelled backwards).  Isamu (“Sam”) Hirahara sounds like a remarkable man. He was born in California, but taken to Hiroshima, Japan as an infant. He was only miles away from the epicenter of the atomic-bombing in 1945, yet survived. Shortly after the end of WWII, her father returned to the States, where he went into the gardening and landscaping business in Los Angeles area.

Sam Hirahara knew his daughter had based a character on him. Recently, he passed away peacefully on January 18, 2012 after an prolonged illness at the age of eighty-two in his home.  But thanks to his daughter, he will live on through his daughter’s tribute to him, in Mas Arai, a character who exhibits quiet strength and grace.

Be sure to check out the Mas Arai Facebook page, as we extend our sympathy to Naomi and her family on their loss.

Ode to Smith Corona and Underwood

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No. 5 Underwood American Standard Typewriter -photo by D.S. Renzulli

I’m feeling a bit sentimental tonight. Very recently, I upgraded my Apple OS to Lion (a belated hear me roar! to Steve J.).  That’s when I discovered that I could no longer use my trusty Microsoft Word, version 10 or thereabouts!  You have to understand that I’ve been using Microsoft Office software since 1989, first at work, and then at home. I’ve written reports, done graphs in Excel, setup PowerPoint slideshows, written books (yes, completed and whole and not published), short stories (some published), letters, and this particular blog: A Writing Primate.  I loved Word, although I never upgraded after the 10.1. Once I left the working world, I only needed a word processor for my writing, and I was quite happy with the version I was using, thank you very much. After all, you don’t want something too complicated to interrupt the muse at her literary efforts. But, when I went to write after installing Lion, well, the big cat bit me in the ass by telling me that it wouldn’t open this particular Office software version.

Now, I could get an upgrade to Office 2011, but I had Pages on my computer, and I made a life changing decision to try it out. Pages (an Apple program) has been on my Macbook Pro for a few years, but I never got into using it. After all, I had the Word and the Word was all I needed, but sometimes you have to try something different, to make sure your brain cells don’t calcify or dribble out your ears (which can be quite messy). So, this blog is being written on Pages, and after it is done, I will uninstall the Microsoft Office with a ceremonial piping generally used for retiring admirals.

Which brings me to Smith Corona and Underwood. For you youngster, these are typewriters. What are typewriters, you ask? Ah child, they were used before the computer came along, and they were glorious machines. They made clackety-clack noises as you pressed down on the keys, and if you made a mistake, shame on you, you either used “white-out” to cover over the mistake, or start all over again, which, when you think about it, really made you think first about the words you were laying down on that pristine sheet of paper.  My mother gave me her Underwood typewriter when I was ten years old and the thing had to be thirty years old then. It was a huge, hunk of metal and I loved it. At a later Xmas, I got a Smith Corona that purred like a kitten because it was electric. The clack wasn’t quite so clicky any more, but there was still a noise. (When I write on my Macbook Pro, all I hear is my brain yelling, “THINK, THINK, WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO WRITE NEXT, DUMMY?”, so I do miss the noise of a typewriter.

The concept of a typewriter dates back to at least 1714, when an Englishman filed a patent for an artificial machine to impress or transcribe letters singly or progressively one after another. The first typewriter built was for a blind Countess in Italy, so she could write letters, and that was in the early 1800’s. The first successful for the public typewriter (1870) looked like a pin cushion with a writing ball above the paper. Others soon followed, looking more like the typewriters we remember, and one in particular, Sholes & Glidden became popular, because it introduced the QWERTY keyboard (a layout we still use on our computers), although it only typed in capital letters. In the 19th century, the cost of a typewriter was $100. The typewriter also helped our grandmothers and great grandmothers find respectable jobs in office around the country, typing away at business letters written by men. Times have changed our perspective, haven’t they?

I miss my typewriter, and I miss my Word, but you know what? I kind of like this Pages software, too. Whatever tool you use to express yourself, it can only be good, whether using a pen or pencil, or typewriter or laptop, or iPhone, or iPad. It’s awesome to think of all the machines I’ve used to write. What fun, it’s been, and will continue to be. I can’t wait to see what comes next.

Quick! What was the first published novel written on a typewriter?
If you are interested, check out the Comments section below for the answer…

TEN ROTTEN BASTARDS OF FICTION

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They are sleazy, obsessed, murderous and just plain rotten, but we love them anyway! The Baddies are the ones who interest us the most in fiction. We shiver, we shake, and we just can’t believe how bad they can really be, and damned if we’ll put down that book just as we get to the part where they’re behaving at their worst!

Below is the Ten Rotten Bastards of Fiction.  Before you email me, I did NOT include Moriarty of Sherlock Holmes fame. I always believed he was an opium-induced vision of Holmes.  Just my opinion…

Long John Silver – Treasure Island

            He’s like the eccentric uncle of villains. Sure, Silver is sneaky and sly, but that’s what we love about him. Admit it, you rooted for him to escape at the end, don’t you?

Mrs Danvers – Rebecca

            She is the housekeeper from hell! Her obsession with Rebecca drives her to make life more than miserable for the new mistress of Manderley.  At the book’s end, she’s just another crispy critter, or is she?

Hannibal Lecter – Red Dragon

            It’s a hard road for Hannibal. To be a gentleman and a cannibal, what a tough act to balance, but this anthropophagous villain manages it with a threatening charm. Be sure to count your fingers after he bends over your hand to kiss them.

Sauron – The Lord of the Rings

            “The Eye was rimmed with fire, but was itself glazed, yellow as a cat’s, watchful and intent, and the black slit of its pupil opened on a pit, a window into nothing.” Oh, will that unsleeping Eye ever stop watching us? For weeks I had nightmares, how about you?

Bill Sikes – Oliver Twist

            I hated him right off, but when he kicked the ugly dog who adored him, well, that was it for me. Boo! Hiss! He deserved his bad end.

Annie Wilkes – Misery

            You don’t want her as your Number One Fan!

 Frederick Clegg – The Collector

            This guy is creepy. He’d be a good match for Annie Wilkes. He “collects” a beautiful woman like she is a butterfly for his collection, then pins her with his love until her death. Love may be strange but Clegg is stranger!

Police Inspector Javert – Les Miserables

            One thing that villains seem to have in common is obsession. He is inflexible and cruel, and one way or the other, he is determined to be the source of Valjean’s downfall.

Count Dracula – Dracula

            A cousin of Hannibal Lector, for sure. He wants your blood. Throughout the years, he’s been transformed into a cottage industry of movies, books, etc. So, we should consider him the Bill Gates of Villains.

The Clown – IT

            This Baddie really creeped me out. It spoiled circuses forever for me because every clown I saw had sharp, sharp teeth. Thank you, Stephen King!

Did I forget your favorite Rotten Bastard of Fiction? Be sure to let me know via comments.

Jennie Shortridge and Seattle7Writers

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“Writing is a solitary occupation. Family, friends, and society are the natural enemies of the writer. He must be alone, uninterrupted, and slightly savage if he is to sustain and complete an undertaking.”                                                                                         Jessamyn West (author, The Friendly Persuasion)

But does it always have to be like that: an isolated writer surrounded by his or hers imaginary characters.  Not according to Jennie Shortridge and her fellow authors, the Seattle7Writers.

Jennie Shortridge, Author

Jennie Shortridge is the author of When She Flew, which has been selected by Indie Booksellers for the Winter 2011 Reading Group list. Other books by her are Love & Biology, Eating Heaven and Riding with the Queen.

She is also a founding member (along with Garth Stein, author of The Art of Racing in the Rain) of the Seattle7Writers, a collective of Pacific Northwest authors, such as Kit Bakke, Erica Bauermeister, Carol Cassella, Randy Sue Coburn, Maria Dahvana Headley, Mary Guterson, Kevin O’Brien, Laurie Frankel as well as friends of the group like Erik Larson, Mark Lindquist and Terry Brooks, etc.

The Seattle7Writers has a mission to encourage the written word in communities in the Northwest and elsewhere.  They raise money to support literacy through projects like donating used and new books to variety of sites in the Puget Sound region for women, men and children who are currently without homes or bookshelves of their own. They have also raised money for programs like Powerful Schools, Writers in Schools and Path with Arts.

In the fall of 2010, Seattle7Writers brought together thirty-six Pacific Northwest writers for a week-long marathon of writing on stage in Seattle. Imagine writing live, in front of an audience. It sounds like paint drying, but it wasn’t, it ended up being a productive and exciting project.

The results were a novel: Hotel Angeline: A Novel in 36 Voices.

Hotel Angeline: A Novel in 36 Voices

Fifty percent of the proceeds from Hotel Angeline go directly back to the writing and reading community. Seattle7Writers will use these proceeds to award grants to worthy nonprofit organizations making a difference through literacy programs and support of the local arts.

Below is an interview with Jennie Shortridge about that project and about her own writing.

Who are the Seattle 7 Writers, and how did they get together as a group? What is the group’s purpose and mission?

Seattle7Writers really began in 2006, when I met Garth Stein at a reading we were both doing. We became friends and got together for coffee one afternoon to talk shop.  Over the next year, we met for coffee every last Friday of the month, each time inviting other local authors.

We realized that our collective energies could be used, not just to promote our books, but also to give something back to our community, so we formalized the organization in 2009 and began putting on events with proceeds benefiting literacy programs in the Northwest. We also started our Pocket Library program, where we collect donated books and shelve them in unconventional places like shelters and correctional facilities.

At one point there were actually seven of us, but we now have ten core members and thirty-four “Friends of the Seattle7.” You can see all of them at the website here.

How did the idea of a marathon novel come up? Tell us about the plot of Hotel Angeline?

We wanted to do something really fun and different for Arts Crush, a month long celebration of the arts in Seattle. Writers always do readings, so Garth said, “Why don’t we write?”  So we decided to do what we do best and write a novel. It actually got published (and is available on Amazon or at OpenRoadMedia.com and some bookstores. Here’s the blurb from the jacket:

Something is amiss at the Hotel Angeline, a rickety former mortuary perched atop Capitol Hill in rain-soaked Seattle. Fourteen-year-old Alexis Austin is fixing the plumbing, the tea, and all the problems of the world, it seems, in her landlady mother’s absence. The quirky tenants—a hilarious mix of misfits and rabble-rousers from days gone by—rely on Alexis all the more when they discover a plot to sell the Hotel.  Can Alexis save their home? Find her real father? Deal with her surrogate dad’s dicey past? Find true love? Perhaps only their feisty pet crow, Habib, truly knows.

Walk us through the actual process for writing the Hotel Angeline – A Novel in 36 Voices.

We wrote for six days, with each author taking a two-hour stint on the stage at Hugo House and writing a chapter we’d “assigned.” An editorial board (five of us) had met the week before to put together a story idea, characters, etc. Then I mapped out what might happen in each chapter to get from beginning to end (very loosely) and the authors took it from there. They were free to write whatever they wanted to as long as they didn’t kill off the protagonist or introduce a chainsaw.

We had lots of help on site, including managing editors to work with each incoming author to get him or her up to speed. We had volunteers synopsizing as the authors wrote, and we compiled a running account of the story. We had butcher paper on all of the walls in the green room, with new developments, like characters and locations and time passing. It was the craziest and most fun thing I think I’ve ever done. All in front of a live audience in Hugo House and online, where it was streaming live.

You wrote the first words of this marathon novel. Did you feel the pressure to be the first to step up and write live on stage?  Do you remember what you were thinking at the time?

Well, you see, if you’re the first, it’s the easiest! I didn’t have to know what came before or fit in with anyone else. I did have a big job, of course, to introduce the story and location and protagonist, and hint at the issues to come. I just thought it was a blast. It was more fun than I’d imagined it would be, and each writer said that, leaving the stage.

How did the group handle rewriting the final mss? Did each author do it individually, or was someone acting as the overall “chef” to make sure the soup tasted delicious?

Our publisher assigned a wonderful editor to the project and although she used a pretty light touch, she really helped pull it all together, snipping loose ends and tying up dangling threads.

In your own writing, your characters step outside the every day box to do something they’ve never done before, such as Mira in Love and Biology, leaves her family behind to start an unknown new life.  And in your latest book, When She Flew, Jess breaks the rules big time in an effort to help a man and his daughter.  Do you see a part of yourself in these characters and if so, why?

Oh, I’m certain they’re all from some place inside me. As a kid, I loved books about females overcoming hardship and obstacles, and then I overcame a lot of hardship and obstacles. So, I love putting those kinds of stories out into the world.

You used to be a musician (singer with a band). Can you relate the two creative impulses (music and writing) together? Has your music background had an effect on your writing?

I think what I really was all along was a writer. Singing in a band was a way for me to communicate my writing (poetry) to an audience. I’m an okay singer, but I think I really found creative satisfaction when I began writing full time 16 years ago. I still sing with my hubby and friends occasionally, just for fun, but I get a lot more out of writing every day.

What do the Seattle 7 Writers plan on doing now after Hotel Angeline?

Funny you should ask! We have two events on October 15th in honor of Arts Crush this year. The first is Write Here Write Now, a day-long intensive writing conference for all levels of writers, with tons of Northwest authors all around to help, all together. Lots of writing. And that night we’re putting on a super weird fun performance of authors reading, but in theatrical ways. It’s called Up Late Reading, and there will be music and comedy and dance and adult beverages and a silent auction . . . all very fun, and all to benefit literacy in the Northwest. There’s info at our website, www.seattle7writers.org.

Can you give us a hint about your next book?

I’d love to—I’m just about to finish it and turn it in! It’s the story of a Seattle woman who experiences amnesia and flees her fiancé, a condition known as dissociative fugue. When she turns up standing knee-deep in the San Francisco Bay, he comes to get her and bring her back to Seattle, and their life together begins again, even though she remembers nothing of the past. The story was inspired by a true story of a man from Olympia who experienced the same thing. There was a story in the paper about his fiancée going to get him in Denver and I found it very romantic but mysterious and intriguing. So, I’ve written a love story wrapped in a mystery. My working title is The Amnesiac’s Love Story, but I’m getting a little push back on it, so who knows what it will end up being at this point. Ah, publishing.

Please give us an 8-word description of your life.

Writing writing writing writing writing writing writing sleep. (Until my deadline.)

Jennie Shortridge website

Core Group of Seattle7Writers

Seattle7Writers FaceBook

New Writers Corner for Sept. 2011

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This month at our New Writers Corner, we are looking at authors who view history as a chance to tell fascinating stories through the eyes of real people. It’s a genre that is hard to pull off, but when it’s done right, as these authors did, it gives the reader a chance to get lost in an era other than their own. Check out these authors and buy their work. After all, we want to encourage them to keep writing!

The Painter from Shanghai is a historical fiction novel based on the life of Pan Yuliang, a Chinese artist born in 1899. Based in New York, Jennifer Cody Epstein has written for Self, The Wall Street Journal, and the Chicago Tribune. She has published short fiction in several journals and was a finalist in a Glimmer Train fiction contest.

Fighting Castro: A Love Story is a fascinating glimpse into the world of Cuba during the time of Castro’s takeover of the country as seen through the eyes of an actual couple:  Lino and Emy.  The book combines historical fact and storytelling of a turbulent time.  Kay Abella is a professional journalist, author, and editor who has been a magazine journalist in New York and in France where she worked as a translator and journalist for the Chicago Tribune. She is now a full-time writer of fiction and nonfiction.

Coffeyville by C. E. L. Welsh is an interesting mixture of using a historical character like Harry Houdini in a novel full of misdirection and mystery.  This is a short novel at a great price ($2.99). C.E.L. Welsh is an author of fiction living in Texas.

Have you come across a book like the one above that you’d like to share with us? Be sure to tell us in a comment below.