Q & A with Author Adrienne Brodeur
Adrienne Brodeur’s debut memoir Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover, and Me tells the story of the affair the author’s mother Malabar had with a close family friend. Early on, she drew her daughter, Brodeur, into the subterfuge, a conspiracy which lasted years and had long-lasting effects on Brodeur.
The memoir was bid on by fourteen U.S. publishers in a heated auction, with foreign rights sold in numerous countries. Entertainment Weekly called it a “twisted mother-daughter story” that “could be the next big memoir.” Film rights were preemptively bought by Chernin Entertainment, with Kelly Fremon Craig, director of “The Edge of Seventeen,” set to direct.
Beginning to End – Hard Mouth: Author, Amanda Goldblatt
Beginning to End is a series from Spine following a book from writing through acquisition, design and on to publication and publicity. For our second "season," we're looking at Hard Mouth, Amanda Goldblatt's debut adventure novel about a woman facing—and sometimes fleeing from—her father's drawn-out battle with cancer. Counterpoint Press publishes the book this month. We begin the series by talking with Goldblatt.
Scott Jurek, Venturing into the Wilderness for North
Scott Jurek ran 2,189 miles in just 46 days in 2015, and set a record for the Fastest Known Time attempt for the Appalachian Trail. That's an average of about 50 miles a day. Or, in more comprehensible terms, 84 back-to-back marathons. He just did it.
In North, out last spring in paperback from Little, Brown Spark, Jurek and his wife, Jenny Jurek, describe the resilience and exhaustion on their plunge into the wilderness, and readers hitch a hike for the mucky ride. The Jureks portray what becomes possible when you work to make a dream into a manifestation.
Jane Healey on Research for The Beantown Girls and Women’s Stories in History
With her second work of historical fiction, Jane Healey knew that she wanted to highlight a story of lesser-known women. So when she came across the story of the Red Cross Clubmobile girls, American women who volunteered to bring a piece of home to soldiers in World War II, she was instantly drawn to them. The Red Cross Clubmobile girls became the subject of her new novel, The Beantown Girls, out last February from Lake Union.
Positively Un-Precious: The Writing Practice of Alison Stine
When The Kenyon Review published Alison Stine’s essay “On Poverty” on Leap Day of 2016, the Appalachian author’s commentary on classism in the writing world-- a piece full of bite but avoiding vitriol--went viral. Like, really viral. Stine’s work has appeared in publications typically associated with the literary elite (read: writers who got a head start): The Paris Review, The Atlantic, The Nation, Tin House, and others. Two years after “On Poverty” made its debut, SPINE caught up with Stine, whose novel The Grower will appear from Mira in fall 2020.
Kelleigh Greenberg-Jephcott on Writing Swan Song
Author Kelleigh Greenberg-Jephcott’s start in screenwriting and directing fostered an early interest in adaptation.
“I was always interested in the art of adapting works of literature for the screen,” Greenberg-Jephcott said. She related a life-changing incident from 2006.
“I was in a villa in Provence having received a fellowship for a Tolstoy adaptation I’d written, and was inspired by authors present to try my hand at prose fiction,” Greenberg-Jephcott recalled. “I had a childhood passion for Capote and was intrigued by the women he called his Swans, who kept cropping up in the Clarke and Plimpton biographies, as well as in Truman’s work. I knew what I had in mind for their collective and individual narratives was too expansive a tale for a feature film—even a series risked not fully capturing their unique voices. I began what would become a ten year process of research and gestation.”
The Writer's Practice: Polis Loizou, Disbanded Kingdom
How does the co-founder of a theatre company create a novel that captures the tumult of coming-of-age in modern London? For Polis Loizou, Disbanded Kingdom developed like a collage.
It began with Loizou’s journals written when he was 24 years-old. Like Oscar, Disbanded Kingdom’s main character, Loizou describes himself at that time as “bumbling and directionless.” The journals captured the emotional journey of discovering how he fit in the world after university, but turning that into a novel was a challenge.
The Writer's Practice: Mike Scardino, Bad Call
Half a century ago, Mike Scardino served as an ambulance attendant for St. John's Queens Hospital. In the late '60s, working an ambulance didn't require training beyond what the Red Cross (or in Scardino's case, the Boy Scouts) offered. The job paid better than anything else a young college student could earn on breaks, but it was brutal, physically and emotionally.
Q & A with Sea Witch Author, Sarah Henning
“I never could quite escape the fact that I wanted to write books,” said former journalist-turned-novelist Sarah Henning. “I think it’s impossible for us to run away from who we really want to be… Dreams don’t die even when we’re adults and have a mortgage and kids. Some people stuff those dreams down and let them rot in their guts and some of us go for it, even if it seems selfish or silly, though dreams never are. Anyone who tells you that you’re either of those things for going after what you want most likely has a big dream-shaped ulcer in their gut.”
The Writer's Practice: Steve Kistulentz, Panorama
Twenty-first century America visually consumes cataclysmic events. A shooting, a plane crash, a terrorist attack — these tragedies we process through videos captured by strangers' cameras, presented to us by newscasters or posted by unknown users online. Watching, we may feel pain or horror or shock, but also we experience a disconnect, pulling these moments into our minds via screens.
