Indie Spotlight: Andrew Hook w/ Eugen Bacon

 Welcome to our Indie Spotlight series, in which TNBBC gives small press authors the floor to shed some light on their writing process, publishing experiences, or whatever else they'd like to share with you, the readers!

Today, we are joined by Andrew Hook and Eugen Bacon, as they discuss the importance of choosing the right setting for their novel Secondhand Daylight, which releases in October. 

Check it out! 

Location Location Location

 By Andrew Hook, author of Secondhand Daylight with Eugen Bacon

 

The setting in a story is just as important as character and plot, but how do you make the decision where to pay big attention to setting? Does it have to be somewhere you know well? Can you pluck a place out of the air and do some research? Or do you cheat (!), aka invent, and make the whole thing up?

 

I’ve done all three, but in my forthcoming novel – Secondhand Daylight – there was a very specific reason for choosing the location, which is predominantly set in Melbourne, Australia: my co-author lives there.

 

Secondhand Daylight is a collaborative time-travel novel written with the African Australian author, Eugen Bacon. When we suggested writing a novel together, I was aware Eugen was living in Melbourne, but I had also spent a few months there in 1991 while travelling. I had fond memories of the place – especially the Sarah Sands Hotel, which was a pub that had an alternative disco on Thursday nights and where I spent a lot of time on the dancefloor.

 

Knowing we both had knowledge of the city centred the novel, but also realising I could start my character’s journey in the early nineties, meant I could harness my experiences of Melbourne at that time. We initially agreed I’d write Green’s story, and Eugen would write Zada’s, but this shifted as we started writing—and that’s a whole different story! As my character, Green, moved forward into the present day, Eugen could pick up on the vibe of the city now, and then extrapolate that into the future. Melbourne becomes as much of a character in the novel as our protagonists, Green and Zada:

 

Thursday night I was back at the Sarah Sands Hotel. It afforded me an approximation of community. The post-punk crowd dressed as extras from a Cure video. The DJ who knew which records to spin, the dance floor which was my church. Within that rectangle, under multicoloured lights, cossetted by music, I spun and twisted, cavorted my body into memories and shapes, glimpsed othersdoing the same, amorphous companions who returned to the shadows once the song finished.

 

Melbourne comes alive in its own way in this story, not just in New Brunswick, where our Sarah Sands Hotel is located, enriched with my own memory of it, but also in Essendon, where Green owns a cul de sac, and in Collingwood, where Green’s father now lives with the woman who has replaced Green’s mother, and in Ringwood, where Green’s friend Batesman (Batey) lives with his family – the latter being Eugen’s renditions of a new Melbourne. Hopefully our experiences – mine and Eugen’s – make the novel more authentic.

 

Gaps in my memory were augmented by internet searches and I was also able to revisit suburbs such as Moonee Ponds via Google Streetview, which coupled nostalgia with being able to see how the area had changed. Eugen could draw on the present day, of course, and extrapolate – the creative author she is, who loves experimenting.

 

During the novel, my character also reminisces about time spent travelling the Gold Coast around the Whitsunday Islands. Another trip I had made. Again, personal experience came into play (except for weed? That was Eugen’s fictional add-on, I swear):

 

Batey and I had each scratched up enough for a plane ticket. I smiled wryly. Don’t even ask, I thought to myself. I’d knocked off something, a fan or an aircon, I couldn’t remember what exactly now. Maybe sold some of my records. Then I got some good hands-on bud, and weed always sold quick on the streets. With all that money, we went no further than Townsville and Noosa…

 

Batey and I, we’d driven north, pulled off the road and down a dirt track at random, so we could take a break and eat pre-bought meat pies and down a couple of tinnies. On a clifftop we’d glanced down into the sparkling azure and caught sight of a school of dolphins, their fins rising and falling in forward movement through the surf. No-one else around. A moment pure for us. At the time, I’d wished I had a girl there.

 

Later, in Zada’s story from the future, the scene replays from Bateman’s perspective:

 

He necks from the bottle of VB. Wipes his mouth. “Green and I went travelling together. There’s a bond there that can’t be broken. Two guys in a camper. No commitments. The naivety of youth. We headed up to Queensland. Noosa. Townsville. The usual. Spent a lot of time around the Whitsundays. Camped out on the beach with fruit bats chittering above us in the trees, their crap bouncing off the tent.” He laughs deeply, now. “One of those ovals dropped into Green’s cup of tea. I let him take a sip before I said anything.”

 

He roars. They’re laughing together. His teeth white as white.

 

“Jeez, those pure white sands at Whitehaven Beach,” says Bateman. “And the girls—a few of those too. But Green had to work harder than I did. He’s more thoughtful, lives less in the moment, you know.” Bateman pauses. “Although I imagine living in the moment is all he has now.”

 

While Melbourne (and Australia in general) worked best for this novel, I would say there are no hard and fast rules when it comes to setting, other than if you are using a real place then try and get the minutiae of your location pinned down as much as possible. There will always be someone ready to comment that a car can’t turn right at that junction, whether in the past, present or future.

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Andrew Hook is a European writer with over 160 short stories in print, including notable appearances in Interzone, Black Static, and several anthologies from PS Publishing and NewCon Press. His fiction has been reprinted in anthologies including Best British Horror 2015 and Best British Short Stories 2020, has been shortlisted for British Fantasy Society awards, and he was longlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Short Story Prize in 2020. As editor/publisher, he has won three British Fantasy Society awards and he also has been a judge for the World Fantasy Awards. Most recent publications include Candescent Blooms (Salt Publishing)—5-star reviewed in the Telegraph. Find him at www.andrew-hook.com or @AndrewHookUK

Eugen Bacon is an African Australian author of several novels and fiction collections. She’s a 2022 World Fantasy Award finalist, and was announced in the honor list of the 2022 Otherwise Fellowships for ‘doing exciting work in gender and speculative fiction’. Her book Danged Black Thing made the 2021 Otherwise Honor List as a ‘sharp collection of Afro-Surrealist work’. Recent books: Mage of Fools (novel), Chasing Whispers (collection) and An Earnest Blackness (essay collection). Eugen has two novels, a novella and three anthologies (ed) out in 2023, together with the US release of Danged Black Thing. Visit her website at eugenbacon.com and Twitter feed at @EugenBacon

Page 69: You Were Watching From the Sand

 

Disclaimer: The Page 69 Test is not mine. It has been around since 2007, asking authors to compare page 69 against the meat of the actual story it is a part of. I loved the whole idea of it and so I'm stealing it specifically to showcase small press titles - novels, novellas, short story collections, the works! So until the founder of The Page 69 Test calls a cease and desist, let's do this thing....

In this installment of Page 69, 

we put Juliana Lamy's You Were Watching From the Sand to the test.

Set up Page 69 for us.

 My Page 69 is the second page of a story called “We Feel It in Punta Cana.” This is a story narrated by a young Haitian boy working as a domestic servant in the home of a wealthy Dominican businessman, circa 1998. Though young, this narrator has eked his way through a series of tense working months at the Rodrigo household, but while he is bringing Don Rodrigo his lunch one day, the plate slips and falls out of his hands. Though he is just as much of a migrant worker as those Haitians working on what many have called “modern-day sugar plantations,” or bateys, in the Dominican countryside, this narrator has had a certain degree of insulation from the batey pace-of-life. Agitated and impulsive, Don Rodrigo takes the narrator to a batey near Punta Cana, where he forces the narrator to witness a moment of shocking violence. This is one of the only stories in the collection whose narrator remains unnamed throughout, insisting on a nearness of consciousness that makes the shock-joy-horror of the narrator as unavoidable of an experience for the reader as it is for the boy whose mind hosts it. 

 

 What is the collection about?

 This collection is about zombie girls and vandalism and geopolitics and Haitianness and horror and the surreality of having to carry out life-making and life-sustaining tasks—eating and talking and singing and such—while mind, body, and country are under siege. It is about Miami and anger and muscle memory and humor and creating people from mud when the loneliness gods you like that. It is about capers and balding tires and children up to no good and grown-ups no to no better. But more than anything, this collection is a tribute to the material, spiritual, and emotional lives of Haitian people.

 

Do you think this page gives our readers an accurate sense of what the collection is about? Does it align itself with the collection’s theme?

 I’m really surprised by how strongly this single page distills so many of this collection’s themes. Social power, loneliness, labor, displacement, family (or the lack thereof)—each has its own claim on this short interaction between the narrator and Don Rodrigo. Give me a few more months and a complimentary speech-writing course, and I’m sure that each of this collection’s stories could be re-worked into a full-throated declamation of power. “We Feel It in Punta Cana” definitely deals with power more explicitly than the other featured pieces do, particularly in the way that it depicts the physicality of power, its immediate and violent bodily collisions with the affected people. Some of the stories here look at ways of re-configuring and re-possessing personal power, as Arbor does in “belly” when she makes her mud person, or as two children named Ezra and Angel do in “Open House” when they keep away their apartment complex’s potential new tenants by destroying vacant units, holding out hope that their evicted friends will be able to return to the units that they’ve kept free of new residents. Other stories spit on entire systems of power, like the two teenagers who decry economic inequality by stealing things from the houses of their wealthy neighbors (“Muscle Memory”).

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“We Feel It in Punta Cana” 

Page 69

All I wanted to do then was be on the other side of what was happening. I wanted to be on the side that would let me forget.

But I’m feeling it all right now, with Don Rodrigo looking through me. I wonder what he’s seeing today. Sometimes I’m his little negrito, his niño listo. The best of my people, the first Haitian helper they’ve had here who never, ever cries even though he (who is me) is so young. Never cries, even when the nighttime comes and they’re sleeping in the back room closest to the chicken shed. Sometimes Don Rodrigo calls me into the living room from the kitchen and reads the newspaper to me.

Do you know who the president is?

No, Don Rodrigo. (I always say, even though I do. Don Rodrigo is happy happy happy when he’s telling me things he thinks I don’t know.)

Well, it’s un hombre de calidad, Leonel Hernandez.

And he’ll look at me and I’ll give him the surprise he needs to see. I’ll draw it on my face, like Rafi and me used to draw those houses in the dirt outside, with fallen sticks from the bannann tree, when we were really little.

He’s done a lot for your people.

Sí, Don Rodrigo.

I’ve done a lot for your people.

Muchas gracias, Don Rodrigo. Que dios le bendiga.

But I’m thinking, right now, while I’m looking at Don Rodrigo’s eyes light like the moon, that this is not going to be one of those times. I don’t say sorry because I know it will make it worse, whatever’s coming. When it rains too hard here all the cars go too fast. Juanma tells me it’s harder to drive. Whatever I say right now, it’ll

be the rain.

What scares me the most, while I’m watching Don Rodrigo get up from the table in the patio, is how quiet his face is. It’s like the pool outside in the backyard when no one’s using it

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Juliana Lamy is a Haitian fiction writer with a bachelor's degree in history and literature from Harvard College. In 2018, she won Harvard's Le Baron Russell Briggs Undergraduate Fiction Prize. She spends much of her free time baking, because the measuring it requires is the best she's ever been at anything math-related. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workhop. Juliana currently resides in southern Florida.

The 40 But 10 Interview Series: Sandell Morse

 

I had decided to retire the literary Would You Rather series, but didn't want to stop interviews on the site all together. Instead, I've pulled together 40ish questions - some bookish, some silly - and have asked authors to limit themselves to answering only 10 of them. That way, it keeps the interviews fresh and connectable for all of us!

Today we are joined by Sandell Morse, the prize-winning author of the memoir, The Spiral Shell, A French Village Reveals Its Secrets of Jewish Resistance in World War II (Schaffner Press, April 2020, paperback April 2022). The Spiral Shell is a Silver Medal winner in the Story Circle Women’s Book Awards, 2020, memoir, and a finalist for the New Hampshire Literary Award, 2021, nonfiction. Morse’s essays have been noted in The Best American Essays series and published in Creative Nonfiction, Ploughshares, the New England Review, Fourth Genre ASCENT, Solstice, and Tiferet among others. She has won the Michael Steinberg essay prize, been nominated for Best of the Net and for two Pushcart Prizes. Morse has been a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, an Associate Artist at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, a resident at the Hewnoaks Artists’ Colony, and a Fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in Amherst, Virginia and in Auvillar, France. She holds degrees from Wilson College, the University of New Hampshire, and Dartmouth College. Morse lives in New Hampshire with Zeus, her Standard Poodle.

 Website: sandellmorse.com    |  Instagram; @sandellmorse   |  Facebook: @sandellmorse

Why do you write?

Writing is so much a part of me now, that without it don’t feel centered. When I was very young, I was a dancer, and I thought that would be my career. Being a writer is like being a dancer, an artist, an athlete; you fall down into a place where you become one with that thing and the rest of the world peels away. And when writing takes me to that place, I am integrated, and all of me is pursuing -what I love, knowledge, understanding, compassion, justice.

 

What made you start writing?

I love that question because I entered by what I call the back door. I’d never dreamed of becoming a writer. I was middle-aged, back in school, pursuing a Master’s Degree when I stepped into what I thought was a literature class and saw a large oval table with chairs. I looked at Ishmael Reed, the instructor, and said, “Is this literature?” He said, “No, it’s fiction writing.” I said, “Oh, I don’t write fiction.” He said, “How do you know?” I said, “I guess I don’t.” He said, “Sit down.” I sat down, I became a fiction writer, and now write nonfiction, memoir.

 

What do you do when you’re not writing?

Am I ever not writing? That’s kind of flip, but I walk a lot with Zeus, my Standard Poodle, and because walking is a moving meditation, I find I’m writing in my head without intending to. The same thing happens when I hike. Not when I ski. Writing is not in my head when I ski. I love to watch films, especially documentaries. And I read. Can’t write without reading.

 

If you could spend the day with another author, who would you choose and why?

I’d love to spend a day with Melissa Febos. Seems strange. She’s in her early forties; I’m in my early eighties. She’s a queer woman; I’m a straight woman who has lived a mostly conventional life, but when I read her work, I feel as if she’s talking to me. She writes beautifully and fearlessly. She’s brilliant. She brings interesting source material into her work. Many of her insights are ah ha moments for me. I imagine a path through woods, a meandering stream, the two of us walking, and me listening.

 

What are you currently reading?

I’m reading Best American Essays edited by friend and writer, Alexander Chee. I’m about half way through, and I haven’t found once essay that I haven’t savored. This is an extraordinary collection. I’m also listening to South to America: A Journey Below the Mason- Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation by Imani Perry. It w-on the National Book Award for nonfiction; Melissa Febos was one of the judges, and on Twitter she recommended the book. I generally read what she recommends. If you think you’ve read everything you need to about race in American, and you haven’t read South to America, give it a read or a listen.

 

What genres won’t you read?

I won’t read horror. Too scary. I generally don’t choose science fiction, speculative fiction, or fantasy, but recently, I read Burning Girls by Veronica Schanoes, which is both speculative fiction and fantasy, and I loved it.  

 

If you could time travel, would you go back to the past or forward into the future?

 Definitely back to the past. It is through the past that we understand the present and the future, and if I went back there, I’d learn and understand so much about who we are today.

 

Do you DNF books?

Yes. Sometimes, because I mean to get back to them and don’t. Sometimes because I don’t like the writing or the characters?

 

What scares you the most?

The pursuit of power at any cost.

 

Are you a book hoarder or a book unhauler?

Well, in 2020, I moved from a large house with plenty of room for bookshelves to a tiny condo, I was forced to unhaul. I miss some of my old books. I’ve bought some again. I’m buying new books, mostly by friends. I love books, so at heart I’m a hoarder with the ability to unhaul.

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In this haunting memoir that reflects on the Holocaust and its legacy, award-winning author Sandell Morse discovers stories of bravery and resistance enacted during WWII in a small town in southern France. In the course of six years, she painstakingly pieces together the puzzle that had been beguiling her over the years: what was the story of France’s Jews under the Vichy government during the Second World War?

 

Inspired by her dogged curiosity and determination to uncover the truth, she met with survivors and historians to seek deeper meaning and understanding of what had happened to France’s Jews and found herself embarked, not only on an historical journey, but on a spiritual journey that marked a return to her own Jewish heritage.

 By gradually gaining the trust of those she interviews, Sandell reconstructs incidents of extraordinary courage in resisting the Vichy regime and Nazi occupation.

 From the survivors’ harrowing tales of escape, ingenious subterfuge, and just plain luck, she learns of a nunnery that gave refuge to a Jewish boy in the village of Auvillar, of a safe-house for Jewish refugee girls in Beaulieu-sur-Dordogne; a rabbi and resistance worker who gave his life to save hundreds of Jewish children; a local gendarme who, endangering his own life, tipped off the director of the safe house to upcoming Nazi roundups.

 In this year that marks the 80th anniversary of the deportation of thousands of French Jews to Auschwitz, this memoir reflects on a crucial time in our world’s history that still reverberates today, and provides a moving tribute to those who resisted oppression and fascism.

buy a copy: 

https://sandellmorse.com/the-spiral-shell/

Indie Spotlight: Thomas Reed

 

Welcome to our Indie Spotlight series, in which TNBBC gives small press authors the floor to shed some light on their writing process, publishing experiences, or whatever else they'd like to share with you, the readers!

Today,  Thomas Reed discusses how his forthcoming novel Pocketful of Poseys, releasing on September 19th, would not have been written if it weren't for two family sabbaticals. Read more the learn why! 

TWO SABBATICALS

 

My darkly comedic novel, Pocketful of Poseys, follows the forty-something children of a Dartmouth professor and his Woodstock-generation wife as they sprinkle their parents’ ashes at a half dozen locations around the globe—most of them associated with their father’s professional travels. The book would never have been written if it weren’t for two actual family sabbatical odysseys—less dark but often enough comedic—forty-eight years apart. The first was in the fall 0f 1953, when my father, an art history professor at Brown University, bundled my mother, sister, and me onto the French Line’s Ile de France on our way to a year-long road tour of Europe.  Armed with a Leica camera and driving what my mother dubbed a “puke-green” Ford Consul (she’d wanted a tasteful navy), he took us everywhere from John o’ Groats to Rome, visiting every museum, castle, and cathedral along the way as he snapped photographs to expand his art department slide collection.

             The car we picked up in London was tiny enough, but my 10-year-old sister and 6-year-old self had to share the back seat with a pair of suitcases too fat to fit into the amusingly named “boot.” I was happy enough to gaze out the window as we puttered through eleven countries and three seasons, but Penelope took the time as her opportunity to read the complete works of Shakespeare (at 10, remember!), so she more or less traversed Europe with her head buried in a book. I took that as a clear indication she dwelt on an entirely higher intellectual plane than I—and I suspect that Brian’s (the brother’s) sense in Pocketful that sister Grace is equivalently ethereal owes a lot to Penelope’s staunch program of self-improvement.

             We were travelling only eight years after the end of World War II, and signs of the global conflict remained everywhere—from boarded-up blocks of rubble in London to tank traps and concrete pill boxes in France to the ruins of Monte Cassino in Italy. We had a “U.S.” sticker on the back of our car, and it’s striking how welcoming almost everyone was to Americans at the time. Many of our troops were still stationed abroad. When we arrived in Austria for Christmas and a four-foot dump of snow completely cut off our mountain hotel, Dad was able to call the U.S. base in the valley and, within an hour, the Army arrived with its heavy equipment to dig us out. Even at six, I could appreciate the comfort of being a persona very grata.

             Fast-forward to the Fall of 2001, when I packed up my own family and headed to Christchurch, New Zealand for a sabbatical year. I was working on a critical study of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde that took a second form in my first novel—after I discovered that the psychological thriller had been blamed for inspiring Jack the Ripper. Since I could work almost anywhere that boasted a good library, my wife Dottie and I decided to head to the Southern Hemisphere so that our school-age children could enjoy the leisure and travel opportunities of an antipodean summer.

             We arrived in Christchurch on September 7<sup>th</sup>, and thirteen-year-old Abigail’s first day of school began with the shocking news that the World Trade Center had fallen. She’d awakened with no more worries than whether her very novel uniform kilt was the right length, but she was soon tasked with explaining to her new classmates what had been happening in New York—and why. Fortunately, nine-year-old Dan had a week or so before he met his new chums and interrogators.

             Despite the unmitigated horror of 9/11—so tragically reminiscent of the Blitz or Dresden over a half century earlier—I once again experienced that curious feeling of being a Welcome rather than an Ugly American. There were, naturally, the expressions of concern and support from folks on either side of our rental house. More striking, though, was the way the whole city of Christchurch responded. On September 10<sup>th</sup> they had dedicated a huge sculpture in the town’s central square, commemorating the city’s founding 150 years earlier. Dubbed “The Chalice,” the 18-meter-high structure looked like a huge, lacy, metallic sugar cone waiting for a giant scoop of New Zealand’s iconic “Hokie Pokie” ice cream. Scorned by many as tacky, it somehow became an epicenter of support for America, surrounded by deep banks of flowers, posters, hand-written notes, and stuffed animals. With global air travel shut down indefinitely, we were for many months among the very few Americans in town. Despite our wrenching concern for our loved ones back home and the inevitable guilt that comes when you’re personally spared what others are suffering, we were bathed in the warmth of a wry, plucky, and caring nation. Some of our dearest friends in life still live there and, tiny gesture of gratitude that it is, we’ll be pulling hard for the All Blacks in the upcoming Rugby World Cup. Their countryfolk had pulled so hard and supportively for us when our country came under attack.

             Robert Louis Stevenson once wrote to J. M. Barrie, “People mayn’t be like their books. They are their books.” With its academic families on the go, traversing the globe in the face of grave loss but sustained by innate resilience and the kindness of kin and stranger alike, Pocketful of Poseys is in more ways than I’ve managed to convey the story of three generations of my own family and our collective travels.

 

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Thomas Reed taught literature, film, and writing at Dickinson College for thirty years. His first novel, Seeking Hyde, grew out of courses he taught on Robert Louis Stevenson’s celebrated novel and was named Finalist in the 2018 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award for Historical Fiction. Pocketful of Poseys draws more broadly on his experience growing up in an academic family; his education at Yale, the University of Virginia, and Oxford; years spent living in Rome and Christchurch, N.Z.; circum-global travels with his wife and children, and courageous decisions made by his motherin-law as she faced her death. He and his wife Dottie now split their year between Sarasota, Florida, and Camp Pemigewassett, a summer camp for boys in New Hampshire that they co-own. Learn more at thomasreedauthor.com.

(photo credit: Dorothy Reed)

The 40 But 10 Interview Series: Scott Mitchel May

 

I had decided to retire the literary Would You Rather series, but didn't want to stop interviews on the site all together. Instead, I've pulled together 40ish questions - some bookish, some silly - and have asked authors to limit themselves to answering only 10 of them. That way, it keeps the interviews fresh and connectable for all of us!

Joining us today is Scott Mitchel May, who is a writer living in Madison, WI. His work has appeared in Bending Genres, WAS, HAD, Maudlin Hause, Rejection Letters, Misery Tourism, and The Bear Creek Gazzette, among others. He was the winner of the 2019 UW, Madison Writers' Institute Poem or Page Competition in the category of literary fiction and he was shortlisted for the 2022 Santa Fe Writers' Project Literary Award. He is the author of the novels Breakneck: Or, it happened once in America (Anxiety Press Spring 2023) and Awful People: A ghost story (Bear Creek Press Dec 2023). He holds a GED from the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction and a BS in English Literature from Edgewood College. He tweets @smitchelmay.

Why do you write? 

Honestly, it’s the only thing I can do with any sense of ease. It doesn’t feel like I’m working at all and no one can tell me I’ve done it wrong. I mean, they can, but it’s not a thing I would believe. Also, it’s what I find fun and enjoyable. I honestly do not understand writers who don’t like writing. The rewards are too small and come so infrequently that to continue writing when you don’t enjoy the act itself seems odd in a way I can’t understand.

Do you have any hidden talents? 

I don’t smoke anymore, which is a good thing, though I still wish I did, but, when I did smoke, I could win bar bets by bending a lit cigarette in half, touching cherry to butt, and then straightening it back out without breaking it. I won $20 once doing that.

What’s the most useless skill you possess? 

See above.

What are some of your favorite books and/or authors? 

I’ve yet to read a book by Don DeLillo that I haven’t absolutely loved. Someone recently asked me what my favorite was and my honest answer was which ever one I’d read last. He’s that fucking good.

What is your favorite book from childhood? 

I remember reading BOY by Roald Dahl in like the second or third grade and absolutely loving it. There was a scene in there where his father is peppered with rock salt while poaching for deer.

What genres won’t you read? 

Never say never, but I’m not the right person for YA. Not even dissing, it just ain’t for me.

Do you think you’d live long in a zombie apocalypse? 

This is an interesting question and I actually just finished up writing and editing a post-apocalyptic novel that’s clocks in at like 130,000 words and the idea I started with was what if you didn’t want to survive the apocalypse but also you just couldn’t seem to die either. Like the world just refused to take you out. I don’t think I want to survive in that kind of world. I like air conditioning too much.   

If you were on death row, what would your last meal be? 

An Italian beef, dipped, with hot and fries with cheese sauce.  

What songs would be on the soundtrack of your life? 

I don’t know what song would begin the soundtrack, but The Broad Majestic Shannon by The Pogues  would close it out for sure. I can’t think of a better song to die to.

What’s the one thing you wish you knew when you were younger? 

That no one is keeping score.

 

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The 40 But 10 Interview Series: Rebecca Hirsch Garcia

 

I had decided to retire the literary Would You Rather series, but didn't want to stop interviews on the site all together. Instead, I've pulled together 40ish questions - some bookish, some silly - and have asked authors to limit themselves to answering only 10 of them. That way, it keeps the interviews fresh and connectable for all of us!

Today we are joined by Rebecca Hirsch Garcia. Rebecca lives in Ottawa, Ontario. An O. Henry Award winning author her work has been published in The Threepenny Review, PRISM international, swamp pink and elsewhere. The Girl Who Cried Diamonds & Other Stories is her debut collection. You can find Rebecca on Twitter or Instagram @rhirschgarcia

 

 

What do you do when you’re not writing?

Read.

Describe your book in three words.

Eerie short stories.

What are some of your favorite books and/or authors?

I tend to connect with individual books more than authors as a whole. Five favourites in no particular order: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, The History of Love by Nicole Krauss, Fifteen Dogs by André Alexis, The Known World by Edward P. Jones, and The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber.

What are you currently reading?

I juggle multiple books at once. I’m currently reading Effi Briest by Theodore Fontane, Heaven’s Breath by Lyall Watson, The Wonder by Emma Donoghue and Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. They’re all great.

Do you read the reviews of your books or do you stay far far away from them, and why?

I don’t go searching for them, but I don’t mind reading reviews or comments, even the negative ones. There’s so much writing out there, the fact that anyone would take the time to read something I wrote is always something I’m grateful for.  

Do you think you’d live long in a zombie apocalypse?

Absolutely not. If there was a zombie apocalypse I wouldn’t want to live anyway. Hopefully I’d be the person who gets bitten first.

If you could time travel, would you go back to the past or forward into the future?

Always the past. I’m old enough to have regrets now, I would go back and meddle, create new problems for me to try to fix.

What’s the weirdest thing you’ve given/received as a gift?

I have both given and received a solitary brick. The recipient of the brick I gave was not amused. Conversely I love my brick. My mother gave it to me for Christmas one year.  I still have it; it’s on my dresser drawer at this very moment.

Do you DNF books?

I read the first third of Sophie’s Choice in high school and then finished it over a decade later. I tried to read Wolf Hall around when it first came out, gave up, and then tried it again in 2021 and finished it. I’ll fully give up on finishing books when I’m dead. Until then we’re just on a break.

Are you a book hoarder or a book unhauler?

I used to be a book hoarder but I’m trying to learn to let go of books I don’t want. Everything I love I keep, but the books I don’t love I’m willing to pass on. Hopefully they’ll find a new home with someone who enjoys them.  

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Purchase your copy here

A girl born in a small, unnamed pueblo is blessed — or cursed — with the ability to produce valuable gems from her bodily fluids. A tired wife and mother escapes the confines of her oppressive life and body by shapeshifting into a cloud. A girl reckons with the death of her father and her changing familial dynamics while slowly, mysteriously losing her physical senses.

 

Infused with keen insight and presented in startling prose, the stories in this dark, magnetic collection by newcomer Rebecca Hirsch Garcia invite the reader into an uncanny world just to the right of reality while exploring the personal and interpersonal in a way that is undeniably, distinctly human.

Indie Spotlight: Jack Houghteling

 Welcome to our Indie Spotlight series, in which TNBBC gives small press authors the floor to shed some light on their writing process, publishing experiences, or whatever else they'd like to share with you, the readers!

Today, Jack Houghteling, author of the forthcoming cover Sunnyside, which releases later this month, discusses the book's cover and how the main character Montague came to be. 

I was at my Mom’s apartment last October - looking out on a northward view of the Hudson up toward the chasmic Tappan Zee - when I came across a picture of my great aunt and late grandma on a brumal Sunday in Sunnyside, Queens.

They smile on the concrete as a boy - a mature twelve or a prepubertal sixteen - peers on the aluminum. Or perhaps, like them, he poses.

I just liked the picture. I shared it to my social. I asked my Mom: What year? What street? What development (which RE company followed which Subway line)?

At the time I was two-and-a-half years into a project about a boy-become-man from the area - I’d first conceptualized a name, Montague Yazzo, in my early twenties. He’d once been a touted and celebrated local football player; a Jesus Shuttlesworth of Westchester County. But this was not a few-worded, many-strided athlete that ultimately succeeded. Why the fuck would I want to tell that story? The streamers and credit card are for that.

No. This was a former player that spoke in arias, spoke too much. He mined past movements. He mourned his lost uncle. He chirped his younger brother.

But above all, he thought about his Mom. He thought about Joanie-Hutch. How she’s left me with all this soul-toting and - contrary to the sportsperson’s climb - nonconclusion. With all these words.

This was it: a story about the conurbation’s cement, asphalt, brick, metal (Why does it get so cold and so hot? Why can I feel it on my breath and body?); about the ball in the sky; about lying in bed, post-breakdown, dreaming back upon nerved movements; about younger men and their older women guardians. Still they stood as we veered and tired.

 

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Jack Houghteling grew up in Hastings on Hudson, NY and published his debut novel Goodman in 2022, which was longlisted for the Dzanc Books Prize for Fiction. Sunnyside is his second novel.

The Book Blurb Reading Experiment

 

It's a wrap!

Back towards the end of July, I embarked on a little book blurb reading experiment. I documented my way through it on Twitter and individually in the reviews of each of the books I had read but I thought it would be fun to outline the project from start to finish here. Because yesterday I finished the last book of the experiment... If you can believe it, I ran out of blurbers. Well kinda, sorta. You'll see!

So how did it begin? 

As many of you might be aware, I own a crap-ton of unread books. Like, a CRAP-ton, I'm not kidding. I have over 1400 books that I own, both in print and digital, that are currently unread. And as you can imagine, many of them have been sitting around unread for a long, long time...

Back in July, I was feeling funky about what to read next, and instead of grabbing one of my more recent titles, I looked at some of the older ones I had lying around, and I ended up grabbing Hye-Young Pyun's The Hole. I had a copy of this book on my kindle for yeeeaaars and had also picked up a cheap hardback copy at a Book Warehouse a couple years ago, thinking it might get me to read it sooner and, well, haha, you can see how well THAT turned out. 

Anyhow, I read it, and of loved it, and got all pissy with myself for having waited so darn long to pick it up. While I was being grumpy about it, I flipped it over and checked out the blurbs on the back cover, and noticed that Lauren van den Berg was one of the authors, and I thought, huh, I think I have a book of hers around here somewhere, and sure enough, I did. I had bought, and never read, her novel Find Me. It was just sitting there unread, like Pyun's book had, waiting for me to notice it. And then I thought, wouldn't it be funny, not haha funny, but sad/mad funny, if I read it now and ALSO wished I had read it sooner... and that, my friends, is the thought that kickstarted my book blurb reading experiment. 

Ok, so how did I decide which blurber to read? 

With Pyung's, I knew I had Lauren's book here, already bought but unread, and that felt like the most natural way to start. And I knew it was something I wanted to read, but just hadn't gotten around to it yet, and this experiment was going to get me to finally pick it up. 

As I continued reading, and choosing, I figured that was the best way to go - if I already owned a book by one of the blurbers, I would read that one. But if I got to a book where I didn't own anything by any of those authors, then I would check out all of those authors' books and buy the one that felt like it would be the best fit for me. This would also, hopefully, introduce me to new-to-me authors!

How did it go? 

Honestly, it was fairly hit or miss. Out of the 5 books I read following Pyung's, I fell in love with three of them. The other two were meh at best, with a little bit of DNF regret in there.  Also, I totally started cheateing! 

From Pyung's, I read Find Me because I already owned it. Dan Chaon blurbed Find Me and I owned one of his too, Await Your Reply, so I read that one. I didn't love it and wanted to DNF it, but against my better judgement, I persevered!  Also, for the life of me, I can't remember why I bought it to begin with... it was that long ago... ugh. 

Then, when I saw who blurbed Dan's book, I allowed myself to break my own rules - Jonathan Frazen blurbed Dan's book and I owned his novel The Corrections. But I just was not at all interested in reading that one, so I looked at the other blurbers and noticed that Justin Cronin was one. I had listened to Justin's The Passenger way back in the day and really disliked it. But when I checked out his bibliography, I saw he had a new one that just came out that sounded right up my alley and I thought, welp, why can't I use the book blurb reading experiment to re-introduce me to authors I had read and written off? Sooo... I added that as a new rule. And it worked out in my favor, because I absolutely LOVED The Ferryman!

After The Ferryman, my blurb choices thinned out a bit. I had already read Stephen King and Andy Weir, and there were only two authors left, so I went with Blake Crouch and bought his less popular novel Abandon, which sounded closer to something I'd enjoy. And I was wrong. I almost DNFd it but kept reading in the spirit of getting father into this experiment. Oh, I think I forgot to mention that one of the rules was that I was going to end the experiment once I hit a book I didn't like. Ugh. And I was only four books in at this point. So fuck it, onward we go, right? 

Blake Crouch's blurbers were just as limited - Harlan Coben and Andy Weir again. I had read and loved Andy Weir's The Martian so I decided to break my rule AGAIN and picked up his novel Project Hail Mary... because none of Harlan's books sounded like something I would enjoy, so now I was not only NOT introducing myself to a new author but I also was not re-introducing myself to one I had read and disliked. Oh boy!

The good news? I adored Project Hail Mary and was so glad I chose it, because honestly, it wasn't even on my radar and god knows if I ever would have read it on my own. Bad news, the option of blurbers for this one was just crappy. George RR Martin and Brandon Sanderson write epic fantasy novels which are a hard pass for me, and Blake Crouch was not someone I was interested in reading again. So I was flat out of options. I hit a roadbloack and decided to yell "uncle".  I was throwing in the towel. 

It was a great experiment though, and I'm not sad about it at all. I got five books deep, took a risk on two of them (Dan's and Blake's), and came out of it having read three amazing novels I may not have gotten to in the near future, or honestly, possibly, at all! 

Where do I go from here? 

I had just as much fun documenting the experiment as I did reading the books for it. So I absolutely plan to do it again. This time, I want to focus on small presses though. So, in a few weeks, you can anticipate me kickstarting this reading experiment again. It'd be interesting to see how far I get this time... maybe the small presses will crush the biggies?! 

There's only one way for me to find out....

The 40 But 10 Interview Questions: Tania Hershman

 

I had decided to retire the literary Would You Rather series, but didn't want to stop interviews on the site all together. Instead, I've pulled together 40ish questions - some bookish, some silly - and have asked authors to limit themselves to answering only 10 of them. That way, it keeps the interviews fresh and connectable for all of us!

Today we are joined by Tania Hershman. Based in Manchester, Tania's second poetry collection, Still Life With Octopus, was published by Nine Arches Press in July 2022 and her debut novel, Go On, a hybrid memoir-in-collage, by Broken Sleep Books in Nov 2022. Tania is Arvon's writer-in-residence for Winter 22/23, and is publishing a multi-author anthology of prize-winning flash fictions, Fuel, to raise funds for UK fuel poverty charities. Her poetry pamphlet, How High Did She Fly, was joint winner of Live Canon's 2019 Poetry Pamphlet Competition and her hybrid particle-physics-inspired book 'and what if we were all allowed to disappear' was published by Guillemot Press in March 2020. Tania is also the author of a poetry collection, a poetry chapbook and three short story collections, and co-author of Writing Short Stories: A Writers' & Artists' Companion (Bloomsbury, 2014). She is co-creator of the @OnThisDayShe Twitter account, co-author of the On This Day She book (John Blake, 2021), and has a PhD in creative writing inspired by particle physics. www.taniahershman.com

Why do you write? 

I’ve always written, I started making up stories when I was little. So the first reason I write is to tell myself stories. I don’t plot in advance, whether that’s for short stories, a novel, or poems, so whatever I write has to surprise and delight me first! The other reason - which I came to slowly over the years as I discovered that if I don’t write for a few weeks I start feeling a little weird - is because it’s my way to engage with the world, to grapple with it. Not to find answers to anything, but to better express my questions and explore what this odd thing called life might actually mean to me.

 

What’s the most useless skill you possess? 

Identifying 80s songs within ten seconds or less. I really wish this was useful. It’s fun, though!

 

Would you and your main character(s) get along? 

Oh definitely! I’ve been writing for 25 years, I’ve written hundreds of short stories and flash fictions, and all my characters are real to me, there are ones that I really miss after finishing a story, I love spending time with them. My new novel, Go On (Broken Sleep, 2022), is what I call a “fictional-memoir-in-collage”. It weaves together quite a few threads, as well as having some standalone pieces, so there are a lot of characters – and one or two which are quite close to being autobiographical! I think I might get on better with the characters that are least like me. I’d very much like to chat to the Narrator character, and I’d love to visit the town where all the women are angry, to learn more about the beautiful and useful ways they approach rage. Also, Sarah, Mary and Marion, the dead women in the cemetery that one of my characters talks to – I think we’d all get along wonderfully! They’re in the cemetery up the road from me, I visit them often. They seem pretty excited that my book is out in the world.

 

What is your favorite way to waste time?  I watch a LOT of television. Although in my defense, I do believe that a lot of what I watch – the dramas etc...- are data, they’re feeding my Story Sense of how stories can be shaped. I actually think that the novel I am writing now I am writing as if it was a TV series, scene by scene. Over the pandemic I became newly obsessed by Star Trek, and this has turned into a source of inspiration in a way I wouldn’t have imagined: I have just been awarded an Arts Council Developing Your Creative Practice grant to write a hybrid pamphlet colliding non-human characters in Star Trek with observations from a neuroscience podcast I listen to every week to “examine ourselves as other”. I can’t wait!

 What are you currently reading?  

I have a pile of at least 20 books on my bedside table, many of them from the local library. I have certain things I like to read at night which don’t overtax my brain – I’m very drawn to fantasy books involving magic, often set in libraries, of which there are several series by different authors. Something I’ve recently loved is A Marvellous Light by Freya Marske, which is queer magical crime, a really fun collision of genres. I’m also reading 100 Queer Poems, and the new poetry collections by Angela Readman and Tara Bergin, as well as Giselle Leeb’s wonderful debut short story collection, Humans, I Think We Are Called.

What genres won’t you read? 

None. I learned what my prejudices were around fifteen years ago when I was running The Short Review, an online journal reviewing short story collections. I had dozens of reviewers writing for me, but I also tried to review a story collection each month myself – and decided to ask for review copies in genres I never would have considered, namely science fiction, fantasy and crime. I discovered that I’d been an idiot, restricting myself like that: genre doesn’t matter, what matters is all these amazing stories out there! Genre labels are stuck on by the publishing industry, and as someone who tries to write things that aren’t easily labelled, I try and do this in my reading life too.

 

Do you think you’d live long in a zombie apocalypse? 

As previously mentioned, I watch and read quite a lot of science fiction and fantasy so I am going to take this question very seriously. Would I live long before being turned into a zombie? Well, I’d like to think that, given all the data I’ve amassed by now, I’d have some pretty good zombie defence strategies, so yes. I’d like to imagine I’d be one of the people banding together to fight the zombie hordes, and maybe even be part of the discovery of some cure or vaccine, something to allow the zombies to die and save humanity. I didn’t know I felt like that until I was writing that last sentence. Quite reassuring, actually.

 

What’s the weirdest thing you’ve given as a gift? 

I once gave a friend a year’s bacon subscription for her birthday. She received a packet of different kind of bacon every month through the post. In a dog-proof package, so it wouldn’t be chewed before she got it.

What songs would be on the soundtrack of your life? 

Me, myself and I by Joan Armatrading, that’s kind of an anythem. Tilted, by Christine and the Queens, is one of my happy songs, and I do love Galileo by the Indigo Girls, a little bit of science always thrills me.

What’s the one thing you wish you knew when you were younger? 

That it’s okay to say no. I only learned that around the age of 49 and it’s a gift, especially for women, we are often taught to be people-pleasers. It’s perfectly possible to be kind to people while also being kind to yourself, while also looking out for your own energy levels, your own wellbeing.

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How to tell your story? “I want to talk,” the Author says on page 1. The Narrator who has been assigned to assist her knows that what is needed now is permission. “Go on,” says the Narrator – and a book is born.

Weaving threads and following tangents, Tania Hershman’s debut novel, a hybrid “fictional memoir-in-collage”, tells one story and many stories: how is it to be a woman moving happily alone through the world? Who are you if not in relation to others? A woman walks through the cemetery, talking to the dead. A class of schoolgirls grapples with what anger is and might be. A baby is left by scientists in a forest. Someone claims to be your grandmother.

As the Author writes her way into and through what she needs to say, the Narrator watches her develop and blossom and wonders what will happen when they reach the end. Go on.

buy a copy here: 

taniahershman.com/wp/go-on-a-novel/