This follows up on my December 1, 2020 post about Deborah Kalb’s author interviews, with 27 quotes from her Q&As appearing last December until June 9. As with that post, these quotes are drawn from the Twitter quotes I regularly post about Deborah’s interviews. The links below take you to the interviews. These quotes represent only a fraction of the many interviews Deborah posts each week. Her Q&As should be required reading for anyone involved, in whatever capacity, in the writing, editing, and conceptualizing of books.
Date of tweet: 6-9-21
Author: Bella Mahaya Carter
Book: Where Do You Hang Your Hammock?: Finding Peace of Mind While You Write, Publish, and Promote Your Book
Author quote: “The audience is writers, but the underlying themes, such as resilience and how to relate to life’s challenges—will speak to non-writers too, especially artists, musicians, and others with creative dreams.”
Date of tweet: 6-2-21
Author: Erika Hecht
Book: Don’t Ask My Name: A Hidden Child’s Tale of Survival
Author quote: “Several previous titles of the #book were discarded as not strong enough. Having to say my name was always a disturbing and painful experience for me, never being sure which of my names was safe to use in that particular circumstance.”
Date of tweet: 5-26-21
Author: Rory Groves
Book: Durable Trades: Family-Centered Economies That Have Stood the Test of Time
Author quote: “I was inspired by the concept of the “family economy”—an integrated way to live and work that unified families around a common purpose rather than everybody separating into a different factory.”
Date of tweet: 5-19-21
Author: Michele Wucker
Book: You Are What You Risk: The New Art and Science of Navigating an Uncertain World
Author quote: “Risk involves choice. By some estimates, each of us makes 35,000 choices every single day. That’s a lot of choice and a lot of risk.”
Date of tweet: 5-12-21
Author: Emily Midorikawa
Book: Out of the Shadows: Six Visionary Victorian Women in Search of a Public Voice
Author quote: “The University of London’s Senate House Library contains the Harry Price Library of Magical Literature, which is as weird and wonderful a resource as it sounds. The materials it holds did a great deal to enrich my understanding of 19th-century Spiritualism.”
Date of tweet: 5-5-21
Author: Catriona Silvey
Book: Meet Me in Another Life
Author quote: “Music is an important part of my writing process: as I plan a book, I make playlists to help me figure out each character’s emotional arc.”
Date of tweet: 4-28-21
Author: Claudia Kalb
Book: Spark: How Genius Ignites, from Child Prodigies to Late Bloomers
Author quote: “Where possible, I talked to family members, including Blakely’s parents, brother, and husband; two of Shirley Temple’s children; Eleanor Roosevelt’s grandson; and Grandma Moses’s great-grandson.”
Date of tweet: 4-21-21
Author: Alison Hammer
Book: Little Pieces of Me
Author quote: “One other aspect of family that the book touches on is the idea that as children we don’t always realize our parents were real people who had actual lives before we were born.”
Date of tweet: 4-14-21
Author: Marvin Kalb
Book: Assignment Russia: Becoming a Foreign Correspondent in the Crucible of the Cold War
Author quote: “I wanted the book to be an opportunity to share the excitement I felt, anticipating going to Russia, being in Russia, and covering so magnetic a political leader as Nikita Khrushchev.”
Date of tweet: 4-7-21
Authors: Syl Sobel and Jay Rosenstein
Book: Boxed Out of the NBA: Remembering the Eastern Professional Basketball League
Author quote: “One of our favorite stories in the book is about how Jay’s parents made the mistake of scheduling Jay’s brother Bruce’s 1964 Bar Mitzvah party on the same night as a Scranton Miners home game against the Camden Bullets.”
Date of tweet: 3-31-21
Author: Ann Heberlein
Book: On Love and Tyranny: The Life and Politics of Hannah Arendt
Author quote: “Hannah Arendt undoubtedly belongs to the exclusive group of intellectuals whose theories have become some kind of public property.”
Date of tweet: 3-24-21
Author: Tim Wendel
Book: Escape from Castro’s Cuba
Author quote: “One is never sure what lies around the next corner in Havana, and that’s something that has captivated writers from Graham Greene to Elmore Leonard to Rachel Kushner.”
Date of tweet: 3-17-21
Author: Jillian Cantor
Book: Half Life
Author quote: “And also the concept of the Flying University – that women denied education in Poland at the time formed their own secret university, the location ever changing to avoid detection, hence the “flying.” Marie and her older sister really did attend as young women in Poland…”
Date of tweet: 3-10-21
Author: Marlene Trestman
Book: Fair Labor Lawyer: The Remarkable Life of New Deal Attorney and Supreme Court Advocate Bessie Margolin
Author quote: “Bessie Margolin, who was born a decade before women could vote and who had no female lawyer as a role model when she was little, simply defied the gender norms of her time.”
Date of tweet: 3-3-21
Author: Nicole Glover
Book: The Conductors
Author quote: “The characters appeared as, What happens after when people were involved in the Underground Railroad? It popped into my mind: They’ll solve mysteries! What tied it together was the magic element.”
Date of tweet: 2-24-21
Author: Margot Bloomstein
Book: Trustworthy: How the Smartest Brands Beat Cynicism and Bridge the Trust Gap
Author quote: “After researching how we got into this mess, how do we look forward? What do we do about it? I developed a framework of voice, volume, and vulnerability based on patterns that were working.”
Date of tweet: 2-17-21
Author: Caroline Adams Miller
Book: Creating Your Best Life
Author quote: “Many people are also struck by the preciousness of life in a new way, and are asking themselves if they need to look at their life goals carefully so that they can live without regrets as much as possible.”
Date of tweet: 2-10-21
Author: Molly Golubcow
Book: The Hotel on St. James Place
Author quote: “I think it molded me as a person who was not fearful of others that don’t look exactly like me. I hope the book conveys that my parents taught me that lesson without having to literally spell it out.”
Date of tweet: 2-3-21
Author: Melanie Chartoff
Book: Odd Woman Out
Author quote: “When I studied with Stella Adler, I learned to get my writer’s and director’s mind out of the picture, so I’d be governed by the imagination of the playwright or screenwriter without tampering.”
Date of tweet: 1-27-21
Author: Denise Williams
Book: How to Fail at Flirting
Author quote: “As part of the guided mediation, we envisioned an ideal future self and I thought about how my character would see an ideal future self and try to get there.”
Date of tweet: 1-20-21
Author: Amy Nathan
Book: Together: An Inspiring Response to the “Separate-But-Equal” Supreme Court Decision That Divided America
Author quote: “I dug into the resources of Louisiana historical societies, libraries, and newspapers. The more I learned, the more books and articles I read.”
Date of tweet: 1-13-21
Author: Candace Jane Opper
Book: Certain and Impossible Events
Author quote: “As I was researching and writing the book, I noticed that I often leaned into mathematical metaphors to describe suicide. Every suicide, in its own way, is a kind of equation, a unique series of factors that add up to that sum.”
Date of tweet: 1-6-21
Author: Mark E. Klein
Book: Franklin Rock
Author quote: “Writing fiction for me is the equivalent of painting yourself into the corner of a room and then merely drawing a door on the wall behind you and stepping out.”
Date of tweet: 12-30-20
Author: Amy E. Schwartz
Book: Can Robots Be Jewish?
Author quote: “I hope people appreciate the extent to which in Judaism there really are multiple answers to almost any question you can ask, and that if people disagree, it’s not the end of the world.”
Date of tweet: 12-23-20
Author: Sharon Kirsch
Book: The Smallest Objective
Author quote: “Dr. Simon Kirsch, my grandfather, taught botany at McGill University, and his microscope includes several objective lenses, the smallest of which allows for the highest degree of magnification.”
Date of tweet: 12-16-20
Author: Barry Eisenberg
Book: Primal Calling
Author quote: “The seemingly disparate themes of family unification, international relations, and oil exploration are woven together in the book. My background in conducting research, including getting a doctorate in the social sciences, has proven very helpful in my fiction writing.”
Date of tweet: 12-9-20
Author: Walter Jon Williams
Book: Fleet Elements
Author quote: “I wanted a huge, complicated world that could support a long series. I also wanted the decisions made by people to be very important (and please understand that “people” in this case also includes aliens).”