One of the few encouraging aspects of the pandemic era has been the steady release of new books. I’ve followed up my April 16 blog post about Deborah Kalb’s author interviews, with these 32 quotes from her Q&As from April until late November. As with that post, these quotes are drawn from the Twitter quotes I regularly post about Deborah’s interviews. They often focus on the creative process behind writing, including the often painstaking research involved in writing a book. As with last time, these books represent both fiction and nonfiction, and a variety of topics and themes. Each author’s name links to their Q&A:
Date of tweet: 11-25-20
Author: Michelle Adams
Book: Little Wishes
Author quote: “When I’m not reading, you’ll hopefully find me in the mountains, but that could be about to change as I’m about to start a post grad in psychology. Like I said earlier, it’s never too late to do something you want to do.”
Date of tweet: 11-18-20
Author: Patricia Peyton
Book: Physical Intelligence
Author quote: “We decided that writing the book would help us create a broader awareness of what Physical Intelligence is and also help increase its credibility given that so much of the underlying research isn’t well known or generally viewed as a whole – a collective body of knowledge.”
Date of tweet: 11-11-20
Author: Elizabeth Topp
Book: Perfectly Impossible
Author quote: “I’d also add that this book is for anyone who has ever pursued creative endeavors while also working.”
Date of tweet: 11-4-20
Author: Gilly Macmillan
Book: To Tell You the Truth
Author quote: “To create a suspenseful story, I had to look hard at my profession and my work habits and ask myself in what ways things might go wrong and become a little twisted, or sinister. That wasn’t always comfortable.”
Date of tweet: 10-28-20
Author: Emily Gray Tedrowe
Book: The Talented Miss Farwell
Author quote: “At this, my novelist antennae perked up. What would it be like, to live in the place you were born and raised, and now where you worked, while steadily bilking your neighbors and friends of millions of dollars?”
Date of tweet: 10-7-20
Author: Deborah Reed
Book: Pale Morning Light with Violet Swan
Author quote: “Agnes Martin wasn’t fully recognized as the great talent she was until the latter years of her life, and, like so many others, she has truly been celebrated since her death.”
Date of tweet: 9-30-20
Author: David E. Lowe
Book: Touched with Fire: Morris B. Abram and the Battle against Racial and Religious Discrimination
Author quote: “At Abram’s funeral on Cape Cod in March 2000, his daughter Ann talked about her father’s insatiable intellectual curiosity. His son Joshua said that until the day he died, Abram woke up wondering what he could learn that day.”
Date of tweet: 9-23-20
Author: Nguyen Phan Que Mai
Book: The Mountains Sing
Author quote: “My novel was launched into the pandemic. First, I was devastated as my #book tour had to be cancelled. But then I found so much kindness in so many amazing people: from booksellers, librarians, reviewers, the media, readers, to literary champions.”
Date of tweet: 9-16-20
Author: Laura Morelli
Book: The Night Portrait
Author quote: “It’s incredible to realize that by 1944, the Nazis had either stolen or tried to steal every known painting by Leonardo da Vinci—in addition to thousands of other priceless masterpieces.”
Date of tweet: 9-9-20
Author: Suzzy Roche
Book: The Town Crazy
Author quote: “Hanzloo, Pennsylvania is not a real town. I thought of it because as a touring musician I’ve driven across Pennsylvania a million times. It’s a very long state, and it’s the gateway from New York City to the Midwest, where I have often toured.”
Date of tweet: 9-2-20
Author: Elissa R. Sloan
Book: The Unraveling of Cassidy Holmes
Author quote: “I was surprised (but not shocked) by how predatory the music industry could be — there’s a video by TLC describing how everyone would take a piece of the pie before the artist got paid, and why many artists were broke or in debt.”
Date of tweet: 8-27-20
Author: David Hollander
Book: Anthropica
Author quote: “Since there are so many competing plotlines, I wanted to divvy out the story in a way that would create both the maximum amount of mystery, and the maximum number of “a-ha” moments…”
Date of tweet: 8-19-20
Author: Kathy Valentine
Book: All I Ever Wanted
Author quote: “I felt my initial book had to be a memoir, a story only I could tell. I felt it would open the door to my being perceived and accepted as a writer.”
Date of tweet: 8-12-20
Author: Evelyn Kohl LaTorre
Book: Between Inca Walls
Author quote: “Rereading my Peace Corps journals tweaked my memory enough to write a memoir about that influential time in my life. Wherever I travel (to nearly 100 countries now) or live abroad, I keep a journal so I can recall my adventures.”
Date of tweet: 8-5-20
Author: Caroline Leavitt
Book: With or Without You
Author quote: “I also wanted readers to know that you actually can, at any moment, through all sorts of ways, become a totally different person. You can create new memories to heal the old.”
Date of tweet: 7-29-20
Author: Gretchen Sorin
Book: Driving While Black: African American Travel and the Road to Civil Rights
Author quote: “The travel guides provided national advertising for mom-and-pop places that couldn’t really afford to advertise—they could advertise for the national African American market.”
Date of tweet: 7-24-20
Author: Katherine D. Kinzler
Book: How You Say It: Why You Talk the Way You Do–And What It Says About You
Author quote: “But the book is much broader than my own work, and incorporates insight from a number of fields — sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics, anthropology, education, and law, among others.”
Date of tweet: 7-22-20
Author: Ido Kedar
Book: In Two Worlds
Author quote: “In essence, fiction takes the reader on a journey into Autismland and exposes the reader to a new world that I hope will prompt social change and greater understanding and tolerance of nonspeakers.”
Date of tweet: 7-15-20
Author: Rachel Eliza Griffiths
Book: Seeing the Body
Author quote: “Stevie Wonder was a constant, dazzling figure during my childhood and still remains a voice that I turn to frequently because of the nuance and range of his music and genius.”
Date of tweet: 7-10-20
Author: David Stasavage
Book: The Decline and Rise of Democracy: A Global History from Antiquity to Today
Author quote: “There has been a lot of discussion lately about whether democracy is in retreat or even dying. If we want to understand why that might or might not happen we need to look at the deep history of democratic governance covering many centuries on multiple continents.”
Date of tweet: 7-8-20
Author: Erica Heller
Book: One Last Lunch: A Final Meal With Those Who Meant So Much To Us
Author quote: “Some of the contributors are famous and many of the people they invited back for lunch are too, but not all. I wanted a rounded sampling of all kinds of people, relationships and emotions. Luckily, that’s just what the finished result turned out to be.”
Date of tweet: 7-1-20
Author: Mia Birdsong
Book: How We Show Up: Reclaiming Family, Friendship, and Community
Author quote: “It was very much about things I needed answers to–questions about belonging, intimacy, interdependence, and accountability. As soon as I realized what the questions were, I knew where to look for answers.”
Date of tweet: 6-25-20
Author: B. Jeffrey Madoff
Book: Creative Careers: Making a Living with Your Ideas
Author quote: “Connect the dots you didn’t think connected before. Realize the importance of context. Recognize opportunities. Take a chance. Don’t be afraid to fail. Quiet the inner critic. Find your voice. Invest in yourself and your self-worth.”
Date of tweet: 6-24-20
Author: Erin Hatton
Book: Coerced: Work Under Threat of Punishment
Author quote: “I interviewed prisoners and workfare workers, and the power dynamics came to the fore. I changed my topic to focus on that power dynamic. And I added student athletes and graduate students.”
Date of tweet: 6-17-20
Author: Lisa Braxton
Book: The Talking Drum
Author quote: “It was also around the time that the Festival of the Black Arts took place in Dakar, Senegal, and I wanted to place one of my characters, Omar, at that festival. Duke Ellington—orchestra leaders, composer, pianist was at the Festival of the Black Arts, and plays a pivotal role in Omar’s life.”
Date of tweet: 6-10-20
Author: Jenny Colgan
Book: 500 Miles from You
Author quote: “I think setting is incredibly important. I really want to take you – my reader – somewhere with me, to the Scottish highlands, or rural Cornwall, or wherever I’m writing about; I want you to feel like you’re actually there!”
Date of tweet: 6-3-20
Author: Kathleen M. Rodgers
Book: The Flying Cutterbucks
Author quote: “For this book, I tried to show the reader what eastern New Mexico feels like, smells like, taste like, looks like and how that affects each character.”
Date of tweet: 5-27-20
Author: Natalie Jenner
Book: The Jane Austen Society
Author quote: “But even though I knew that the first real-life Jane Austen Society had started in 1940 with the mission to acquire this cottage, I wanted my book to be a work of fiction that explored themes of grief and community, and how a shared passion can bring different people together.”
Date of tweet: 5-20-20
Author: Scott Newstok
Book: How to Think Like Shakespeare: Lessons from a Renaissance Education
Author quote: “What I ended up doing was something familiar to Renaissance writers: “commonplacing,” or compiling favorite passages from thinkers whom I admire. I harvested these from my library, from my research, from my friends, from materials I’d developed over 20 years of teaching.”
Date of tweet: 5-13-20
Author: Janie Chang
Book: The Library of Legends
Author quote: “I also subscribe to JSTOR, a site that publishes and reviews academic books and papers. Some of this research leads to buying books, and a lot of these are used reference texts or non-fiction, so then that leads you to used book sites.”
Date of tweet: 5-6-20
Author: Christina Chiu
Book: Beauty
Author quote: “I used to teach at the Brooklyn Museum. One thing we often taught our students was how to look at objects. When one takes the time to look closely, one tends to notice things that one hadn’t seen before.”
Date of tweet: 4-29-20
Author: Gretchen Berg
Book: The Operator
Author quote: “I did a lot of research, and the research spanned roughly three and a half decades, although the majority of the story takes place in the early 1950s.”
Date of tweet: 4-22-20
Author: Victoria Zackheim
Book: Private Investigations: Mystery Writers on the Secrets, Riddles, and Wonders in Their Lives
Author quote: “One thread, and a prominent one, was the hard work, determination, and angst most of the authors put into writing and being published. Not one of the writers shared that it was easy.”
It’s been a busy year for Deborah, who was recently interviewed by author and teacher Ellwyn Autumn, and released her new children’s book, Thomas Jefferson and the Return of the Magic Hat, the third in The President and Me series. As ever, Deborah remains a true friend and strong supporter of writers everywhere, and a great ambassador for honoring and celebrating the creative process.