Deborah Kalb continues to do extraordinary, Herculean work on publishing her interviews with authors multiple times each week. The Q&As illuminate the creative process for authors in conceptualizing, researching, and writing their books; as well as providing a glimpse into what they are working on, now that their books have been published. This post follows my most recent curation of quotes from Deborah’s Q&As, which are mainly drawn from my regular Twitter quotes about the interviews. I’ve provided links to the original interviews, along with book titles and quotes.
Huge congrats and thanks to Deborah for completing another year of these priceless interviews!
Author: Farah Jasmine Griffin
Book: Read Until You Understand: The Profound Wisdom of Black Life and Literature
Author quote: “Memoir helped me to frame the readings of literary texts. I only used those parts of my life that might contextualize the selections of books and the values I wanted to discuss.”
Author: Thuan Le Elston
Book: Rendezvous at the Altar: From Vietnam to Virginia
Author quote: “Drawing from family anecdotes and photographs, genealogy records, old letters, and new emails, I mix nonfiction and fiction like a cocktail. What I serve are intimate diary entries, revealing conversations, and epic family reunions.”
Author: Faith Kramer
Book: 52 Shabbats: Friday Night Dinners Inspired by a Global Jewish Kitchen
Author quote: “When we eat these foods with intention, we also are using them as a sort of prayer or message, which deepens the meaning of a ritual meal or holiday celebration.”
Author: Annabel Abbs
Book: Windswept: Walking the Paths of Trailblazing Women
Author quote: “I began researching and found hundreds of historical women who walked – for work, for pleasure, for adventure, but often for emotional catharsis. For several years, I collected accounts of walking women – many of them gleaned from letters and diaries.”
Authors: Mike Mattison and Ernest Suarez
Book: Poetic Song Verse: Blues-Based Popular Music and Poetry
Author quote: “What we call poetic song verse isn’t poetry set to music, like the Beats’ poetry with jazz accompaniment, but it sometimes takes a hybrid form in recordings like Gil Scott-Heron’s or Leonard Cohen’s.”
Author: Jean Hanff Korelitz
Book: The Plot
Author quote: “I tried to get out of writing the novel within a novel. I had finished my novel, and now I had to write another one! It involved a lot of heavy lifting. But my editor disagreed, and I took a deep breath and dove back in.”
Author: Fiona Hill
Book: There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the 21st Century
Author quote: “It’s astounding to me that I would become a celebrity for telling the truth. Everybody should tell the truth. I keep quoting George Orwell, that in a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. That’s not what I thought I was doing when I set foot in the building.”
Author: Susan Page
Book: Madam Speaker: Nancy Pelosi and the Lessons of Power
Author quote: “But it was her comfort and skills with power – gaining power, wielding power, and holding on to power – that forms the spine of this biography. She is as comfortable with power as any public official I’ve ever covered.”
Author: James McGrath Morris
Book: Tony Hillerman: A Life
Author quote: “What inspired me to spend several years researching and writing a biography is a belief that Hillerman’s work is more significantly important than that for which he’s usually given credit.”
Author: Christin Essin
Book: Working Backstage: A Cultural History and Ethnography of Technical Theater Labor
Author quote: “But as satisfying as I had found the work, I had yet to encounter a book that fully expressed the labor of theatre technicians in a clear, evocative language. It is essential but largely invisible industry work that is underrepresented and too often misunderstood.”
Author: Codi Schneider
Book: Cold Snap
Author quote: “I think the key to writing from an animal’s POV isn’t imagining all the ways they’re different from us, but the ways they’re similar. This makes them relatable and reachable—the ultimate goal for any character, human or otherwise.”
Author: Paul Halpern
Book: Flashes of Creation: George Gamow, Fred Hoyle, and the Great Big Bang Debate
Author quote: “I had considered, as various points, writing biographies of each of those scientists, so when the opportunity arose, I put forth the idea of a dual biography, with the Big Bang as kind of a third character.”
Author: Hilma Wolitzer
Book: Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket
Author quote: “When the story was written, in the mid-1960s, many women were questioning their place in what felt more and more like a patriarchal society. The supermarket, with all of its domestic bounty, seemed like the perfect setting to examine those stirrings of discontent.”
Author: Peri Chickering
Book: Leadership Flow: The Unstoppable Power of Connection
Author quote: “Leadership flow as a title and guiding image is about an invitation to live with a deep and abiding experience of connection to the wisdom and rhythms which drive the very fabric of our universe – we are a part of this wisdom and it lives in us as it does in everything around us.”
Author: Stephen Kurczy
Book: The Quiet Zone: Unraveling the Mystery of a Town Suspended in Silence
Author quote: “I ended up visiting a dozen or so times over three years, totaling about four months on the ground. Each visit to Green Bank revealed another, more nuanced layer to the surrounding Quiet Zone.”
Author: Philippa East
Book: Safe and Sound
Author quote: “For me, writing is a way to try and understand the world, other people, and myself. I think this drive originally led me into the field of psychology – and now storytelling has become my means to ask and explore those questions.”
Author: Moisés Naím
Book: Two Spies in Caracas
Author quote: “With the novel I gave myself the possibility of telling the story that I knew – the story that I had researched – as a work of fiction, as a novel that contained many facts and events that I knew were true but that I could not corroborate.“
Author: David A. Shapiro
Book: Who Do You Want To Be When You Grow Old?: The Path of Purposeful Aging
Author quote: “We consider the book, and the topic, to be “age-agnostic.” It’s really for anyone, anywhere who is growing older.”
Author: Jacquelyn H. Berry
Book: Find Your Carrot: Stop the Foolishness!: Get on With Your Authentic Self
Author quote: “To produce something helpful and worthy of notice will take a lot of failure; otherwise, someone would have done it already. Want big success? It isn’t going to be on your first try. Period.”
Author: Gail Aldwin
Book: This Much Huxley Knows
Author quote: “The themes of the novel around bullying and isolation dictated some of Huxley’s strengths in terms of his resilience and bounce-back-ability. He was a great character to write and I think of him very fondly.”
Author: Scott Borchert
Book: Republic of Detours: How the New Deal Paid Broke Writers to Rediscover America
Author quote: “But I was intrigued by the idea that these books—which were not only readable but surprisingly absorbing—were created by the federal government. It seemed like a highly unusual thing for the government to do in the best of times, let alone during the Depression, a moment of deep national crisis.”
Author: Michael Blanding
Book: North by Shakespeare: A Rogue Scholar’s Quest to Discover the Truth Behind the Bard’s Work
Author quote: “I was surprised to learn just how little we know about Shakespeare and how what we do know about him doesn’t seem to match up with the plays—creating these mysteries that still linger today.”