This post follows up on my August 5, 2025 curation of quotes, links, and book information drawn from my regular social media posts about the Deborah Kalb book/author Q&As, now updating for August through December 2025.
As usual in my posts about the Q&As, a wide range of authors is included; fiction and nonfiction, with links to the original interviews. In the latter, Deborah draws out crucial information about how authors found inspiration and creativity for their books, and how they were researched and written.
I continue to support the following sentiment, which I have included on previous curations of Deborah’s work: Continued kudos to Deborah for the many high quality author interviews she publishes each week about both fiction and nonfiction books. They provide a valuable window into the writing process, and demonstrate that while there are commonalities among authors and books, each publishing experience is unique.
Author: Anne Abel
Book: High Hopes
Author quote: “I would not be writing now, if I had not grabbed onto the Springsteen lifeline and followed his High Hopes Australia tour.”
Author: Kathleen P. Allen
Book: Stuck in Our Screens: Setting Aside Social Drama and Restoring Human Connection
Author quote: “I hope the book will stimulate a civil and intelligent conversation that produces thoughtful and wise changes.”
Author: Dani Alpert
Book: Hello? Who Is This? Margaret?
Author quote: “I hope readers will find it to be a much-needed break from the chaos in the world and can have a laugh or two.”
Author: Sara Gothelf Bloom
Book: Just Enough to Start Over
Author quote: “In exile, although little of their material comfort remains, they haven’t lost their artistic sensibility or their will to create.”
Author: Gareth Brown
Book: The Society of Unknowable Objects
Author quote: “I want to know what the secret is, and I want to know who knows and why they are keeping it secret.”
Author: Jerome Charyn
Book: Maria La Divina: A Novel of Maria Callas
Author quote: “I wanted to live in her world for a while.”
Author: Susan Coventry
Book: Till Taught by Pain
Author quote: “As I read, I became fascinated by Halsted and lost interest in Freud.”
Author: David Eliot
Book: Artificially Intelligent: The Very Human Story of AI
Author quote: “As I researched, I realized that everything I wanted people to understand about AI could be traced back to a human decision.”
Author: Howard W. French
Book: The Second Emancipation: Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, and Global Blackness at High Tide
Author quote: “Nkrumah is the most widely admired person on the African continent today, surpassing Nelson Mandela, who is much better known in the West.”
Author: Tinsley Galyean
Book: Reframe: How Curiosity & Literacy Can Redefine Us
Author quote: “The core takeaway is the recognition that curiosity is key to freeing us from limitations and enabling a life centered on learning.”
Author: Brendan Gillen
Book: Hang Time
Author quote: “I wanted to create a sense of flow, stacking shorter and longer pieces together to establish a rhythm of peaks and valleys.”
Author: Susan Gregg Gilmore
Book: The Curious Calling of Leonard Bush
Author quote: “There’s thought that in Southern fiction, setting becomes character, too.”
Author: Emily Hauser
Book: Penelope’s Bones: A New History of Homer’s World through the Women Written Out of It
Author quote: “It’s attempting to get at the book’s heart, which is using archaeology and new advances in science as a starting point towards the silenced women of epic and myth.”
Author: R.L. Maizes
Book: A Complete Fiction
Author quote: “In honor of the release of A Complete Fiction, a novel about writers, I’m declaring November International Be Kind to Writers Month and International Return Writers’ Calls/Emails/Texts Month.”
Author: Alec Nevala-Lee
Book: Collisions: A Physicist’s Journey from Hiroshima to the Death of the Dinosaurs
Author quote: “Alvarez was undeniably a genius, but he was also driven, a relentless taskmaster, and born at the right place and time.”
Author: Phaedra Patrick
Book: The Time Hop Coffee Shop
Author quote: “I’m fascinated by actors or pop stars who were once in the public eye and what happens to them when the spotlight fades.”
Author: Alyson Richman
Book: The Missing Pages
Author quote: “While this novel centers around a library built out of grief, the heart of the novel is that books truly are as eternal as the soul. “
Author: Kathleen M. Rodgers
Book: The Llano County Mermaid Club
Author quote: “For years I longed to write a novel that incorporated writers and books and elements of magical realism into the narrative.”
Author: Polly Stewart
Book: The Felons’ Ball
Author quote: “There’s something about the area where I grew up that really motivates me creatively.”
Author: Carolyn Larkin Taylor
Book: Whispers of the Mind: A Neurologist’s Memoir
Author quote: “Whispers represent the difficulty to hear reflections of what is really wrong or bothering the patient.”
Author: Kathy Watson
Book: Orphans of the Living
Author quote: “I visited (virtually) state archives and special library collections of football memorabilia. I read the board meeting minutes of orphanages in Montana.”
Author: Octavie Wolters
Book: This Will Last Forever
Author quote: “Making art is what I must do, what I am on earth for.”