I’m following up on my August 9, 2024 curation of quotes, links, and book information drawn from my regular posts about the Deborah Kalb book/author Q&As, now updating for the second half of 2024.
Deborah, my longtime friend and former colleague at USA TODAY/Gannett, continues to do heroic work by presenting insightful interviews with authors of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry multiple times each week of the year. In addition to her own writing and editing, she and Mary Grace McGeehan have a podcast, Rereading Our Childhood, and Deborah recently hosted the October 2024 Jewish Book Carnival.
The quotations in this post from her Q&As shine a light on the creative process. They will ideally provide perspective, context, and valuable information for readers, as well as current or aspiring authors.
Author: Jane Alison
Book: Villa E
Author quote:“The “fiction” came in envisioning crucial emotional or dramatic moments and going deeper into the mazes of their minds.”
Author: Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani
Book: The Cities We Need: Essential Stories of Everyday Places
Author quote: “I’ve spent a long time working on how photographs and texts can work together, without photographs illustrating the text, or text captioning the photographs.”
Author: Mike Bond
Book: Crude
Author quote: “Novels are like life: you can plan all you want, but if you try to stick to your plan, you can have a very boring life.”
Author: Tess Callahan
Book: Dawnland
Author quote: “I let the characters take the wheel, which is a messy proposition when they are terrible drivers.”
Author: Susan Sisko Carter
Book: The Lyric Hotel
Author quote: “The very nature of a hotel is character-driven.”
Author: Dante
Book: The Base
Author quote: “I also hope that readers will be more curious about the possibilities in science, and that they will read below the surface to find the good vs. evil thread in the book.”
Author: Ginette DePreist
Book: Reach Up: My Beautiful Journey with James DePreist
Author quote: “I am still amazed after his passing away over 10 years ago, how Jimmy is still so alive in people’s memory. Whether it is all the artists he collaborated with or with the public he served and the students he had been teaching all through his career, their memories are strong and they are still happy to talk about him.”
Author: Gretchen Dykstra
Book: Lessons from the Foothills: Berea College and Its Unique Role in America
Author quote: “I spent lots of time in the special collections of the library, appreciative of the archivists willing to pull endless files to find gems for me.”
Author: Greg Fields
Book: The Bright Freight of Memory
Author quote: “I returned from my last trip to Ireland to learn that The Bright Freight of Memory has been nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award, along with a National Book Award.”
Author: Varun Gauri
Book: For the Blessings of Jupiter and Venus
Author quote: “I first started this novel when my eldest, now 23, was a toddler. I worked on it off and on (mostly off) for decades.”
Author: Brendan Gillen
Book: Static
Author quote: “He has no Plan B. He’s never considered a life outside of making music.”
Author: Phyllis Gobbell
Book: Prodigal
Author quote: “I began thinking about Prodigal after I read William Kent Krueger’s Ordinary Grace and heard him speak at a conference.”
Author: Sydney Graves
Book: The Arizona Triangle
Author quote: “But facts can be liberating, especially if you’re willing to do a lot of research. And I love doing research, even for short stories.”
Author: Miles Harvey
Book: The Registry of Forgotten Objects
Author quote: “Place and geography are crucial indicators of psychology and drama.”
Author: Rebecca Hendricks
Book: Hard Dog’s Night
Author quote: “The core message of the series is to never give up and always believe in yourself.”
Author: Diana Janney
Book: A Man of Understanding
Author quote: “I weave philosophy into all my novels, making it come alive in an accessible way that is interesting to readers, whether or not they have previous knowledge of the subject.”
Author: Ricardo Jiménez
Book: Crash Course: A Founder’s Journey to Saving Your Startup and Sanity
Author quote: “I also hope that founders see themselves as much more than their startup and they don’t forget to optimize for themselves and their lives as much as their startup.”
Author: Patricia Leavy
Book: After the Red Carpet
Author quote: “Novels with big, outrageous plots can be loads of fun, but I’ve always been a fan of more subtle, character-driven novels.”
Author: Donna Levin
Book: The Talking Stick
Author quote: “The two ideas merged into the story of a woman’s group that comes into possession of a talking stick that might have some magical power.”
Author: Keith G. McWalter
Book: Lifers
Author quote: “The background of the longevity breakthrough described in the book is based on actual science, and refers to real people, such as the maverick gerontologist Aubrey de Grey, who was an early trailblazer in conceptualizing aging as a disease that could be cured.”
Author: Umberto Nardolicci
Book: Eye of the Nomad
Author quote: “The lingering lesson is that knowledge and wisdom are two distinctly different things. Knowledge, when wielded without concern for implications, can be extremely dangerous.”
Author: Clare Norman
Book: Cultivating Coachability: How to Leverage Coaching Readiness So Thinkers Can Optimise Value
Author quote: “Coaching is a joint endeavour to discover new thinking. It’s a partnership, where the coach creates the space within which the thinker can do their best thinking.”
Author: Alix Rickloff
Book: The Last Light Over Oslo
Author quote: “As a lover of history, the research is almost as fun as the writing so learning about the events surrounding WWII’s often overlooked Norwegian campaign was fascinating.”
Author: Marilyn Simon Rothstein
Book: Who Loves You Best
Author quote: “I knew I could have a fun time writing as soon as I plotted a story in which three grandmas vie for the attention of one grandchild.”
Author: Donna Seaman
Book: River of Books: A Life in Reading
Author quote: “I decided to write about how I ended up doing what I do, basically tracking the making of a book critic and editor.”
Author: Jane Seskin
Book: Older, Wiser, Shorter: The Truth and Humor of Life After 65
Author quote: “The collection talks about what we don’t talk about in regard to aging.”
Author: Stephen B. Shepard
Book: Salinger’s Soul: His Personal & Religious Odyssey
Author quote: “Born to a Jewish father and a Christian mother who “passed” as Jewish, young Jerry Salinger was raised Jewish and had a bar mitzvah at age 13.”
Author: Andrea J. Stein
Book: Dear Eliza
Author quote: “I don’t know about other writers, but I find that, when I write, I’m so immersed in the story that I often don’t know how it may affect others when they read it.”