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How to Start a Novel

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By Martha Anne Toll

People frequently tell me that they want to write a novel, they just don’t know how to start. Unfortunately, I have no advice, only a few thoughts on how I came to write Three Muses, which has found a wonderful home with Regal House Publishing.

An author is the worst person to describe her novel, but this was my 100-word pitch for Three Muses:

John Curtin, né Janko Stein, finds his way in America—damaged and traumatized—having survived a concentration camp singing for his family’s killer. World famous ballerina, Katya Symanova, née Katherine Sillman, fights her way from a lonely home and an abusive and intense creative partnership with her choreographer. Ultimately, she must face the impossible choice between art and love. How John and Katya find one another and unlock their futures forms the heart of this novel, which is framed against the power of three muses: Song, Discipline, and Memory. 

I know what year I started writing my novel, and I know some of its sources. Most of its origin story remains shrouded, however.

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In 2010, I was casting around for a frame on which to hang a new story. I stumbled upon a tradition from the Greek island of Boeotia that honored three muses. Song, Discipline, and Memory were said to be the original muses, and, in at least one version, Memory was said to give birth to the nine muses who came down to us through history.

I don’t know ancient Greek, but I was intrigued by the translation of their names: Aoede (song or tune), Melete (discipline and the preparation for prayer), and Mneme (memory). Beyond these translations, I found virtually nothing from the few Greek scholars I consulted, nor from inquiring at the National Archeological Museum in Athens, nor from the internet.

Nevertheless, I couldn’t let go of these three women. What difference did it make that I knew nothing about them? The novelist’s job is to weave fictions.

As I started writing, I came to know my protagonist, John Curtin, who was pulled out of line to sing for the Kommandant at a Nazi concentration camp. Would the Muse of Song abandon John once he reached safety? I began to worry that music would be a lifelong torture for him.

I spent hours at my computer, trying to inhabit the ballet studio with Katya, a woman who lives to dance. Was she working too hard? Too enmeshed with Boris Yanakov, her choreographer?

They haunted me, these characters—John for the agony of his experience and Katya for the consequences of her iron will (Discipline). I watched the Muse of Memory hover over both of them. Memory tends to do that with all of us.

I took in more than a few skeptical comments about the muses. After multiple re-writes, I reached an accommodation with their role in the story. Readers will need to have the final say. It’s up to them to decide what impact the muses have on Katya and John.

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On the other hand, I wonder if my lifelong passion for ballet was the source of my novel. I adored ballet from my earliest memories of it. At age five, I started taking lessons with Miss Corinne, who wore a bright red leotard.

And yet. I’m not sure that memory is accurate. It could have been my two older sisters who took from Miss Corinne. Maybe I came with my mother to pick them up when lessons were over.

I do remember my later enchantment, waiting for class to begin at the School of the Pennsylvania Ballet in Philadelphia, peering into the window, watching professional dancers rehearse. I would have happily spent all my time in front of that little window. It was an opening to a magical world of hard work and beauty.

Or maybe it was my long years playing viola and studying music. My compulsion to try to get music on the page. My need to explore what became a fraught and painful relationship with my instrument.

Music is backbone to Three Muses—it is the vehicle for Katya to express herself, and for John, the means of survival.

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Alternatively, it’s true that the inspiration for Three Muses was my feverish interest in the Holocaust. The older I get, the closer the Holocaust feels to my birth. I read and read about it. I listen to people’s harrowing family stories.

The Holocaust is more than a living memory, it was part of my upbringing. I come from a generation who knew Holocaust survivors. They were my relatives with German accents, my friends’ parents, my extended family. They were familiar; they visited our high school classrooms. I played music with them; they were my dentist and later my bosses.

Too, they were blanketed in silence. Like so many in her generation, my Nana avoided talking about them; she declined to discuss “that Nazi business.” My parents acted similarly.

My family was assimilated in the same ways that our German relatives were. We were not religious or observant. We were Americans first, just as our relatives were Germans first.

It was the poison of anti-Semitism that separated Jews from their compatriots, that made entire societies collaborate in their roundups and murder. Now we call it “othering,” the toxic process by which a group of people is made so onerous and reviled that they become non-human, opening the way for oppression and mass slaughter.

Never forget, we Jews say, meaning never repeat, no matter which group of people are the objects of derision. Here in the United States, the president and his henchmen have been relentless in their efforts to other. Their practice is not only cruel and vicious; it is also extremely dangerous. America is in peril. We need stories to help awaken us to hatred’s risks.

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In the end, I can’t describe the origins of Three Muses. I only know that we humans are angry and loving; we are selfish and injurious and kind.

How to express the trove of unique stories each of us carries around? We can sing and dance; we can remember out loud. Or we can we suppress our traumas and live in freighted silence, hermits sitting atop memories that are too shattering to voice.

I prefer to break the silence.

Martha Anne Toll is the 2020 recipient of the Petrichor Prize for Finely Crafted Fiction. Her novel, Three Muses,is forthcoming from Regal House Publishing in Fall 2022. She is a regular contributor to NPR Books and other outlets; and was the founding executive director of the Butler Family Fund, a social justice philanthropy. 

How Can White Folks Join the Fight to End Systemic Racism?

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Racism lives in our minds and bodies—to end it, we must first find and feel it. 

By Amy Banks MD

Like so many in our country, I am sick—not from the coronavirus, but by the ways systemic racism continues to shackle and kill people of color in our country and by the ways in which too many white Americans continue to deny it, look the other way, and/or fail to see how their lives benefit from it.

In the U.S., systemic racism is one of the primary default programs all citizens use to filter day to day experiences. The random fact of being born white comes with unearned power and an unseen advantage over people of color. I have learned from antiracist friends and colleagues that racism is so deeply embedded in our societal structures and subconscious minds that if you live your life without examining your biases and the biases of people who were instrumental in shaping your beliefs, you will inevitably replay the learned racism consciously or unconsciously.

For many white people, it is too easy to believe that you care deeply about social justice but are too busy with work, taking care of kids, or paying the bills to join an all-out war on racism. It’s been too easy to only think about Black lives mattering immediately following the killing of another Black person by the police. The mass of diverse protesters across our country are screaming in one voice that inaction is no longer tolerable. It is time for white people to take responsibility for changing the culture of racism by changing themselves and the unequal social structures they have created. Silence is not an option. 

In more intimate groups of well-meaning white people, I have heard many share how they feel stuck, frozen by guilt or fearful of doing or saying the wrong thing. They want to jump in but don’t know how or where to start. Taking responsibility must begin with an increased awareness of one’s own biases—how they were created and how they benefit all white people. Only then can any of us honestly own the role we are playing in perpetuating the status quo.

Racism lives in our bodies and therefore we cannot simply think our way of it. We cannot escape into our heads and create a new community ideal without first feeling the impact of racism. We must feel the pain that people of color have endured and to use that pain to fuel action for change.

Examining my own whiteness and unearned privilege takes me back to my roots in Maine, which remains the whitest state in the nation (2020). Here I can begin to understand how seamlessly my own racist education started and how deeply it lives in my cells. This is not an exercise in self-flagellation, but rather an attempt to see where it stills lives in me. I understand that it is impossible not to be racist when you grow up in an environment with toxic levels of bias, judgement and misinformation about people of color. I cannot become an anti-racist without owning and identifying where racism lives within me and in my communities.

To say that race relations were not on my radar growing up would be an understatement. In fact, in high school I was just coming out to myself as a lesbian and I was preoccupied with the injustices in the LGBTQ community in the later ’70s. In Maine, there was plenty of homophobia to worry about. However, for my family, that changed in the spring of 1979 when my father traveled on business to New Orleans. On his first day in NOLA, after eating dinner in the French Quarter, he and a colleague walked back to the Hyatt Regency. At the entry to the hotel, they were held up by two young men, and my father was shot and killed. 

Within hours, my family was told that “two Black men” had tried to rob my father and his colleague. This was my first substantive exposure to someone from the Black community. My family had been shattered by the murder and naïvely believed that the legal system in New Orleans would help us seek justice for the death of my father. We had no idea that what we were told was filtered through the New Orleans legal system well known for its racist attitudes. When the photos of the suspects, Isaac Knapper and Leroy Williams, popped up in our local newspaper, I remember looking at them closely and wondering what in their lives would have caused them to rob and kill. It never occurred to me that the prosecution would withhold exculpatory evidence at the trial and that one of the young men, Isaac Knapper, would be wrongly convicted for murder and sent to prison for the rest of his life. My family did not question the arrest and verdict for many reasons, but the biggest was that my family was solidly part of the white, dominant culture. One does not have to be an avowed white supremist to be racist—you simply have to be brainwashed 24/7 by a culture that defines health and acceptability as the birth right of all white people and associates people of color with violence.

When I found out in 2005 that the alleged killer of my father, Isaac Knapper, had been exonerated in the early 1990s, I was shocked and sickened. By then I had become a psychiatrist with a deep interest in issues of social justice and was well aware of the gross inequities that existed in America between people of color and white people—in health care, life expectancy, educational opportunity, housing, wealth … the list goes on and on. However, until I learned of Isaac’s exoneration, I had no way of knowing how entwined my own story was in America’s racism. The traumatic memory of my father’s murder was now exponentially more painful as it now involved the wrongful conviction of a sixteen-year-old boy. The anguish was now compounded by images of Isaac as a young man in the Louisiana State Penitentiary, Angola where he was sent to live out the rest of his life with no chance of parole.

By 2015, I was both curious and furious. Eric Garner, Freddie Grey, Michael Brown—the killings of Black men by police just kept happening. I decided to take personal action to more fully understand the horrendous racist event that my family had unwittingly been involved in. With much fear, I reached out to Isaac Knapper (who had been released after thirteen years and was living in NOLA) and asked to meet. In December of that year my sister, Nancy, and I met with Isaac and his wife in New Orleans. The meeting and our friendship have transformed my life. What surprised me the most was how easy it was to be together—how we didn’t stop talking and sharing the entire weekend we spent together. What disturbed me to my core was hearing Isaac’s personal experience of police brutality. How much worse his experience had been then I could even imagine. He shared his violent arrest at 5:45 a.m. when he was awoken with guns pointing at his head, the brutal interrogation where police beat him to within an inch of his life in an attempt to force a confession (it failed), and the utter disregard for his humanity at every turn of the legal proceedings. Yet, despite all he had been through (and continues to go through as a Black man in this society), he also listened to our story and our pain with deep compassion and caring. 

From left to right: Laurie White, Nancy Banks, Isaac Knapper, Amy Banks

One lesson I have learned from Isaac and his family is that the process of healing racism will hurt and at times, the risks you will need to take will be terrifying. But the pain is not penance for bad behavior (though there is room for that as well). When you hurt so badly you feel you will die—pay close attention. Feeling unspeakable pain may mean you have finally begun to feel clear empathy and resonance with the relentless agonies and indignities faced by people of color. You must walk directly into that pain to fully understand the price Black and brown people have paid for your/our white privilege. If you can’t stand it, don’t stop feeling, find someone who can help you hold it. Do you dare to risk everything to be part of the movement to repair the racial divide that has plagued our country since white people enslaved Black people over 400 years ago literally using their Black bodies to build America?

Isaac and I have established a deep friendship—one that feels more like family. It is a chosen family that I cherish. Within it I have had the opportunity to heal and to grow and to witness my own biases in a way that humbles me. We have chosen to write our story in an upcoming book, Fighting Time. In sharing our story, we hope to inspire people to move into the fear and the pain of systemic racism and to have the conversations that are desperately needed to see and feel one another and to help our society grow beyond our tragically racist roots.

Fighting Time, by Isaac Knapper and Amy Banks, M.D., will be published by Regal House Publishing/Pact Press in 2021.

Amy Banks is the author of The Complete Guide to Mental Health for Women, published by Beacon Press in 2003, and of Four Ways to Click: Rewire Your Brain for Stronger, More Rewarding Relationships, published in 2015 by Penguin. Her second book captures the work she has done over the past fifteen years studying the neuroscience of relationships and how essential supportive connections are to overall health and well-being.

References

Walker, Maureen. When Getting Along is Not Enough: Reconstructing Lives in Our Lives and Relationships. 2019, Teacher’s College Press, New York, NY

Kendi, Ibram X., Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. 2016, Nation’s Books, New York, NY

This article was first published at Psychology Today

My path to racial healing…

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If my path to racial healing is any indication, we have a long way to go as a country. In March, Pact Press published my debut essay collection Your Black Friend Has Something to Say. In June—within two days of one another—as I mourned the loss of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter protests swept the nation, I received an email from a friend from high school and a text from a friend from college who had both read my book and found themselves in it. One was a bystander to a microaggression I wrote about in my book, the other the perpetrator of a microaggression I wrote about in my book. I didn’t know I needed to hear from friends I went to high school and college with in the aftermath of my book coming out, but turns out I did. They wanted to take responsibility for the role they had played in the microaggressions I had suffered. Their words were thoughtful, considerate, and kind. I started crying and couldn’t stop. It wasn’t the apology that did it, I don’t think; it was the recognition that what had happened to me was wrong. That visibility, that validation, was enough. I thought the path to racial healing was one I’d have to walk alone. I was wrong. It’s imperative that my white friends walk it with me.

This is a tender time for Black people. We are mourning and marching at the same time. Our emotional labor is at an all-time high. Our personal trauma, our generational trauma is being triggered. Over the years I’ve come to know my own racial trauma rather well. It’s like I broke my leg but it didn’t heal correctly. Now the bones need to be reset so they can mend properly, and it hurts like hell—it’s a very painful process—but it’s what’s needed, it’s what’s necessary, in order for me to walk again. In fact, I don’t know which is worse: the initial breaking of the bones when the trauma first took place or the re-breaking of the bones when the trauma is treated. I realize, in writing my book, I gave my friends a tool to treat my trauma and they’re using it. Our country needs to do the same. Black people know what needs to be done. We have the tools. It’s up to white people to use them. But in order to heal we have to be heard—which is why healing hasn’t happened yet. Not everyone wants to hear what we have to say. Too many white people dismiss or deny our trauma—the acts of horror committed against us every day. They don’t want to take responsibility for their role in it. Then there are those who are too complacent to care. I’m grateful I have friends who do care, because when it comes to racial healing, the truth is, my trauma is their trauma too; my healing is their healing too. If more people knew that, understood that, then maybe we as a country could do the work we need to do, and we could all be set free.

Melva Graham is a writer, actress, and part-time activist. Your Black Friend Has Something To Say, published by Pact Press (an imprint of Regal House Publishing) in the spring of 2020, is her debut essay collection.

Steven Mayfield: “It’s Hard to Make Up Stuff that Good”

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Writers are always advised to write what they know. I don’t disagree, but think that it’s how you come to know about something that matters. I once took a class from Roger Welsch, the renowned folklorist. He advised us not sell ourselves short on what we knew, recalling a previous student flummoxed by her lack of worldly experiences upon which to draw. Dr. Welsch gave her an assignment. “Think of something about your family that you find interesting.” The girl came back with the following tale: Her grandmother and grandfather lived in a small Nebraska town where everyone knew each other. It was in a time when people talked over the back fence and hung their laundry on a clothesline. Every week the girl’s grandmother washed her husband’s pajamas and hung them on the line. When they were dry, she neatly folded them and placed the PJs in a dresser drawer where they remained until the next week when she removed the clean, unworn pajamas, rewashed them, and again hung them on the line. Why did she do this?

“Well,” the girl told Dr. Welsch, “my grandpa slept in the nude and my grandma didn’t want anyone to know.”

“It’s hard to make up stuff that good,” Dr. Welsch told his student.

So, she did have something to write about, even though it wasn’t drawn from her own experience. She’s not alone. Frank Herbert created the world of Dune, J.R.R. Tolkien the inhabitants of Middle-Earth, J.K Rowling the wizard’s school at Hogwarts. My next book, Treasure of the Blue Whale, describes a town and a time period that I never knew. Don’t blame me for such presumptuousness. Blame Alastair MacClean. When I was a teenager, I loved books by MacClean, the Scottish schoolteacher who wrote The Guns of Navarone and other adventures. His tales of mountain-climbing commandos, nuclear submarines, and double agents were concocted without actual experiences. He did not learn about such people and things by scaling Matterhorn, doing battle with Blofeld, or splitting an atom. He went to the library. Afterward, he didn’t write what he knew; he knew what he wrote.

The Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, CA at sunset.

A few years ago, when I lived in San Francisco, I picked up my wife from an appointment in Pac Heights. When I pulled up to the curb, she was waiting alongside a very old man. “This is Zane,” she told me. “We’re giving him a ride.”

Zane got in the car and introduced himself. “Thank you for your kindness,” he said. “In exchange, you will get a really good story.”

Zane was 90 years old and Nisei—born in America—the son of a Scotch-Irish mother and a father who was Issei—born in Japan. He’d gone to high school in San Francisco, graduating in 1942 just a few months following the attack on Pearl Harbor. Not long thereafter, Zane and his parents were shipped off to an internment camp in Utah. He spent a year there before being allowed to enlist in the Army.

“I moved to New York City after the war,” he told us. “I lived there for twenty-six years. I was a dance instructor.” He offered to give my wife and I free lessons. He said the rumba was easiest and we’d start there.

Zane’s home was in an assisted living facility not far from the Golden Gate Bridge. The sidewalk fronting the building was steep and we offered to help him to the door. “I can make it,” he assured us. “Have you heard of Michael Jackson? He did the moon walk. I can do the moon walk, too.”

And then he did.

“He was interesting,” I said to my wife as we drove home. I was already planning the book I would write, one currently in progress.

“Yes he was,” she replied, “he was very sweet. And his story…can you believe it? Why, you just can’t make up stuff that good.”

Steven is the past recipient of the Mari Sandoz Prize for Fiction and the author of over fifty scientific and literary publications that have appeared in Event, The Black River Review, cold-drill, artisan, The Long Story, and the anthology From Eulogy to Joy. In 1998, he was the guest editor for Cabin Fever, the literary journal of the Cabin Literary Center. He is the author of Howling at the Moon, a Best Books of 2010 selection by USA Book News as well as an Eddie Hoffer Finalist.

Ill-Fated Lovers: Writing About Socioeconomics and Race

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Writing Bliss presented several challenges which I would divide into two categories: the literary and the personal.

Portraying the impediments to Danielle and Connor’s relationship—the central plot of Bliss—was challenging primarily because those impediments are societal, as opposed to interpersonal or circumstantial. It would be one thing if they were merely too stubborn or prideful to admit their feelings, if they only misunderstood each other (which, for much of the novel, they do), or if they were from rival families, he a Montague, she a Capulet. But it is their socioeconomic and racial differences that threaten the love between them, and capturing the implications of these differences was thorny. Societal constructs are both omnipresent, all-powerful and insidious, and rarely discussed in everyday life, much less between two individuals from completely different backgrounds, like Danielle and Connor.

Connor, raised amid affluence and ease in a predominantly white community, has never reflected much on the luxuries of his race, which are apparent to Danielle, raised amid poverty and strife in a predominantly black community. More, she cannot comprehend why someone would forgo the opportunities wealth has offered him, as Connor attempts to do in the beginning of the novel. A rec center employee devoted to the needs of underserved children, she knows that luxury and opportunity are rare and precious blessings, and falling in love with someone who doesn’t understand this feels to her like a betrayal of her community. They are each caught between two worlds—their own and their lover’s—worlds their love can reveal but perhaps never reconcile. Perhaps.

Bliss also presented a personal challenge, because years of examining these characters’ worldviews had a powerful, if disquieting, effect on my own. I am the child of middle class parents who fostered roughly seventy kids. I attended public high school in northern Minnesota, then private college at St. John’s University (MN). I grew up believing I was capable of grasping a wide array of viewpoints. So, when I conceived of the basic premise behind Bliss back in 2014, at the tail end of a brief correctional career in Saint Paul, Minnesota, I felt that my experience—in particular, the year and a half I spent as a guard at the Ramsey County Juvenile Detention Center—offered me unique insights into urban poverty and relations between law enforcement and communities of color. However, the more I explored Danielle and Connor’s lives and the more confident I was in their motives and natures, the more I asked the obvious question: What right do I, a white man in 2020 America, have to write a love story featuring a black woman?

To this I have no answer. I can only take solace in the equally obvious fact that I am no authority, not on America, its merits or ills, not on race, womanhood, or love; rather, my time with Bliss has further convinced me that the realm of fiction is not for authorities. It is for the uncertain, those with more questions than answers, those who wish to understand the things they know they never will.

Fredrick Soukup received a philosophy degree from St. John’s University (Minnesota) in 2010. Excerpts from his works have been published in Fluent Magazine and Sou’wester. His debut novel, Bliss, will be released March 2, 2020 by Regal House Publishing. He lives in Saint Paul with his brilliant wife, Ashley.

Best. Interview. Ever.

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We had the pleasure of a virtual sit-down with Dan Kopcow, author of the soon-to-released Worst. Date. Ever. and are delighted to share his responses to our questions with you.

We’ve all heard the advice that authors should “write what they know.” But fiction emerges from imagination and creation of new worlds. Do you feel a tension between what you’ve experienced and what lives only in your mind?

First off, “It Lives Only in Your Mind” sounds like a 1950s sci-fi horror movie I would definitely want to catch on late-night TV. 

As a writer and a reader, I want to escape everyday life.  So writing just what I know doesn’t excite me.  I want to take what I know, or more specifically, what interests me, and heighten it until it’s dramatic and entertaining.  Life doesn’t always throw coherent drama and absurdity at you so I think there is a fair amount of invention involved in writing.  Sometimes, it’s finding a nugget of reality and imagining a particular circumstance or character within that reality. 

If I wrote only what I know, things would tend to get dull for me.  In life, you’re trying to manage things to keep the chaos and entropy at bay.  When I write, I look for the extreme and try to figure out how I can maximize the chaos and make my characters squirm.  It’s all about possibilities; either comic, dramatic, or thrilling.  And I tend not to think in terms of genre – it’s all about what the story requires.  As Stephen Sondheim is fond of saying, content dictates form. 

As an example, I had heard a story on NPR a few years ago about something called the John Hour.  In 1979, Ed Koch, who was NYC’s mayor at the time, thought it would be helpful to broadcast the names of the men who had been arrested for soliciting prostitutes every day on public airwaves.  Well, as soon as I heard that, I thought it would make a great basis for a comedy of misunderstandings.  It took a while to crack the story but “The John Hour” is one of my favorite stories in “Worst. Date. Ever.”  You never know where you’re going to find your next bit of inspiration.

What surprising skills or hobbies do you have?

Because I work by day as an engineer, my hobbies tend to be more on the creative side.  I love woodworking and furniture making.  I’ve reviewed films and directed theater.  I used to be in a professional boys choir and once sang for the Pope at the Vatican while we were on tour in Italy.  I make a mean Tres Leches Cake.  Actually, I find all these things are tied to my storytelling.  Even the Tres Leches Cake, especially when it turns into an epic, mushy, failure. 

What’s your process for writing: do you outline, create flow charts, fill out index cards, or just start and see where you end up? Do you use the same process every time?

All of the above.  Usually, before I even start writing an outline, I think a lot about my characters and what they want.  That usually leads me to what the right point of view and tone should be.   Once I know who should be telling the story and what their perspective is, I’m ready to start writing.

Some stories are more plot driven so a roadmap is helpful to make sure I get to certain rest stops and destinations.  Others are more character driven so it’s all about the journey.  Some of my stories are very tightly-woven so flow charts are completely necessary to diagram where and when each storyline and character will bounce off the other to create more complications and resolutions.

So, all that is part of my process.  And massive amounts of cocaine and absinthe.  Wait, am I allowed to say that?

Who inspired you? Which authors influence you?

Keeping my eyes and ears open for strangers, their stories, expressions and turns of phrase is always inspiring for story ideas.  Teachers were a great inspiration, of course.  There was a guidance counselor at my high school who was in charge of the Drama Club.  He really encouraged me to pursue the creative arts and think about story structure. 

As an adult, I draw my inspirations from a variety of authors, playwrights, and screenwriters.  The list is vast but at the top sits P.G. Wodehouse, Stephen Sondheim, Truman Capote, David Mitchell, Michael Chabon, Kate Atkinson, and Jacque Tati.  I love the way each of them decides to tell their stories.  It’s rarely a conventional subject matter and almost always expanding the boundaries of structure and perspective.

My friend, Paul, started writing when we were in college and inspired me to take it seriously.  We’ve been sharing each other’s stories for decades and it always inspires me to keep going.  

And my wife keeps me whimsical and not so serious.

What’s next for you?

I’m always working on a few short stories.  I also have two novels I’m currently polishing.  Prior Futures is a social satire thriller that I’ve been working on for several years.  The Singing Boys is a fictionalized version of my time in a professional boys choir including our summer tour through Italy.  “Mac and Cheese,” one of the stories in Worst. Date. Ever., is a chapter from this novel.

I’m also continuing to work on my next novel, The People from Away.  It’s a quirky detective story and family drama.

That’s My Story: Mandy-Suzanne Wong

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With what do you write? A computer? A pencil? A ballpoint/biro? Rollerball? Quill and the blood of virgins (male or female is fine, we’re all about equal opportunity at Regal)? A fountain pen (people who use a fountain pen get extra credit points)?

Regal House Publishing author, Mandy-Suzanne Wong

Ah, the fountain pen! All students at my British-modeled school were required to use blue fountain pens. Bloody hell, I loathed them. The cartridge running out when you need it most. The new cartridge vomiting all over your magnum opus. The horrible pink blotting paper. Ink all over your uniform, which would earn you a telling-off. Other children chewing the ends of their pens and winding up with disgusting blue teeth. How I longed for a biro! I faked my homework with my mum’s rollerball whenever possible. Now that I’m a professional writer with a professional writer’s income I scribble with whatever I can mooch for free, black biros given out at conferences preferred. But. How many plastic biros and biro refills must there be in the Great Atlantic and Pacific Garbage Patches? Have you ever wondered? According to Google, the most eco-friendly writing tool isn’t the biro or the computer but the hated fountain pen! It has to be a model that uses not disposable cartridges but an internal bladder which should not require replacing. However, it does require you to dip your pen in an ink bottle every once in a while, carefully squeezing ink into the bladder while not spilling it on your draft and hoping against hope that in the meantime your idea won’t sail clean out of your head never to return, and if your pen is on the asthmatic side, ink inhalation can take time. I have yet to solve the problem of eco-friendly writing in a way that satisfies my conscience. I have a terrible feeling I may never satisfy it.

We’ve all heard the advice that authors should “write what they know.” But fiction emerges from imagination and creation of new worlds. Do you feel a tension between what you’ve experienced and what lives only in your mind?

I’ve never found that advice particularly helpful. For one thing, none of us really knows much about anything. It’s questioning and wondering that make for good writing, not pretending to know it all. Even if I’d been groomed from birth to be a professional paper shredder, I wouldn’t know everything there is to know about being a professional paper shredder because I don’t know everything there is to know about being human. That very fallibility is essential to being human. We really don’t know much about ourselves. We know even less about other people. When characters run around shooting other characters or fling about sweeping generalizations, so sure of themselves that they never think to question their motivations—and much of the time it’s because their authors think they “know” that what they’re doing is justified by popular prejudices—well, as I reader I’m turned off, sometimes irreparably. Prejudices are not knowledge.

The idea that writers “write what they know” is misleading to readers too. My characters are not me. My characters’ families are not my family. I don’t write romans à clef. It is infuriatingly difficult to convince people of this. I’ve had to resort to asking aloud whether people really think that J.K. Rowling ever believed herself to be an eleven-year-old boy with magical powers—which I hate to do because people then assume I’m comparing my level of success to Rowling’s, and that is absolutely not the case—but it’s the only thing that seems to get the point across. Mind you, few people who offer to pray for me have actually read Drafts of a Suicide Note beyond the title. Someone offered to be my therapist (they’re not a therapist) on the assumption that, instead of raising difficult questions about the experience of depression, I already “know” it all and they “know” even better. When anxious, I just Add To Cart, books preferred. What could be healthier?

Who has supported you along the way? [or “The Hands of Aetna Simmons”]

Drafts of a Suicide Note has received some very special support in ways that are highly unusual for a novel of its kind. As far as I know, you can only die once; but Aetna Simmons has left behind ten suicide notes, all different: different voices, different looks, different inks and penmanships. Michelle Rosquillo, my truly magnificent editor at Regal House, suggested to the wonderful Editor-in-Chief, Jaynie Royal, that my wild dream of seeing Aetna’s documents rendered as illustrations—something I’d diffidently asked for but never dared to hope for—mightn’t be too wild after all.


Heather Kettenis and Mandy-Suzanne Wong at AWP

The cost of illustrations, however, was prohibitive. Jaynie suggested that I ask the photographer who’d taken my headshot if she might be able to help. Well, my photographer is my longtime bestie and soul-sister, Heather Kettenis. Heather has done papercraft, digital collage, and photography all her life. She’s also a hardworking physician. But she made the time to help to make my dream come true. We explained our idea and Aetna’s bizarre story to other artists who happen to have interesting handwriting, and they agreed to help as well. Rich Andrew, screenwriter and editor; Mark “Metal” Wong, breakdancer and performance artist; Kathryn Eddy, painter, collage artist, and sound artist: they became the “hands” of Aetna Simmons, some of her proliferous tentacles. I’d made up her words, they were already in my novel; the artists wrote them down in their distinctive ways; Heather photographed what they had written and made the images ready for print. She created more of Aetna’s documents on her own, using a combination of papercraft and digital techniques.

After that, Heather still had more to do. What image could possibly lend itself to the cover of a book called Drafts of a Suicide Note? Long story short: Rich, who’d read the manuscript, came up with an idea that Jaynie and Michelle and I refined in our minds. But how to execute it? Only one person we knew had the necessary skill and believed in the book enough to want to make it come to life.

I’ll never forget the afternoon Heather and I spent smashing pieces of my manuscript and photographing the balled-up scraps inside my piano bench. My job was to hold up black skirts and white tissue paper, absorbing and reflecting the Bermuda light as the sun moved slowly westward and Heather, bent over the camera on the tripod, said, “A little to the left . . .”

On my next birthday, my mom presented me with the actual smashed-up piece of paper that made it onto the cover, mounted in a black-box frame.

And the book? Well, it exceeds my wildest dreams.

Why are there so many Russian matryoshkas in Drafts of a Suicide Note? Those things are totally clichéd, and they’re probably symbols of reproductive fecundity, which couldn’t interest you less. What is up with the matryoshkas?

No matryoshkas appear in Drafts of a Suicide Note. But you’re right, I’ve been sort of mesmerized by Russian nesting dolls since I was a child. The best ones are unquestionably works of art, often painted by underappreciated women artists. But that’s not the main thing. I’ve spent some time staring at one of my favorite matryoshkas—a simple one with flowers—and wondering why I like these things, let alone find them mesmerizing. When you open the outer doll, which you do with a sort of splitting, not a twisting motion, there’s another doll inside with the same face. You open the inside doll, and there’s another one inside it with that same face. And so on. Yet you’re absolutely right that I’ve no interest in self-replication. I think the main thing is this. You break me open, but I’m still here. Break me again, but I’m still here, break me again and again until you reach the hard kernel at the very base of me that cannot be broken, that may have no resemblance to anything, and that is nonetheless still me. I think that’s what matryoshkas say to me.

What’s next for you?

I’ve got two novels in the works at the moment. One is still in its early stages, a novel about Ayuka Watanabe, the subsistence free-diver who stars in my fiction chapbook Awabi. The other I’m hoping to finish by the end of the year. Right now I’m calling it The Box. It’s a novel in six second-hand stories, each presented by a different narrator with a different voice and style, about a puzzle box that only some people can open as it’s lost and found and lost and found, changing hands again and again in a city that’s undergoing some strange effects of climate collapse. In no case is any narrator simply telling their own story; they’re telling stories they’ve heard from others. There’s no particular protagonist. It’s very experimental for me, really a lot of fun. The pay might leave something to be desired, but I do love my job.

Mandy-Suzanne Wong was the winner of the Digging Press Chapbook Series Award (Awabi, Digging Press, 2019) and the Eyelands International Flash Fiction Competition. Her work has also been shortlisted for the UK’s Aeon Award. Her stories and essays appear in The Spectacle, The Hypocrite Reader, Conclave, Sonic Field, Quail Bell, The Island Review, and several other venues. She is a native of Bermuda, where she’s writing a new novel and her first nonfiction book.

Four Dead Horses

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Martin Oliphant had always hated horses. Their staggering stupidity. Their unexplained, unexpected, and ever explosive snorting. The way they twitched distinct patches of their skin to dislodge flies. The way they shied madly at the most innocuous occurrences: a golf umbrella at fifty feet; a leaf falling from, of all places, a tree; a bale of hay stacked exactly where it’s supposed to be stacked and had been stacked for the last month.

Martin Oliphant hated horses but he didn’t, it must be said, wish horses dead. It must be said because horses died around him. Died or almost died. At Martin’s hand or almost at Martin’s hand. And it was horses, dead ones mostly, that blazed the trail to his life-forging passion. Horses brought Martin to cowboy poetry, and horses, live ones mostly, were cowboy poetry’s central theme.

Opening lines of KT Sparks’ Petrichor Prize winning novel Four Dead Horses (Regal House, spring 2021)

KT Sparks

Regal House: So, as a debut author who no one has ever heard of, isn’t it a bit pretentious to start an interview quoting yourself? It’s not like you just finished penning Profiles in Courage.

KT: Oh, absolutely. But I’m a complete egomaniac. It’s why I’ve been able to start writing novels at my late age (I’ll be 116 when Four Dead Horses comes out). It takes a unique brand of self-focused tunnel vision to say to your family: “Yeah, I’m sure you all need college funds and health insurance and not to have your decrepit old mother showing up on your doorstep having blown through her retirement savings and needing a loan for a knee replacement. But the world is calling on me to lock myself in a trailer, drink an Olympic swimming pool of coffee, and send forth 300 pages worth of words on the subjects of folk literary arts, midwestern men, western values, and equine mortuary science.”

But that’s not why I wanted the book’s opening up top. It’s because, when you decide to title a book Four Dead Horses, you better be ready to explain quickly why that’s the case.

Regal House: Four Dead Horses is the story of a corpulent middle-aged Midwestern pet mortician who, despite hating horses and occasionally (and always unintentionally) contributing to their deaths, dreams of performing with the real cowboys at the Annual Elko Cowboy Poetry Confluence. Is the novel autobiographical?

KT: Well, I’m neither male nor in the business of burying animals nor residing in Michigan (any longer). And my BMI is in the normal range for a woman my age, though I’d love to do something about that visceral fat, but hormones, what are you going to do? The small town on the shores of Lake Michigan in which Martin is raised is based on my home town as it was in the early eighties, and Martin and I would have been at the University of Chicago around the same time (I’m sure he was in my Political Order and Change class). I also, much to my own surprise and like Martin, fell in love with cowboy poetry while writing the novel. I even went to the Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada on which my fictional Annual Elko Cowboy Poetry Confluence is based. It was fantastic—cowboys (and cowgirls and Mexican vaqueros and Native Americans) with rodeo belt buckles the size of dinner plates and dents in their foreheads from bull busting in standing-room-only crowds straining to hear other identical cowboys (and cowgirls, etc., etc.) perform poetry. It was art integrated with real life and hard work and dusty open plains in a way you just don’t see on the literary circuit out East.

Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada

Regal House: What led you to hone in on Martin Oliphant as a main character? Aren’t you afraid the sad-sack-Midwestern-white-guy-hero’s-quest market is already saturated?

KT: There’s always room for another entry in the poetry-spouting-pet-mortician canon, don’t you think? And I’m a sucker for a character who, despite relentless failure, pursues a completely improbable and inappropriate set of life goals. It’s funny (I hope) and also tragic in a particularly Midwestern way, the lengths to which Martin will go and what he’s willing to sacrifice to hitch his chuck wagon to an idealized vision of the West. He misses out on a lot of opportunities for a rich life at home in order to pursue a version of the American dream that probably doesn’t exist, and certainly not for him.

Regal House: So you’re saying Martin’s a MAGA-type?

KT: Absolutely not. He supports the arts! He’s with Hickenlooper all the way.

Regal House: OK then, what about the movie? Who plays Martin?

KT: Jonah Hill, no question about it. But he’d have to put the weight back on.

KT Sparks is a farmer living in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. Her short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in a numerous literary magazines. Her first novel, Four Dead Horses, won Regal House Publishing’s 2019 Petrichor Prize and will be published by that Regal House in spring 2021.