Janet Lee Carey - Author Interview: Setting

Pick one of your favourites among the settings from your published fiction stories or a setting which is an interesting example from your published fiction. What makes this setting one of your favourites or an interesting example from your fiction?

I’ve said little of my stand alone fantasy Stealing Death (Egmont USA, 2009) in these interviews. Because of this and because the setting surprised me, I’ll delve into that one here. It’s a favorite of mine because the setting really stretched me. I grew up in a redwood forest near the sea. I knew trees and mist and water, so many of my novels take place in or around the wild woods.

Stealing Death had to be set in a drought-ridden country, in sand and dust and thirst and heat. First a short description of the novel:

Would you steal death to protect the one you love? After Kipp loses his family in a fire, Kipp swears he will never let anyone he loves die again. When the Death Catcher comes after the girl he loves, he steals the soul sack, and rides away.

Kipp is alone in the desert on the run from the Death Catcher through most of this story. I had to get to know the stark realities of desert survival to write an authentic tale. To learn how to find water when there’s none to be seen on the surface, to describe the landscape strewn with boulders that looked like hunched giants after dark, or show the dusty road drenched in light, to learn the habits of scorpions instead of woodland larks.

What is a setting from a published fiction story by another author you would compare this setting to and why are they similar?

I love Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa. I listened to it on tape and and read it many times to taste the dryness of the landscape on my lips, and see the beauty in a wilderness that was ‘other’ than forestland. Dinesen loved her time in Africa and you can scent her love in her words. Beryl Markham, the author of West with the Night, also taught me how to see desert and dry savannah with a new light.

How would you describe the way you introduced this setting to readers of your story?

The book opens with Kipp’s dream: “In his sleep, Kipp heard hounds baying in the foothills. He dreamed of sweeping human bones into a sack. His mouth was dry when he awoke. The thorn bush scratching the window whispered the same kush-kush sound the broom made in his dream. But there was no howling now and no scattered bones to be swept off the floor.”

The dream is brought about by the sense of impending death due to the long drought and the hazards of fire. Kipp’s father had hoped to start a new life in Zolya, but the drought has withered his father’s dreams along with their orchards.

How would you describe the integration of characters and setting in this story?

Setting is a character in this story. It is the first antagonist, the bringer of death. Kipp’s journey forces him to live close to the land. He’s riding and camping out in the wilderness alone. He’s caught between the world of the towns and the world of the nomads. Because he’s different and alone, he’s not trusted in either place.

How would you describe the interaction of story and setting in this story?

Since Stealing Death is a fantasy, I want to mention the relationship between fantasy and reality in setting. Magical elements can be used to increase danger. Using magic to ‘rescue the character’ is problematic. I wrote this story knowing Kipp could just as easily die of thirst in the Zolyan desert as he could in a realistic novel. If that weren’t true, the book wouldn’t have any weight.

How much research did you do for the setting of this story, and what did that involve?

I have stacks of desert books. Along with studying landscape, plant, and animal life, I looked at tribal life in places like rural Africa and studied the nomadic way of life. My researched showed me the desperate need for clean water in drought-ridden landscapes like Africa. I usually donate to charity as a part of each book launch and raise awareness on school visits and put a link on my website to allow readers to learn more. For Stealing Death I chose Water for People (http://www.waterforpeople.org) to raise reader awareness for the need for clean drinking water. You can see more on that on the “giving back” page on my website.

To what extent would you describe the setting of this story typical or atypical of the settings in your fiction stories?

Atypical. It was really a challenge for me! I loved the challenge.

How do you usually decide on or develop a setting for your fiction stories?

Setting development comes naturally as the characters interact in time and space. Every detail heightens the reality. It’s especially essential in fantasy to ground the story. This is done through narrative using the five senses and through the character’s physical experiences. Masterful setting is real enough for the reader to feel it. An author friend of mine who grew up in India used to read Alistair MacLean’s book set in the Arctic Ice Station Zebra each year to “cool off”. Sitting outside in 110 degree weather, she would actually feel cold! That’s the ultimate setting challenge for any author.

To what extent do the settings of novels you read have an impact on why you read them, and why?

I’m a sucker for a good setting! One of the reasons I‘ve read Tolkien again and again to return to Middle-earth. And the same is true for other books like Out of Africa and West with the Night. Ursula K. Le Guin’s settings also stir me not only in her Earthsea books but in her science fiction and fantasy novels. I also relish well-crafted settings in historical fiction novels like Amy Tan’s descriptions of China in The Bone Setter’s Daughter, and Indu Sundaresan’s The Twentieth Wife and the rest her Taj Mahal trilogy set in the time of the Mughal Empire in India.

Yes there must be story and yes there must be character but I also want to GO somewhere. Don’t we all?

Author website: www.janetleecarey.com



Brian Freeman - Author Interview: Setting

Pick one of your favourites among the settings from your published fiction stories or a setting which is an interesting example from your published fiction. What makes this setting one of your favourites or an interesting example from your fiction?

I think extremes enrich drama. Most of my books are set in Duluth, which is an extreme place – a small city on the shore of violent Lake Superior, on the border of the Canadian wilderness, in one of the coldest places in the U.S. The intensity of the setting reflects the intensity of the story. Weather plays an important role in many of my books, because weather inevitably plays a role in the life of people in the American Midwest. It’s a day-to-day reality of how people survive. It also means that the setting is intertwined with the characters.

Interestingly, my second book STRIPPED is set in Las Vegas – another extreme place on the opposite end of the spectrum. It’s wide open where Duluth is closed off, red hot where Duluth is ice cold. But they contribute to the novel in similar ways.

What is a setting from a published fiction story by another author you would compare this setting to and why are they similar?

People in Sweden refer to Minnesota as “Swedish land” because there are so many Swedish immigrants here, and because the bitter landscape is similar to Scandinavia. Not surprisingly, readers of the “Swedish noir” authors such as Larsson, Nesbo, and Mankell often feel right at home with the “Minnesota noir” of my books.

How would you describe the way you introduced this setting to readers of your story?

I’m not an urban author. We have plenty of great writers who set their novels in big cities like Los Angeles, New York, or Chicago. I wanted to write books with a more rural, more remote setting, dealing with intimate emotional issues rather than urban themes. That’s why I chose Duluth. It’s large enough that you can imagine dark things happening there, but small enough that you’re always bumping into your past. That’s the essence of my novels, and Duluth reflects those themes.

How would you describe the integration of characters and setting in this story?

Duluth was a very wealthy city once upon a time. In the early part of the last century, Duluth was the busiest shipping port in the U.S., and fortunes were made on mining and shipping. Most of that money and glamour have bled away with changes in industry. As a result, there is a sense of faded glory about Duluth; there is a sorrowfulness in the way people think about the past and yet a determination to keep going in the face of hardship. My characters bring that same mix of toughness and tragedy. They reflect the city, and the city reflects them.

How would you describe the interaction of story and setting in this story?

Well, of course, no one would want to visit the Duluth in my novels. The crime rate is way too high. I’m never sure whether the Chamber of Commerce will let me back in! However, Duluth gives me fertile ground for the kinds of stories I tell. I like scenes that are set outdoors. I like extreme weather influencing the plot. I like unusual, dramatic settings. In my fifth book, THE BURYING PLACE, for example, I located a ruined school building in the rural lands outside Duluth – and it proved to be the perfect creepy locale for many of the book’s scenes. It’s a real place, just like nearly all of the places I use in my books.

How much research did you do for the setting of this story, and what did that involve?

My books should give readers a “you are there” feel. I always say that movies do a great job with two senses – seeing and hearing – but a novel should activate all of your senses. Every scene should make you feel like an invisible observer, where you’ve been dropped down in the middle of the action, and you can hear, see, smell, feel, touch, and taste what’s happening around you. The way I capture that authenticity is by scouting locales for every scene the way a film director would. I carefully pick a setting that matches the tone of the chapter – and then I go there to record my own impressions. I use a voice recorder and camera to establish how the places feel to me – and then I pour all of that into the manuscript.

To what extent would you describe the setting of this story typical or atypical of the settings in your fiction stories?

This is who I am as a writer. It’s exactly the setting I like to write about. When I was growing up, my parents had a little cottage in rural Michigan where we went on summer weekends. That’s where I cultivated my love of the Midwest. To me, this area is about dirt roads, deserted beaches, storms, fields, and remote farmhouses. Those are the places I remember from my childhood, and I try to bring them to life in my books.

How do you usually decide on or develop a setting for your fiction stories?

I have to fall in love with an area. Some people may wonder about that, because usually I describe these places as pretty dark! It always seems to be raining or snowing. Everything’s in disrepair. You can’t trust your neighbors. It makes you wonder how I would describe places I didn’t like. However, I’m always attracted to the essential mystery of a region. If I drive through an area and wonder what’s going on behind closed doors or in its shadowy woods, that’s an area I’d like to write about.

To what extent do the settings of novels you read have an impact on why you read them, and why?

I do pick books based on their settings. I’ve always been a great fan of rural England – so Peter Robinson and his Yorkshire settings appeal to me. The same is true of the settings in books I read growing up, such as Ireland in Uris’s Trinity or Michener’s Hawaii. If it takes me somewhere fascinating, I know I’ll enjoy the book. On the other hand, a great writer can make any setting appealing. I may not have a lot of interest in gritty, urban L.A. – but when Michael Connelly takes me there, I’m happy to go.

Author website: www.bfreemanbooks.com



Jack Ross - Author Interview: Poet

What kinds of poetry, including songs, did you experience as a child and teenager, and did you have some favourites?

The first poet I read in detail was – somewhat surprisingly – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. I bought an old copy of his poetical works for a dollar, and studied it carefully (I’d come across a stanza from his poem “Tegner’s Drapa” quoted somewhere: “I heard a voice that cried / Baldur the beautiful / is dead, is dead / and through the misty air / passed like the mournful cry / of sunward sailing cranes”). That really knocked me out as a child. Sometime after that, I moved on to A. E. Housman, whose curt laconic stanzas suited me perfectly as an adolescent (“Where you would not, lie you must / Lie you must and not with me”).

The first actual “modern” poet I read was Apollinaire. I studied French at school, so discovering his work (“La Chanson du Mal-aimé”) had the effect of revolutionising me and showing me that there were exciting alternatives to the more rigid and traditional patterns I’d got used to.

Would you say your childhood and teenage experience of poetry has had a distinct influence on how you write poetry now, and why?

For years I was addicted to strict forms, in obedience to models such as Housman and (a bit later) W. H. Auden, whose work I still adore. I really can’t stand most of the poems I wrote then now. I think that I first started to write poems which had some quality of permanence to them (for me, at any rate) when I realised that the kind of time and attention I was prepared to give to translating poems out of foreign languages had to apply to my own work as well. I found out that poems I’d written years before might still need new lines, new stanza – in some cases a complete overhaul, and that this process had no clear end.

Who is another poet whose poetry you admire and why?

There are so many! Right now I’ll say the German poet Paul Celan, though, as I’ve just been translating from his work and I find it an endless source of fascination and joy. It’s hard for me to think of anyone who combines so much intensity and attention to detail with so much lyrical inventiveness and ability to evoke the anarchy of the world (what the Chinese call “the 10,000 things”).

How would you summarise one of your poems in one paragraph?

I published a poem called “Our Lady” in an online anthology in 2005 [http://www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz/features/fugacity/ross.asp]. It begins with the lines “Our Lady / of Perpetual Tension / intercede for me ...” and goes on to list a number of causes which might combine to produce the somewhat OCD-like symptoms which one might refer to as “perpetual tension” or (to use a term a friend introduced me to sometime later ) “free-floating anxiety”. Hunter S. Thompson refers to this feeling simply as “the Fear.”

How would you describe the appeal of this poem to readers?

I feel that a lot of people can identify with this pit-of-the-stomach sensation of a world accelerating out of control towards some inexplicable abyss of fear and chaos. I try to keep the causes of anxiety in the poem strange and clear in order to give a feeling of dream (or nightmare) logic – even though just about all of them happen to be quite true.

Could you share a stanza or small section of this poem?

the bus doors
are wedged open
the men in silver suits
unzip their skin

How would you describe the contribution this stanza or small section makes to the poem?

This is the end of the poem, after the speaker has described the obstacles impeding his / her attempt to get a piece of machinery fixed; that sudden shock you get when you realise you have to finish a job in days rather than weeks; and the sensation of trying to get to a shop in time to buy a much-desired something, only to find it had shut a moment before. At this point the anxieties become more sinister (or transcendent), as the Martians / Men in Black / Asylum doctors suddenly unmask, “unzip their skin” ...

Would you describe your poetry primarily as narrative, thematic, character portrait, or how would you describe your poetry?

I’d say that my poetry was primarily narrative. I try to make my stories as pared down and suggestive as possible, though, so hopefully there’s little nineteenth-century sprawl left in them. I like to think of people reading them and then gradually becoming aware that there’s something subtly off about the events or emotions being described. I definitely want to unsettle and perturb my readers as much as I want to please them ...

Do you read your poetry aloud to people? If so, how would you describe the size and response of your listening audiences?

Yes, I do. The groups would range in size from a hundred or so to twenty or thirty. Sometimes I join in group readings with other poets, sometimes I give readings on my own. What I like most is to mix in reading other people’s poems with my own (it’s so much easier to perform other people’s work), but when the stipulation is made – as it so often is – that I can only read my own work, I tend to fudge the issue a bit by reading out translations as well as originals. The response varies. I find that I often get the most enthusiastic reception when I read work I would think of as pretty difficult (word-jumbles, passages in foreign languages, etc.)

Do you write groups of poems to form collections? If so, how were the poems connected in your most recent collection?

Again, it varies. I do believe that collections need a good deal of narrative logic to justify their appearing together as a book, but sometimes this connectedness isn’t really apparent to me until after I’ve written all the constituent poems. My most recent published full-length collection was a group of poems written during a visit to the Czech republic, and inspired by the experience of visiting the Nazi “model ghetto” Theresienstadt. I called the book To Terezín (2007), and it included prose pieces from my journal and even some mini-essays as well as poems.

The book I’m working on now, though, is a rather more conventional grouping of poems written over the past couple of years, linked by some common themes and ideas. I’ve tentatively entitled it Models, and I try to look at that word in a lot of different ways: role-models, miniatures, fashion models, poetic models etc. etc.

Author website: The Imaginary Museum - http://mairangibay.blogspot.com/



Douglas E Richards - Author Interview: Teen/Young Adult Novelist

What kinds of fiction did you read as a teenager, and did you have some favourites?

I read science fiction almost exclusively. I loved Isaac Asimov and Madeline L’Engel, especially her novel A WRINKLE IN TIME.

Would you say your reading as a teenager has had a distinct influence on how you write fiction now, and why?

Absolutely. As a kid, I became passionate about science, but this passion didn’t stem from the boring lessons I was learning in school about plants and mineralogy, it stemmed from the accurate, mind-blowing concepts I was reading in science fiction novels. Within the pages of these novels, I encountered scientific ideas so awesomely cool they were harder to believe than anything out of a Harry Potter novel. Concepts such as Einstein's theory of relativity, quantum physics, cosmology, genetic engineering, and nanotechnology. Concepts that sent my imagination soaring. Because of this, I made sure to include similar mind-blowing concepts in my middle-grade/YA science fiction series, THE PROMETHEUS PROJECT.

What did you do before you became a published teen/young adult novelist, and how did you come to write your first teen/young adult novel and get it published?

I was a biotechnology executive. As my own kids became older, I realized that while there was plenty of worthy fantasy available for kids, there was very little of the “hard” science fiction that I had loved growing up. I wrote the first book in THE PROMETHEUS PROJECT series and was lucky enough to sell it to a very small publishing house.

How would you describe your style of teen/young adult fiction or your approach to writing teen/young adult fiction?

My goal was to write adventures that would appeal to all ages, from nine to adult, including boys, girls, advanced readers, and reluctant readers alike. Adventures with numerous cliffhangers, breakneck action, mind-expanding science, and tight plots; hopefully making it very difficult for anyone to stop reading them, regardless of their age or passion for reading.

The protagonists in my books are bright, well adjusted kids, and the tone is optimistic and upbeat. I take great pains to deliver intelligent, tight plots with complex mysteries at their centers. My villains are always brilliant, brilliant people who don’t make mistakes -- and yet as brilliant as they are, the kids are always able to outsmart them.

Who is another author whose teen/young adult fiction you admire and why?

Rick Riordan. I admire writers like Rowling and Riordan who are able to captivate kids and adults alike.

How would you summarise one of your teen/young adult novels in one paragraph?

In CAPTURED (THE PROMETHEUS PROJECT, Book 2), Ryan and Regan Resnick are the youngest members of a top-secret team exploring the greatest discovery ever made: an abandoned alien city buried deep underground -- as potentially deadly as it is astonishing. When the city is captured by highly trained soldiers led by a ruthless alien, the adult members of the team are taken hostage, and Ryan and Regan become the team's only hope of survival. With the future of the world at stake, the Resnick kids must do the impossible: outwit the brilliant alien, free the prisoners, and thwart an unstoppable invasion. But not everything is as it seems. And time is quickly running out. . .

How would you describe the appeal of this novel to teen/young adult readers?

Young readers get to root for fellow kids, and can immerse themselves in an exciting, perilous adventure in which young protagonists are able to outwit a brilliant alien and save the day.

How would you summarise a chapter from this novel in one paragraph?

In one of the later chapters, the kids finally figure out the exact nature of the villain’s plot, and walk the adults through the logic and clues that led them to this horrific, yet inescapable, conclusion.

How would you describe the contribution this chapter makes to the novel?

This chapter reveals the horrible truth behind the villain’s plot, which is worse even than the adults had thought, and underscores the kids amazing reasoning skills and clarity under pressure. But just because the kids have figured out what is going to happen, doesn’t mean they’ll have any way to stop it . . .

To what extent would you say fiction written primarily for young readers is different from fiction written primarily for adult readers?

I recently wrote my first adult novel, an adult biotechnology thriller called WIRED, which has become a bestseller in the US. Having written for both worlds, I find that writing for kids is far more difficult than writing for adults. When I write for kids, I’m never completely sure what will resonate with them, because, alas, it has been many years (decades) since I was one myself. I still demand of myself that my plots for kids are complex and contain surprise twists, but for an adult book I can totally let myself go with respect to the complexity and sophistication of both concepts and sentences.

Author website: http://www.douglaserichards.com/. I am better able to keep my author Facebook page current, so I also encourage anyone interested in my work to Friend me on Facebook at Douglas E. Richards Author.