#morrisinterview

[johncoreywhaley-blog]

Becky Albertalli Morris Finalist Interview!!!!

This year, as part of the annual William C. Morris Interview Series, I was delighted to speak with the uber-talented and oh-so-brilliant Becky Albertalli.  Becky’s debut novel Simon vs. The Homo Sapiens Agenda has not only landed her a Morris nomination, but also a spot on the National Book Award long list and a Publishers Weekly Flying Start honor.  This mother of two and former clinical psychologist has wowed readers and critics alike with her whip-smart and heartfelt story of identity, first love, and the nuances of the teenage experience.  

JCW: For starters, congratulations on a truly lovely, original novel and all the very-well deserved praise it’s received this past year.  How has the experience of publishing your debut been so far?  Overwhelming?  A dream come true?  A strange mixture of both?

BA: Thank you so much. (And just to get it out of the way, you should imagine a thousand cat emoji lined up making heart eyes at you.)

This experience has definitely been a mixture of dreamy and overwhelming. SIMON was my first attempt at writing a novel, and my book deal happened really quickly. I had to adjust to the publishing world quickly – and this can be a challenging field for people who are anxious or sensitive (I’m both).

That being said, for me, it’s been an incredibly rich and fulfilling few years. I’ve had the opportunity to become a part of this weird, awesome YA community. I hear from readers all over the world who feel connected to Simon or feel inspired by his experiences. I’ve gotten fanfiction and fanart (I’m a giant fangirl, so this is honestly my dream). It’s challenging, emotional work – even after the writing part is over – but my readers and this community make it worthwhile.

 JCW: YA writers frequently get asked, “Why do you write for teenagers?” and it occurred to me that your answer may be the only one I’ve ever really been interested in hearing.  You’re an experienced psychologist, having worked with teens for years in various capacities.  So, why write about teenagers?  Why Simon? 

BA: It’s funny – I think people assume I write YA because I worked with teenagers (and therefore know all their secrets). Totally not the case. I think I’m drawn to YA for the same reasons I was drawn to working with teens in therapy. I feel connected to teens. I’ve known so many who are interesting, funny, vulnerable, and sincere. And high school is still really vivid for me, even though I’m in my early thirties.

Simon, in particular, appeared in my head very early in the process, and he was easy to get to know. He’s a lot like I was as a teen – though he’s much more charming, and a little less self-aware.

JCW: In Simon vs. The Homo Sapiens Agenda, the title character begins an online correspondence with an anonymous boy named Blue.  This gets him into a strange situation, but I hate spoilers so I’ll stay mum on that.  My question, though, is if you could, in some hypothetical reality, have Simon correspond with a fictional character outside of the world you so skillfully created, who would it be and why? 

BA: I don’t think this answer will surprise anyone, but if Blue wasn’t in the picture, I’d ship Simon with Aaron Soto, from Adam Silvera’s MORE HAPPY THAN NOT. They’re both these softhearted nerds who think they’re cool, and have no idea how painfully earnest they are (i.e. they are Adam and me). And I think they’d be good for each other. Simon has a lot of social support and fairly minimal angst, so I think he could help Aaron find some stability. And I think Aaron would be able to gently challenge and work through some of Simon’s assumptions and misconceptions.

JCW: Someone once told me that there are about five stories out there and we (writers) are all just trying to create our own unique versions of them.  Where do you think Simon vs. The Homo Sapiens Agenda fits into that theory? 

BA: I’ve heard that – though I don’t know what the five story prototypes are! For what it’s worth, I have always thought of SIMON as a romantic comedy – which is why I’ve been so happily surprised that it’s been nominated for awards (I believe romantic books should get recognition – I just didn’t expect it). Actually, when I was writing SIMON, I wasn’t concerned with the story being absolutely unique – because no story is.  My priority was telling a story that felt true, honest, and authentic.  

JCW: Did you find it especially difficult to write from the perspective of a teenage homosexual male?  Do you think that, as a writer, the very idea of exploring identity was aided by this feat?

BA: Simon’s voice and point of view actually felt really natural for me! This is partially because he’s similar to me, and partially because I think there’s a lot more fluidity to gender and character voice than people realize. That being said, I wrote this book after working for years with LGBTQ kids, teens, and adults, especially gay boys. It’s hard to tease apart what felt natural because it was natural, and what felt natural because my work had become almost a part of me.  

JCW: One of the many things that stands out to me about your writing is that it has this uniquely accessible intelligence to it—you don’t talk down to your readers (teen or adult), but you also don’t waste any of our time with pretentiousness.  It’s a straight-forward story that packs emotional punch equal to its skillfully woven emotional depth.  So, you know, how do you do it?  Haha.  I’ll rephrase that to be more of a question: What is the Becky Albertalli writing inner thought process like?

BA: I have no idea.

Seriously. There is so much I don’t understand about my own creative process. I know there are moments when I’m in the zone, where certain scenes (usually pivotal ones) seem to write themselves. There are other scenes that I have to fight my way through.

I do read my teen journals before drafting. I outline loosely. If the story wants to deviate from the outline, I always follow it. I know I write really conversationally, which isn’t for all readers, but it seems to be how my brain likes to explore ideas. And I try to write honestly, even if it’s embarrassing (it’s usually embarrassing).

JCW: Simon, to me, is all about identity.  It’s the reason I write YA—because it took me so long to figure out who I was in the world—so I’m wondering if your skill for writing this particular kind of story stems from any personal experience as well?  Perhaps from your work with teenagers or from your own teenage years?

BA: Absolutely - issues related to identity are why I write, too, and that definitely stems from my own experiences. Many of my personal conflicts were different from Simon’s, but they were real (and are real – I really believe identity is something we continue to work through as adults). I actually explore some of those conflicts in a way that hits closer to home in my next book, which centers on a chubby girl falling in love.

  Lightning Round:

JCW: Is there a question about Simon vs. The Homo Sapiens Agenda that you haven’t been asked yet but would really like to answer? 

BA: Not Simon-related, but I have a pretty great answer for anyone who wants to know my most embarrassing author moment. It involves Jasmine Warga’s launch party and a pair of tights.

JCW: What is your favorite song?  Can you sing it well?  

BA: Hmm – my favorite song changes a lot! Right now, it’s probably the entire soundtrack to Hamilton, and I can sing it VERY well.

JCW: Is there a book you’ve read that you secretly (but not so secretly anymore) wish you’d written? 

BA: So many. One I really wish I’d written is my agent sister Lianne Oelke’s book. I stumbled across the first few pages on a writing forum, and fell so deeply in love that I asked if I could beta read the whole manuscript. It was a good decision.

JCW: Finally, it’s a tradition here for me to make the last question all about myself.  You’re a former clinical psychologist.  You wrote a beautiful and hilarious book with maybe the coolest title in YA history.  And you’re a devoted and awesome wife and mother.  So, there’s only one thing left to ask: Do you think you’re better than me?

BA: I AM AN ACTUAL HOT MESS, THOUGH, COREY. (Can we print that? In the Morris interview?)

So, I just typed: “Yes, I am better than you, John Corey Whaley.” And then I started giggling. And then I had to delete it. That sentence cannot actually exist.

JCW: Oh now stop.  In the interest of humility, I’m printing it here for all the world to see.

All jokes aside--a big thanks to Becky Albertalli for an incredible debut novel, the hopes of many more to come, and for being down right fantastic.  She is a true original. 

To find out more about Becky and her books, stalk her using the following socially approved media: 

www.beckyalbertalli.com

http://www.tumblr.com/follow/beckyalbertalli

@beckyalbertalli

Good luck to Becky and all of this year’s Morris finalists! 

-JCW

[johncoreywhaley-blog]

MORRIS FINALIST INTERVIEW: CARRIE MESROBIAN

CARRIE MESROBIAN, author of Sex and Violence (Carolrhoda LAB)

 The lowdown on Sex and Violence:

 At first you don’t see the connection.
Sex has always come without consequences for seventeen-year-old Evan Carter. He has a strategy—knows the profile of The Girl Who Would Say Yes. In each new town, each new school, he can count on plenty of action before he and his father move again. Getting down is never a problem. Until he hooks up with the wrong girl and finds himself in the wrong place at very much the wrong time.

And then you can’t see anything else.
After an assault that leaves Evan bleeding and broken, his father takes him to the family cabin in rural Pearl Lake, Minnesota, so Evan’s body can heal. But what about his mind?

How do you go on, when you can’t think of one without the other? 
Nothing seems natural to Evan anymore. Nothing seems safe. The fear—and the guilt—are inescapable. He can’t sort out how he feels about anyone, least of all himself. Evan’s never really known another person well, and Pearl Lake is the kind of place where people know everything about each other—where there might be other reasons to talk to a girl. It’s all annoying as hell. It might also be Evan’s best shot to untangle sex and violence.

  BUY Sex and Violence here: http://www.indiebound.org/book/9781467705974

  Stalk Carrie here: http://carriemesrobian.com or here: @CarrieMesrobian

  Converse with her fake boyfriends here: http://conversationswithmyfakeboyfriend.tumblr.com

  Because the William C. Morris YA Debut Award and I have a past, I had the great pleasure of speaking with Carrie Mesrobian about her debut novel, a finalist for this year’s award and a beautiful novel that has garnered much acclaim and multiple starred reviews.

  This is what happened:

    1.)  We all know that Sex and Violence is your debut novel, but was it the first novel you’d ever written?  How would you describe the experience of writing it? (Do you feel it came naturally to you, or did you struggle/were you accustomed to other types of writing?).

  Writing S&V was very intense but mostly very enjoyable. It kind of gushed out, as if I'd been restraining Evan and not letting him talk. But he was so much fun to write. 

  S&V is not the first novel I've ever tried to write. I have several failed or unfinished novels. The year I wrote S&V, I was trying to write a mystery novel. Do you know how hard it is to write those things? You have to be all deceptive and stuff! I'm terrible at that.

  2.)  What is it about coming-of-age stories that intrigues you?  Do you think you’ll always be interested in this kind of story, in one way or another?

  While I think there's a case to be made for me still dealing with a lot of crap from my adolescence that I probably should be over by now, I mostly like YA because it's got nothing to do with my current life, which I enjoy living, certainly, but which involves problems that are very boring to contemplate: motherhood, marriage, mortgage. 

  I don't know if I'll always want to write YA, but I'll tell you that I find most notions of being 'grown-up' or 'adult' supremely boring and uncomfortable. This is why I had to quit teaching high school. I felt like a total fraud and a terrible role model and was sure that any second the authorities would discover I didn't know what the hell I was talking about. I still feel this way about most areas of my life, for some reason.

  3.)  You’ve spoken in other interviews about the misconceptions that many people have concerning the use of medications and therapy to treat mental illness (PTSD, Anxiety disorders, etc.).  How important is it to you that your work, and perhaps the works of others in the YA community, offers teenagers an honest, all-sides perspective to this issue?  Do you think medications and therapy are too easily used as storytelling devices and not given fair treatment in some works of fiction? Are you wicked pissed off about it?

  It's very important to me that people understand mental illness better. I'm annoyed with stereotypes about depression, suicidality, anxiety, medication, therapy. It astounds me that people do not understand mental illness and mood disorders when you consider that almost everyone has one or knows someone who has one. And that really, most of these illnesses are pretty simple to treat if you bother to treat them and deal with them. It's when you pretend they don't exist that they become extremely problematical and complicated. 

  I'm pretty intent on banging on about medication's role in treating some mental illnesses because people don't realize that therapy costs a lot of money. It's not often covered by insurance. It's also goal-oriented; insurance companies want you to be done in so many sessions. And therapy isn't magic. If the person doesn't want to be there and learn how to help himself or herself, then it's largely useless. Mental illness, though it's often manifested through behavior, often has a biological component. That's why medication is so important to me to acknowledge. I have tried to live w/o medication for my anxiety and it doesn't work. Even when my life is relatively stable and things are going great, my body still finds a way to short out and panic over nothing. So when people say I need to examine my source problems instead of taking pills, yes, I get pissed. My source problem is my serotonin acts all wonky. I don't need to write in my courage journal more; if processing my thoughts about my childhood and whatever was the cure, I should have been cured by now, you know?

  4.)  Since its release, your novel has been met with much critical acclaim.  Can you speak a bit about how it feels to be recognized so publicly for something like writing, which is, in my opinion, such a personal, private thing?

  It feels weird, but it's nice. I feel focused on other projects, so my response to people reading S&V is now is like, "Oh, THAT. Right. That's such old news, you guys." I'm more in love with the newer things I'm doing. People liking S&V is like someone looking at pictures of my ex-boyfriend and saying, "Wow, he's cute!" Maybe it's true, but I've moved on, you know?

  (That sounds dickish. I don't mean to sound dickish.)

  5.)  Lightning Round: Answer in as few or many words as you like.  Who needs rules?

  -Is there a particular question about Sex and Violence that no one has asked you that you'd really like to answer?

  People really don't talk about the Beauchant brothers enough. They are my favorite characters for so many reasons. I love Tim Beauchant a lot. I think he needs his own book.

  -What’s your favorite song?  Can you sing it well?

  I won't even say my favorite because you will be so grossed out and then make fun of me on Twitter! I'm a terrible singer, though, and would never sing it at all.

  -If you could have written anyone else’s book, which book would it be and why?

  That's kind of a horrible question. It makes me feel like I'm hijacking someone else's business! It feels like terrible manners! John Corey Whaley, how could you ask such a thing!

  Okay, maybe what you want to know is what book that I really admire. So, here. A book that pleases me, over and over, is Eireann Corrigan's Ordinary Ghosts. I couldn't have written it but it's just so brilliant and funny and beautiful.

  -You frequently have conversations with your Fake Boyfriends on your tumblr page.  So, I must ask you, why haven't I been on there?  Do you think you're better than me?  Is it my hair?

  I hate to be the one to tell you this, Corey. But you, sweetheart, are Real. I have met you in reality. You made jokes about how sweaty you were, remember? You are a Real Person and I wouldn't want you to think that I'm putting creepy words in your mouth. It's really your personal space and dignity I'm thinking of, not a comment on your looks. Because you, as well as your hair, are absolutely spectacular.

As are you, Carrie. As are you.  

[johncoreywhaley-blog]

Morris Award Finalist Interview: emily m. danforth

The Miseducation of Cameron Post written by emily m. danforth, published by Balzer + Bray, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

The lowdown on tMoCP: 

When 12-year-old Cam learns that her parents have died in a car accident, her first reaction is relief that they will never know that just hours before she was kissing her best friend, Irene. Shortly after the funeral, her conservative aunt moves to Miles City, MN, to help Cam’s grandmother with the caregiving, but all the churchgoing and discipline they can marshal throughout Cam’s teen years can’t prevent her from exploring her sexuality further, finally falling for Coley Taylor, a “straight” girl who wants to experiment. When they eventually get caught, Coley tells all, blaming everything on Cam, and Aunt Ruth sends her niece off to God’s Promise, a conversion therapy school and camp. It is here that Cam meets gay teens like herself, and she begins to deal with the guilt and trauma of her adolescence, not through the pious teachings of the camp but through the love of her friends.

Because of my past relationship with the Morris Award, I was recently allowed to barrage my friend emily m. danforth through email and text message to obtain the following interview. If you don’t already love her, you soon will.

You can stalk her here: @emdanforth

Here: http://www.emdanforth.com

Or  here: http://somuchflotsam.tumblr.com 

Enjoy!

1.)  We all know that The Miseducation of Cameron Post is your debut novel, but was it the first novel you’d ever written?  How would you describe the experience of writing it? (Do you feel it came naturally to you, or did you struggle/were you accustomed to other types of writing?).

First things first, JC-dubs, thank you for interviewing me here as part of this very fun Morris Nom tradition. I’m tickled to be participating in it. I only wish that it also came with some sort of creepy induction ceremony that takes place at night on an ivy-swathed brick and stone college campus somewhere here in the northeast, a ceremony that involves blindfolds and drinking strange substances from a communal cup and possibly group tattoo and Pacey Witter from Dawson’s Creek …Or wait: does it potentially include those things and I just can’t know about them yet? Don’t tell me. I can wait.

tMoCP is both my debut novel and my first-novel-ever: the first I wrote or attempted to write. Working in the novel form felt pretty much like coming home, really, even early on in the drafting process, before I necessarily knew what I was doing or where the book was going. I was a student in a couple of grad programs (focused on creative writing) while working on tMoCP, and because of my enrollment in the workshop portions of those programs, I’d become accustomed to writing, for years, really, short stories. This was true in the undergraduate creative writing classes I took, too. For all kinds of reasons it’s just easier to workshop a 15-page short story than a chapter or scenes toward a novel. And writing short fiction also seemed really productive, at the time, because the idea was to write, workshop, and revise those stories and then send them out for publication in various literary magazines, hopefully building substantial pub creds that way. And lots of my fellow graduate students were very adept at this process. The thing is: I was never very good at writing short stories. I just don’t think that form suits me particularly well, and it certainly doesn’t speak to the reasons that I wanted to study (and write) fiction in the first place, which have absolutely everything to do with novels—usually fairly long ones. I love to read short stories, but personally I think that I’ve only ever written 3 that are any good at all (and one of those is maybe only 65% good.) And those stories came to me almost fully formed at their inception: I saw the whole story, how it would work in terms of approach, content, style, and I just sat down and wrote it and it basically ended up working as a story (with very minor revision). But, I mean, that’s true of only 3 (2.65, really) stories out of the dozens and dozens and dozens I’ve made attempts at over the years. Not such an impressive record.

Anyway, while all of that work writing shorter forms of fiction was ultimately a very good thing for me in terms of developing technique and learning to read like a writer, to recognize craft and its various usages in a piece of fiction, it never inspired me the way that working on a novel does. So while I wouldn’t say that tMoCP came easily, necessarily (there were plenty of stops and starts and things to fiddle with along the way), it did feel like it was absolutely the book, the story, that I needed to be writing, that I most wanted to be writing—and I recognized that early on. I think most of my general approaches to storytelling are just best served by the novel form.

  2.)  What is it about coming-of-age stories that intrigues you?  Do you think you’ll always be interested in this kind of story, in one way or another?

I think if you’re not coming-of-age in some way, always, then you’re stalled—stagnate. It’s tempting to try to say something pithy, here, like: In the end, every story is a coming-of-age story—but that’s pretty simplistic and not all that interesting, either. I know I have a more expansive “take” on coming-of-age than lit purists or scholars of the bildungsroman allow for, but so, so many novels that I admire, novels that made me want to be a novelist, can, I think, be read in satisfying ways as coming-of-age stories. Sure, usually when people use that term they’re talking about transitions that move a character, a person, from childhood/adolescence to adulthood (this is almost always true when we talk about YA), but that doesn’t mean that coming-of-age can’t speak effectively to lots of other scenarios, other kinds of narratives. One of the things that lots of fiction does, particularly character-driven fiction, is chronicle an extensive process of change that occurs in the novel’s main character. Traditionally, the coming-of-age novel just happens to do that with younger characters who are awakening to a certain level of maturation or self-awareness or identity-formation and then either embracing or fighting against those changes (or, often, both: fighting against and embracing). And everything about these processes is naturally heightened for teenagers because they’re completely new and therefore so often feel fraught. So, to answer your question: I absolutely wanted tMoCP to be, at its core, a great big coming of age (or coming of GAYge, as I’ve joked before) novel. I wanted it to follow this character, Cameron Post, for several years of early and mid-adolescence as she settles into herself, figures out what that it even means to be Cameron Post—what are the options, who is that person, or who might she be? And, most importantly, I wanted my novel to work within this first-person literary tradition, one that offers a chronicle of a character’s experiences with certain rites of passage typically unique to adolescence.

And yes, I will always be interested in reading coming-of-age novels—particularly given, again, that I think pretty expansively about just what that means. And thematically, sure, I’m certain I’ll explore some of these same themes in my future novels, but I don’t know that I’ll again write a book that’s framed so specifically as a capital C Coming-of-Age story. I feel like I’ve done that already, and have done it in a way that, for now, I’m really satisfied with. There are countless other approaches to writing fiction about adolescence (and adolescents)— particularly in terms of thinking about how to structure a novel—that I want to tackle now.

3.) You’ve said before, in previous interviews, that your major goal when writing Cameron Post was to “honestly portray [your] character’s experiences with as much nuance and depth as possible.”  Do you feel like you told the story the way you wanted to tell it?  Would you do anything differently, having lived with the novel for so long now?

Did I really say that was my “major goal” in writing the novel? Did I use that phrase—major goal? I believe you—I believe that I did, I just feel pretty sad/cringe-y about it now. I think I had lots of goals when writing this novel. Wait, I don’t even like the word goals when it comes to my novel and what I was or wasn’t attempting to get at with it. What gives, JC-dubs—why you trying to set me up for failure, here? Am I soccer player or a novelist? (But then there’s the sweet fact that I’ll always love you JCW. You know it’s true.) I think, I hope, what I was talking about in whatever interview you’re quoting me from, is just what I think all character-driven, representationally-realistic fiction does or attempts to do—and no doubt tMoCP is character-driven, representationally realistic fiction—and that’s make the characters feel as fully imbued with all their humanity as is possible on the page. I don’t know if I succeeded at that completely (maybe not with Aunt Ruth, say, or Lydia from God’s Promise), but I sure tried to revise my way to that place. I want readers to feel like these are walking, talking people—not props, not puppets for the plot or some didactic agenda, certainly not one-dimensional cut-outs for me to manipulate in scene. But there are more elements than just character development bound-up in making all of that happen, of course—the idea is creating a complete and convincing world on the page and then, you know, making shit happen within that world. I mean, I was absolutely as concerned with developing sense of time and place in tMoCP as I was with getting the characters inhabiting that time and place to feel authentic. I don’t know how to remove one from the other, or to prioritize one over the other—those things have to work in concert.

As for changing things—shoot: I’ll always want to do that, I think. I’m just one of those writers. I can’t point to a specific scene for you—not right at the moment, anyway—but sometimes when I’m giving a reading, say, I’ll think about how I might have worked a sentence or a moment differently, or added this character detail, finessed this line of dialogue, whatever. The other thing is that there’s so much of Cam’s story (written, I mean—pages of it) that’s not in this book. I suppose that sounds incredible to people who look at its current 500 page heft and want to hit me with a stick (or maybe just with the book), but it’s true. I know where Cam goes immediately after the novel’s closing scene, and what’s more: I know where she goes after that scene, and the next. And a lot of that material is already written and revised (though not quite all of it). Maybe someday it will be published, but I don’t think I’d ever want it as a separate book 2. It’s not its own novel is the thing. In my dream scenario, instead what would happen is they’d reissue this novel, tMoCP, but it would have like 300 pages more than the version people have now. That’s all. It would be the super-sized version—that’s what it would be.

  4.)  Since its release, your novel has been met with much critical acclaim.  Can you speak a bit about how it feels to be recognized so publicly for something like writing, which is, in my opinion, such a personal, private thing?

Well, you know, it feels both wonderful and also too public sometimes, too exposed, which has been an uneasy combination for me to settle into, but it’s likely one that doesn’t really go away. It’s a combination that speaks to the differences between being a writer (private) and an author (public)—and whether you like it or not, once you publish your book, you’re definitely both of those—both hats are hanging there on your coat trees, my friends, and you’re expected to put one or the other on at various times. (Though not usually both at once). It’s not that I don’t like that public side of things (I teach, after all, and that’s certainly part performance), but it doesn’t come as naturally to me as the writing part, and I still wonder, all the time—am I doing this “author” thing right? How might I do it better? It really is wonderful to have anyone, anywhere, involved with my novel—reading it, thinking about it, saying something to someone about it. It’s still, in some ways, something I have a hard time quite fathoming, even. It all still feels very new in that way, which I love, the newness of it—I do—but that also means that so much of the process is unexpected, and so it sort of gets at what I was saying when I was talking about coming-of-age as an adolescent—simply the continued newness of this process, if you’re a debut novelist, the unexpectedness, it can feel kind of fraught, I guess—even if it shouldn’t, or if it’s not reasonable for it to feel that way. Does that make sense? Maybe it’s a little like waiting for the other shoe to drop or something. Or maybe it’s just, again, the combination of these two very disparate states of being—wholly private, plopped down at a computer, muttering about scenes for days on end; and then tweeting, and giving readings and blogging and out there being an “author.” Other people manage the two with a kind of elegance and ease (or it seems that way) that I envy no end. I just putter about between them like an old woman without her glasses who’s looking for her cat in her neighbor’s rose garden, bumping into the wheelbarrow occasionally, stepping backward and mashing the prized Damask on the trellis. It’s mostly a pleasant sort of bumping-about, but it’s not very graceful.

  Lightning Round: Answer in as few or many words as you like.  Who needs rules?

-What’s your favorite song?  Can you sing it well?

Does anyone really have just one favorite song? I’m impressed by that. I do not. I have favorite songs on certain days or for certain occasions—I have lists of favorite songs by artist or genre or theme, year, certainly, but no singular, favorite song. However, I sing Bonnie Raitt’s portion of the live, acoustic version of her very sad duet with John Prine, “Angel From Montgomery,” pretty well, I think: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1T5NuI6Ai-o. (On certain days.) And I can do a mean “Sandra Dee” (from Grease) at Karaoke. But then, I suppose, so can most everyone else.

-If you could have written anyone else’s book, which book would it be and why?

Michael Cunnigham’s novel The Hours. For me, it’s a perfect novel, and if I’d written it I think I might have just ended things there and said, Done, suckers: I am done. You see this thing I just wrote? Yeah? Well that’s it. There it is and you’re welcome. (Of course, lucky for all of us, Michael Cunnigham, is not a total tool bag and so he has not acted this way and continues to write other beautiful books.)

-You’re an Assistant Professor of English at Rhode Island College.  So, tell me, do you think you’re better than me?

This is how you’re going to end this interview, JCW? Really? This is the note of your choosing? Fine. I mean, my options here, clearly, are to respond with one of the following answers to your horrible question:

  1.    No I do not, but your inferiority complex is showing.

2.    Yes I do, of course, but not for the reason you mentioned.

3.    What did the people of Rhode Island College ever do to you? You gotta problem with all Rhode Islanders, JCW, or just the people who work at or attend one of its public institutions of higher education?

However, I won’t do that. I won’t stoop to that level. I’m ashamed of you, JC-dubs. I thought we’d declared a truce of our great literary feud to conduct this interview, but it seems that I am mistaken.

All literary feuds aside, emily m. danforth is about as awesome as they come and so is her beautiful novel.  So, good luck to her and her fellow finalists! 

-C.