Please note that Writers Revealed is on an indefinite hiatus. We will not be posting interviews/reviews or interviewing authors until further notice.

Rachel: Channeling Mark Twain is filled multi-layered characters and topics from pimps and prostitution to mental illness and social activism. What made you decide to give the novel that title? Were you trying to direct the reader’s attention to one area of the book?

Carol Muske-Dukes: I couldn’t write this novel for years. I tried it as a long poem (I’m a poet) and as a kind of journalism, but no go. My difficulty in finding its center or nucleus was caused by a conflict I felt in my own life which colored my initial attempts to write this semi-autobiographical novel. The novel is set in a time I remember well. I was teaching poetry at the Women’s House of Detention on Riker’s Island (and in other prisons) during the 70’s (the “present” of Channeling Mark Twain) and I discovered that I could not seem to bring together, in my mind, the world of prison and prison poetry — and the world of the literary life of Manhattan and its traditional aesthetic of poetry. This division of sensibilities, of language, tortured me for years. Finally, I realized that I could write about the conflict itself, what that felt like at the time. And what helped me realize this was a moment of inspiration: I suddenly thought that, along with writing about my own experience, I could invent a character who was a version of Mark Twain’s Huck Finn, contemporized — and I tried to imagine what it would be like if Huckleberry Finn “came back” as a young African American woman in prison on Riker’s Island. Thus, my character, Polly Lyle Clement, is at the center of Channeling Mark Twain. This young woman, a mysterious wayfarer and self-described blood descendant of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, channels him — just as I tried to “channel” her.
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“The depth of Gross’ portraits, and the nobility she imbues both moms with, renders a thoughtful account of how, for modern mothers, there is no easy choice.”
— Boston Now

Cara Seitchek: What audience did you have in mind as you wrote the book? It seems to have been written with a female audience in mind, but it’s definitely not chick lit. Did you also hope that men will read the book, perhaps to gain insight into women?

Gwendolen Gross: I started writing The Other Mother(which was, incidentally, originally titled The Mommy Wars) in 1999, soon after my first child was born. I felt as though while there were nonfiction titles about this divide between working and Stay-at-Home (SAH) moms (though this was before mommy lit, and there wasn’t yet so much nonfiction exploration of the subject), the personal, psychological impact was even bigger than the abstract and political. The fact of motherhood changes women’s choices—influences us, via hormones, emotion, the absurd elastic stretching of time, and changes our self-perception. Not only that, but there’s the wisdom of the ages that visits in the form of judgmental ghosts and neighbors. It’s a blissful time, new motherhood, and as difficult as it is tender. Our biological purpose becomes evident, but we’re still women who have thought about our own lives and desires and friendships independent of dependants for all the years leading up to this change. The battle seemed more internal to me than external, though the snappy comments fly, and people settle into camps, people I never expected began lecturing on good and bad mothering.
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Panoramic in scope, Away is the epic and intimate story of young Lillian Leyb, a dangerous innocent, an accidental heroine. When her family is destroyed in a Russian pogrom, Lillian comes to America alone, determined to make her way in a new land. When word comes that her daughter, Sophie, might still be alive, Lillian embarks on an odyssey that takes her from the world of the Yiddish theater on New York’s Lower East Side, to Seattle’s Jazz District, and up to Alaska, along the fabled Telegraph Trail toward Siberia. All of the qualities readers love in Amy Bloom’s work–her humor and wit, her elegant and irreverent language, her unflinching understanding of passion and the human heart–come together in the embrace of this brilliant novel, which is at once heartbreaking, romantic, and completely unforgettable.

Writers Revealed fans will recall that we had technical snafus and couldn’t get the Virtual Book Club running. Amy has since been gracious enough to field questions from her readers after the jump.

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Deemed by biographer Robert Lomas as “the man who invented the 20th century,” Nikola Tesla was one of the world’s most revolutionary and famed electrical engineers. He is a captivating if not puzzling figure, whose interests ranged from electromagnetism to Vedic philosophy to pigeons. Samantha Hunt’s The Invention of Everything Else brilliantly resurrects Tesla’s stay at the Hotel New Yorker, where he lived out his last days. On New Year’s Day 1943, Louisa, a young chambermaid, first encounters a luminous Tesla during a blackout at the hotel. She strikes up a friendship with the extraordinary inventor through their shared love of pigeons and begins to uncover his past. All the while, her romance with Arthur—a mechanic possibly from the future—buds, and her father’s impending departure in a time machine approaches. With The Invention of Everything Else Hunt celebrates the spirit of invention, and of life itself.
-Lisa Kunik

Lisa Kunik: The opening pages of The Invention of Everything Else transport the reader to an early twentieth century New York painted through a magical realist lens in which Nikola Tesla converses with pigeons. Likewise, your first novel The Seas embodies a magical spirit, that of the sea and mermaids. Has the realm of the magical always inspired your writing?

Samantha Hunt: I never think of it as magic or magical realism but I have always had an interest in mystery and those writers who, rather than solve mysteries, point out even larger ones — people like Haruki Murakami and Kelly Link. The world’s a mysterious place. Science and nature are stranger than any sort of magic or trickery. I’m very interested in the experiments being done by the British biologist Rupert Sheldrake. He studies things like why we know when someone is staring at us, or why, when we think of a long lost friend, very often he or she calls. He would like to demonstrate that these phenomena — that we all agree happen — are controlled not by coincidence or magic but by cells, biology. (He also happens to be doing experiments with pigeons and how they know the way home.) I like to think that’s the way I write as well.

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The Sabotage Café tells the story of Cheryl, a bored suburbanite playing with anarchy for the first time. After running away from home in the novel’s opening scene, Cheryl finds herself down and out in Minneapolis’ Dinkytown, at home– for the first time, perhaps– holed up among the lost youth of her generation in the abandoned building known as the The Sabotage Café.

But Cheryl’s mother, Julia, cannot seem to let her daughter go, especially since she knows what life in Dinkytown is like– having herself gone to live there some twenty years earlier, back when the now dilapidated The Sabotage Café was Minneapolis punk-rock mecca. Cheryl’s attempt to escape her mother, and her mother’s life, join them together, and it seems that the farther Cheryl runs, the closer she gets.
-Adam Goldwyn

Adam Goldwyn: How did you come up with the name The Sabotage Café? Is there an intentional irony in this choice? How does the theme of sabotage play itself out in the novel, if at all? And also, what about “café,” since this word, reeking as it does of bourgeois respectability and Starbucks’ capitalism, is the very thing Cheryl and her friends are trying to avoid?

Joshua Furst: The title rose from a number of sources: When I lived in the East Village in New York in the early 90s, there was a bookstore on St. Marks called Sabotage Books where the gutter punks who were the initial inspiration for the book seemed to spend a lot of time hanging out. Then, also, there’s a legendary collectively-owned Anarcho-leaning joint in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood of Minneapolis called the Hard Times Café. The title of the book nods to both these establishments. Hopefully, it does more than this. Of course, much of the action of the book transpires in a place actually called The Sabotage Café. But I think more interestingly, the central story being told revolves around Julia, and the ways her mind is at war with itself. She, in her respectable, bourgeois suburb is a kind of Sabotage Café of one.
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A sweet note to relay that our virtual book clubs are on hold until further notice. We will not be taking applicants for book clubs and all previously scheduled book clubs have been cancelled. Please note that this does not affect our weekly show or WR Classics. Keep checking back for updates. Thanks!

Du Maurier’s work lends itself to film.  Atmospheric, plot driven, psychological… 

For those of you who have read REBECCA, you’ll notice that in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 production Laurence Olivier’s Maxim de Winter isn’t a murderer at all…what’s up with that?  Most people think it is because Hitchcock felt it was too much of a challenge to make a murderer seem sympathetic.  From what I’ve researched, however, it seems it was actually a little more political.  Although the producer wanted to be faithful to the novel, the censors demanded that Maxim de Winter could not kill his wife without paying the penalty. Suicide was also frowned upon. After a hard-fought but futile battle, Selznick had to settle for Rebecca being accidentally killed when she falls while attacking Max.

But on to Hitchcock and Du Maurier.  Despite the success of Hitchcock’s Rebecca, Jamaica Inn, and later, The Birds, Du Maurier did not like Hitchcock’s adaptations of her work.  Probably because Hitchcock was notorious for having his own agenda.  Du Maurier felt he changed her works a little too liberally, shaping them into his own vision.  I love Hitchcock as much as I love Du Maurier.  I think it is a good idea to take a look at both versions of the work and compare.  I do think that one especially interesting addition in the film version of Rebecca is the scene in which Maxim describes Rebecca’s death.  Hitchcock films an invisible Rebecca during the entire description to eerie effect.  With this gesture, Hitchcock embues the film with Rebecca — she looms throughout just as she does in the book.I’ll refrain from discussing the discrepancies between Hitchcock’s The Birds (one of my favorite films) and Du Maurier’s short story.  (Du Maurier especially hated this Hitchcock adaption.)  Indeed, they are quite different.  I recommend both though as each have their own merits.

In a comment, a reader mentioned DON’T LOOK NOW.  This is a terrific Du Maurier short story collection (which includes “The Birds”).  Nicolas Roeg’s film adaptation stars Julie Christie, Donald Sutherland, a pair of creepy elderly sisters and something even more sinister at the very end.  The setting is Venice.  The couple is on vacation, in an attempt to get over the death of their young daughter.  The short story and film are often classified as “horror” but both go somewhere deeper than conventional horror.  I promise you won’t forget the story or the film.