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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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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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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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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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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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. 

I feel like it is almost cliche to begin my post with Daphne Du Maurier’s opening lines to REBECCA, one of the most famous opening lines in English literature. Here, Du Maurier immediately establishes the voice, locale, and dream-like atmosphere of her story. We are sucked into another world and, like her nameless narrator, forever haunted by the imposing structure of Manderley and the larger than life ghost of her husband’s dead wife.

And yet, despite her timeless ability to compel readers, Du Maurier often gets a bad rap. Until recently, she was dismissed as an escapist romance novelist. The prevailing thought for some time was that her work was “middle-brow.” Others considered it trash. Why? Let me try to put it into context. The books REBECCA most closely resemble are JANE EYRE (Charlotte Bronte) and WUTHERING HEIGHTS (Emily Bronte), both published ninety-one years before Du Maurier’s bestseller. Meanwhile, James Joyce’s experimental FINNEGAN’S WAKE was published in 1939 (just a year after REBECCA) and Virginia Woolf’s modernist masterpiece, MRS. DALLOWAY was published thirteen years before REBECCA. So, Du Maurier was writing traditional historical romances and gothic thrillers at a time when her best known contemporaries were more concerned with experimenting with form. She, in fact, wrote — what we might now call — commercial women’s fiction.

In recent years, critics have revised their takes on Du Maurier and her status has been elevated. They have focused on the Freudian and Jungian subtexts of her books, news of her potential bi-sexuality, and the undeniably powerful psychological realism in her works. Her work is now commonly accepted as literature.

Yes, it might be true that there is a “trashy” element to REBECCA, if trashy is equivalent to page-turning and accessible (although that might not be it, exactly, either) but it seems far too easy to dismiss the novel or the author. First of all, as in REBECCA, Du Maurier’s endings are never quite happy. When one reads REBECCA, they enter a dark and queasy place full of twists and turns and never feel quite at rest even at the book’s close. (Not exactly a place you would want to escape to.) Second, I think Du Maurier touches on something profound in all of her novels and short stories: whether it is the loneliness at the heart of her book and their heroines, the complicated relationship between the narrator and Rebecca, or the way in which a house (Manderley) becomes a complex character in its own right.

-Jennifer Bassett

- Survive long, boring meetings
- Plot out a “sick day” calendar to maximize time off
- Write your novel on company time
- Create the most pro-worker cubicle to instill a false sense of your total commitment
- Anonymously send your boss a Happy Secretary’s Day bouquet

Overall, the book aims to turn the daily grind on its head, so that instead of feeling overwhelmed and disgruntled, you will foster fun and creative ways to make the workplace work for you.

About the Author: Jeffrey Yamaguchi threw himself a retirement party at the age of 26. No, he had not won the lottery or benefited from a stock options windfall. It was just wishful thinking, which continues on to this day. More of his schemes can be found at workingfortheman.com and 52projects.com. His new book, Working For The Man: Inspiring and Subversive Projects for Residents of Cubicle Land, has just been published by Penguin.

The author will be joining the show at 6:00pm. Want to score a free copy of Working for the Man? Leave a comment for the author here, and if we use it on the air, you’ll win a free book!

Erin Hennicke is back to chat about books and books to film! Join us at 6:40 as we chat all things books & film! Erin Hennicke started her career in the Subsidiary Rights Department of Viking Penguin before segueing into the film industry as a story editor at Barbra Streisand’s production company, Barwood Films, where she oversaw development and production. In 2000, Erin joined Franklin & Siegal & Associates, the largest literary scouting agency in New York, where for the past seven years she has scouted books & material for Universal Studios, among others, a job that allows her to have a foot in both the film and publishing industries.