Tag: novels

Inside the Author's Studio: Interview with Terri Giuliano Long

 

After attending my first Thrillerfest, the world of books is drawing me closer — despite all the gloomy predictions from within the publishing industry — and from conversations over the summer, the same pull is at work on readers and aspiring writers around the globe. Towards this end, I’m mixing up the standard book review and including an interview with the author for my next several posts so that we can appreciate both the finished work and have a sense of the toil that went into producing the oldest form of technology we have.

The feature this week is In Leah’s Wake by Terri Giuliano Long. 

Terri Giuliano Long

Juggling a cheating, absent husband, and two very active children, the protagonist Zoe, battles memories of forced termination of a third pregnancy due to it threatening her own life. Is Zoe a good, albeit besieged, mother? Or are her reluctant maternal  instincts about to have drastic consequences? See the excerpt below for an example of how Ms. Long builds suspense and sets the dramatic arc for these characters.

1.   How did you get started as a writer?
I’ve been a writer, in one form or another, my whole life. As a child, I entertained myself by making up stories and acting in my own improvisational plays. In high school, most of my hobbies and activities involved writing. One day, brazenly, I walked into the editor’s office at the town paper and asked for a job. For a while, I covered sports and general high school news. Eventually, the editor gave me my own column. I was sixteen. That column was my first paid writing job. I earned about a dollar a week – and I knew then that writing was the only job I’d ever want. I can’t imagine a life where I didn’t write.

2.   What was the hardest part of writing your book?
For a lot of writers, it’s facing a blank screen, revising, dealing with rejection. I struggle with all of this, too, to varying degrees. For me, sustaining belief—not in the project, but in myself—is, by far, the biggest challenge. I wonder if I’m on the right track, constantly second-guess myself. I’ve taught writing for 15 years, and this is my first book. There were many nights – and days – when I wondered what I was doing, and I seriously considered giving up. Dory, the little blue surgeonfish in the film Finding Nemo, says, “just kept swimming.” That really is what I’ve done. Above all, hold onto your dreams. Don’t ever give up!

3.   Was there any part of writing the book that surprised you? I wrote the first draft as my MFA thesis, so I was under the gun. The writing was dreadful, but it was a breathy process; when I finished, the novel had rounded characters and a general shape. I spent the next several years immersed in the book. I was with the characters, in this fictional place, all day; the Tyler family took over my dreams. I almost believed they were alive, that Cortland, the imaginary town, was a real place. It was an adventure, and I loved every minute.

4.   What advice would you give you aspiring or first time novelists? It’s hard, but believe in yourself. Trust your instincts. I know wonderful writers whose first, second or third books – really good, strong books – were rejected. To deal with the rejection, boot your computer day after day when it seems as if no one cares, as if the stars are misaligned – to self-publish in a world that privileges the traditionally published – you’ve got to believe in yourself.  Writing is a lonely profession. Most of the time, we’re alone with our work. The loneliness can wear on you, and cause you to question yourself.  Cherish your friendships. Your supportive writer friends can encourage and sustain you.

5. Anything else you want to tell readers?
I’d love to see In Leah’s Wake turned into a major motion picture. What writer wouldn’t love to see his or her book on the big screen? Realistically, I hope to continue writing, building an audience. I hope readers enjoy my books and, in some small way, that my works gives people hope and helps them feel connected to the community around them.
6. After attending the Oscars, what’s next?
I’m currently at work on a contemporary psychological thriller with a historical twist: Nowhere to Run takes place in the White Mountains in northern New Hampshire. A year after the brutal murder of her six-year-old daughter, Abby Minot, formerly an award-winning writer, accepts her first assignment—a profile of the philanthropic Chase family

Excerpt from In Leah’s Wake

In Leah's Wake Cover

In the dream, Zoe is rowing a canoe, in the middle of the ocean. The canoe bobs in the waves. A swell washes over her, tipping the boat, and Zoe is treading water. She tries to swim, the current too strong. The tide carries her downstream, through a narrow passageway, to a saltwater river. A party boat passes, so close she can almost reach out and touch it. People in Twenties-style clothing—mustachioed men in crisp white suits, women in short frilly dresses—are crowded on the deck, several men leaning precariously over the rail. The women laugh, sipping martinis. A band, playing on the upper deck, launches into a song, people singing, dancing. Zoe cries out, but no one hears. Suddenly, she spots Leah, floating toward her. Zoe kicks her feet, harder, harder, propelling her body forward. Leah reaches, grabbing her neck. No, Leah. We’ll both drown. Take my hand, baby. My hand.

He’s dead, Momma. He’s dead. Leah tugs Zoe’s hand.

“What?” Zoe says, somewhere between waking and sleep. “Baby, what’s wrong?”

Leah shrieks, her face blotchy, contorted. Zoe pushes to her elbows, her tongue cotton, her ears full of liquid.

A haze has fallen over the house. She searches for the clock.

The room blurs. Zoe thinks she might vomit. Leah tugs harder, trying to pull Zoe—Where? Reaching backward, using the arm of the sofa for leverage, Zoe drags herself up. Rubs her eyes, her skull expanding, her mind numb.

“Mommy, listen,” Leah cries. “You’re not listening, Mommy.”

Zoe floats toward the stairs, Leah zooming ahead. Her joints ache, the soles of her feet burning as she presses, one foot then the other, to the hardwood floor, sheer will propelling her forward. She wishes she could go back to sleep. She could sleep forever, she thinks.

Sleep forever.

“Mommy,” Leah calls, from the top of the stairs. “Hurry.”

“I’m coming, Leah. I am.”

Zoe holds onto the banister, the stairs moaning under her weight. Leah has drawn stick figures with black magic marker on the walls inside the stairwell. Her temples throb, blood draining from her head to her chest. Mommy. Come, Momma. Hurry.

What has she done? My God, Zoe thinks. What have I done?

“I did it, Mommy,” Leah cries. “I killed him.”

For one horrific moment, the world goes still. Then Zoe is shaking her daughter— “Who, Leah? Who did you kill?”—terrified of the answer.

Suddenly, the baby wails. Zoe blinks, catching her breath.

“I wanted to make him pretty, Mommy. I hadda hold him,” she sobs. “I holded him nice. I did. I tied the ribbon and he stopped breaving.”

She sees the hamster now, in Leah’s open palm, a pale blue ribbon cinching its waist.

 

The Question No One Wants to Answer

In writing my second novel — working title WAITING FOR SUNSET — I was having a lot of fun. The characters were lively; they said outrageous things, behaved in outrageous ways, and in general made fiction jump off the page. But then as the story progressed into part two, I began to wonder: is this how people really behave? Or rather: am I depicting how people fall in love accurately?

The theories about the function of art and writing vary. Some think that they should imitate life, vera similitude and really let the reader see things as someone might experience them in the ‘real’ world. Others think art is a mirror for us to understand ourselves and sometimes that can mean the mirror of a funhouse at the fair.

I had a basic question that I put to everyone I encountered over the course of week three of getting through my first draft: how do people fall in love? The answers were discouraging to say the least. Although love is a topic we all talk about irrespective of race, religion, or gender, no one wanted to go ‘on record’ and give me their opinion. A group of married men, all practicing husbands with ten or more years under their belt of relationships, children running all around at a two-year-old’s birthday party — evidence of their love with their mates — were hampered perhaps by the proximity of their spouses and unhelpful. I was dismayed by the generic answers I was getting from these friends, each of whom I knew their personal journey to their spouse. One met her at the tender age of 16 as a foreign exchange student. Another while a first year student at college. Still another while working in D.C. On average they had a 1.5 children (one couple 2, one couple 1 with one on the way, skewing the dynamic).

“Married people know nothing about love,” I said that day, fulfilling a stereotype that actually isn’t true. Married people know more than anyone in any industry that spins the cobwebs of love that love is a daily choice of loyalty, fidelity, and head working in conjunction with heart and the other parts of the body to honor commitment. But this doesn’t mean we can verbalize how we come to make this strength of bond to someone else over all others. I am also included in this non-expressive bunch because although I had a ‘love’ marriage as most South Asians would call the act of choosing your own spouse, three years later, I couldn’t identify what drew me to my husband. Not to say I didn’t remember how or why we were attracted: my memory had erased the moments when any such union between a monolingual Lao-Thai American and converted South Asian Christian could have been in doubt.
“It was our destiny,” I said to my Indian friend and her husband and the other couple at the table at her husband’s birthday party when I raised my question and they pointed out both of their marriages had been arranged by parents. “We had no choice but to get married — it all funneled in that direction.”
I suppose I was making an argument for divine arrangement – that while true and in fact how it happened when the two of us met in Qatar — it was still an easy way out of the kind employed by my male friends at the toddler birthday party.

My own personal inability to answer the question only fueled my fire and the novel was a secondary benefit. I had to know why people didn’t want to talk about love in a definitive way even though all music: English, Arabic, Tamil or otherwise is about love; movies whether Hollywood, Bollywood or Egyptian feature star crossed lovers, and each of us during adolescence to adulthood searches for a lover who will stay true throughout life.

I went deeper into my search and got more answers at our early Thanksgiving potluck.

“Poise, confidence, and beauty,” a six month newly wed said, as he twirled the hair of his new wife.

“Things start tallying up until there is an aggregate of positives that tips her over,” another friend said.

“Common interests,” my husband said (which is hilarious because we actually have very few).

“Immune systems,” my other friend said, “I read that women can sense men with stronger immune systems and so biologically they want to mate to make strong off spring.”

I mulled these over and came back to my characters, Abdulla and Kavitha, who meet in an apartment in London unexpectedly and sparks fly. I tried to distill together what I had grasped from the various conversations, with men in particular because women will love as easily as we inhale air, and came up with the following skeletal list:
Attraction — check.
Strange circumstances — check.
Polar opposites — check.
Small discoveries of similarities — this is what needed developing, I decided, “the meat” missing out of the story and the heart of how people come into proximity and decide not to look at anyone else any longer.
After a few weeks of asking, I feel a bit like Carrie Bradshaw and still don’t know that I have a concrete sense of how people fall in love: it is ethereal, indescribable, ever present, and yet, just beyond our grasp.

What I do know that is that for Abdulla and Kavitha it will be each of these things and none of them. For each love story is it’s own unique tale.

My first novel (currently seeking representation) started in early drafts about how two people fell out of love: the anatomy of a breakup. This second one explores how two people who seemingly have nothing to gain, find the world in each other. The third one I’m researching on this trip to Laos and Thailand has early hints of the first and a bit of the second: Why would a woman leave her eleven year old son and father of her child for the wide world?
I’m not sure how long the idea of love will interest me as a writer but for now the cultural and social dynamics of how we choose our partners is fascinating, perplexing, and great fodder for fiction. Perhaps I am a romance novelist at heart but minus the graphic covers and sex scenes.
Share with me your experiences or thoughts about love and help enlighten the path of my characters – and the rest of us in real life.

In search of a word…

For the past week or so, I’ve been looking for a word. Yes, it sounds crazy, not a pair of glasses, or car keys, or even a misplaced phone number. But a word. The word I was looking for was – I thought – “asture.” 

But it came up with the red squiggly line underneath it which means spell check thinks it’s misspelled. 
So I clicked on the red squiggly and this is what spellcheck offered me:

Assure
Astute
Pasture
Satire
Azure
 
None of these were the one that I wanted. I was typing away, happily meeting my NaNoWriMo goals, when I wanted this word “asture” to describe the boss in the novel I’m writing. I meant, purposefully sparse, a no nonsense man. I Googled it, figuring the internet dictionary would know exactly what I meant.
 
Turns out the Internet (and Google) have their limits too. This is what I got with a search for “asture”: lots of links explaining the word pasture.
 
I was getting desparate: had I made up a word? I am moderately dyslexic when it comes to spelling and numbers – things reverse themselves – so I turned to my tried and true source for all things literary: my undergraduate English professor.
 
Here is the email I wrote her, subject line, “What is the word I mean?”:
 
Asture? The word that means sparse, plain, reserved.
 
Would have been in Jane Eyre to describe that orphanage where her friend died from TB.
 
I can’t find it and the dictionary thinks I mean ‘astute’ which I do not.
 
Did I make this word up?
 
Help!
m

Everyday she is now living her dream of being in the Big Apple, teaching and walking around everywhere, or taking the subway, right in the middle of the city that pulses with life. After decades in North Carolina, raising three children, and teaching at a small liberal arts college, she threw off the shackles of domesticity and made me dream come true. Needless to say, with her in NYC and me in Doha, our correspondence is more precious than ever.
 
As I waited for her response, I posted to a NaNoWriMo (http://www.nanowrimo.org/user/234858) forum, WORD OF THE DAY, which offers everyday a word to work into your section for that day. There were funny ones such as flies, or cut, or purple, and there were interesting ones such as abandon, or precise, or betrayal. Having stumbled onto the forum, I was ten or twelve words behind. I busily started writing in the past suggestions but I was still stumped by the specter of “asture.” So I wrote the forum moderator, a similar, but increasingly desperate plea to figure out what word I meant. (For more on my NaNoWriMo: http://mohanalakshmi.livejournal.com/2813.html)
 
She (I’m assuming, not entirely sure that is a woman) wrote me back a polite message with various permutations of words that were close to the spelling of the word I wanted, and some that were not:
perhaps you mean:
astute: shrewly discerning, acute, wiley – someone who quickly picks up what is going on from minimal information

aesthete: one who makes overmuch of the ‘sense of the beautiful’ generally someone who is not a part of the real world of emotions and dirt

apathy: indifferenct to what appeals to feelings – dont care about anything

aloof: removed in distance or feeling from, reserved stand offish, not involved

Was her tone slightly…. Impatient? 
I waited, knowing I would be vindicated by my now urbanite mentor.
 
Her opening line:
 
“I’ve never heard of it in my life.”
 
What? I thought. Eeek! I

’ve invented a word, and not only that, a word so obscure that even my most favorite literature teacher in the world hasn’t heard of it. I despaired and felt foolish. Perhaps the forum leader on NaNoWriMo was right to edit me. Perhaps I was a dolt, searching for a word that didn’t exist, stubbornly bothering people who had better things to do – like write with words that everyone knows, for example.

 
Then, in the typical intellectually curious fashion that she used on me all four years of undergraduate to bolster a burgeoning interest in graduate school, she recounted an episode of something similar happening to her:
 
But then I was teaching a poem by Francis Ellen Watkins Harper called “Bury Me in a Free Land.”  It’s in one of those used-to-be-$1, now $2 Dover editions.  One stanza starts, “I could not rest if I heard the tread / Of a coffle gang to the shambles led.”  I’d never heard to coffle and didn’t get around to looking it up.  Then the day I was teaching it, I went and left my book at home, so found it on the internet and printed it out.  There, the line read “Of a coffee gang to the shambles led.”  That sort of made sense – maybe a coffee plantation on a Caribbean island.  I made a point about how Dover can’t afford to do careful editing and still keep the price down.  Then in the middle of that night I suddenly remembered coffle, went to dictionary.com, and learned it’s a line of prisoners chained together.  So the next class, I had to make the point that the internet is even less trustworthy! 
 
Love,
 
I put this all behind me and kept going on NaNoWriMo, kept going with daily tasks like work, laundry, having a dinner party, cleaning up. 

My husband has recently started going back to school to complete a bachelor’s degree that fell by the wayside when he was offered full time employment as an undergrad.

 
“How do you know so many words?” he asked me one night while I was typing busily on the laptop on NaNoWri
Mo.
 
He was at the dinning table, typing on his latest assignment on his laptop.
 
“Reading,” I mumbled, “I read a lot and you always learn words that way.”
 
“Do you stop and look up every word you don’t know?’
 
I looked up.
 
“I don’t really have to anymore. But I used to. Sometimes I’d circle them and then come back.”
The rest of the evening went in companionable silence and we both reached our requisite word counts.
 
A few more nights go by and I’ve forgotten all about my quest for this word that no one else seems to know but me.
 
And last night, tucked in bed, feeling a little achy from a cold he had likely passed on to me, I read. I read because I always have read, ever since I can remember, from eight or nine, my mother taking us to the bookmobile to get our weekly allotment. I’ve read things she didn’t want me to read, romance novels before she thought I was ready for them, and this is how I found about many things about life as an adult she would rather have kept secret (but that’s another story).
 
So I read last night, like nearly every night for a ten thousand nights.
 
And that’s when it happened:

In the middle of SUITE FRANCAISE by Irene Nemirovsky there it was:

“Mentally Charlie reproached her for this – he liked his maids to be thin and a bit austere – but she looked about thirty-five or forty, the perfect age for a servant, when they’ve stopped working too quickly but are still fit and strong enough to provide good service” (223).
 
THE WORD! Used EXACTLY as I meant it to describe the boss in my novel!
 
I circled it, dog-eared the page, and went to bed with a smile on my face.
 
Now even Google knows what it means:
 
“Austere, bleak, spartan, stark all suggest lack of ornament or adornment and of a feeling of comfort or warmth.”
dictionary.reference.com/browse/austere
 
Thank you, Mom, for sharing with me the love of reading.
Thank you, mentor, for giving me the courage to ask questions.
 
Now, back to that novel, and that austere boss character….