Blog
Authors Answer – 5 Questions from Elizabeth Rynecki
"Authors Answer is a new project by Elizabeth Rynecki, a writer, film director, and now a promoter of other authors..." 1. Are there particular films that have influenced your writing? 2. Do you listen to music while you write? 3. Is your go to comfort food sweet or savory? 4. Do you collect...
Q&A with Deborah Kalb
"Mending What Is Broken, like all my novels, grew out of a short story. Although “The Teardown Party” was published and I thought myself done with it, the story was not done with me. First off, Peter Sanguedolce. Peter really intrigued me. He was unlike any other character I’d drawn. He was a...
Playlist for Mending What Is Broken – Largehearted Boy
"Peter Sanguedolce swims in music. He remembers his Nonno Franco—known all his life as Fatty—playing a tinny upright on the mezzanine of a pungent cigar factory. Fatty regaled his bored cigar-rollers with everything from Giuseppe Verdi to the Big Bopper. Peter’s Uncle Nico commanded the organ at...
In Conversation with Terry Shepherd
Mending What Is Broken was born out of a short story about a man names Peter Sanguedolce. But Peter was too good to lose. He had more of a story to tell. Listen to the backstory of how a short story evovled into a novel.More From the Blog
Rags of Time: Studies in Fictional Travels in Time
All good science fiction draws us into the author’s dreamworld, but seminal science fiction possesses something beyond riveting plotlines. Read my essay on literary time travel in The Decadent Review. Rags of Time: Studies in Fictional Travels in TimeMore From the Blog
How a Novel Began to Spin a Web Around Me
Writers are often asked where a story or novel came from. Is this true? Did this happen to you? One would like to respond to such sweet curiosity with something definitive, “Oh, I took this from an article that appeared in the New York Times on October 4, 1965.” But rarely is the muse so...
A Novel Idea. An Interview with Suzanne Lang of North California NPR
"McKean's characters are so palpable...and we can relate to aspects of their humanity and also their radical behaviors that are just off-kilter from what we might imagine of ourselves and others. And it’s in that slight extreme and unfilteredness that his characters are endeared to us." - Suzanne...
Svetlana Alexievich: Voices from Chernobyl
As I have been reading my way through Powell’s Bookstore “25 Books to Read Before You Die, World Edition, 2016,” I have been choosing my selections from the list somewhat randomly. For some time I’ve had my eye on Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices from Chernobyl and finally last month got around to...
Bohumil Hrabal: Too Loud a Solitude
Czechoslovakian writer Bohumil Hrabal comes out of a long tradition of wicked satirists. Think of Rabelais, Swift, Voltaire, and, in our era, Günter Grass (The Tin Drum), Raymond Coover (The Public Burning), and Terry Southern (The Magic Christian). Or, even more contemporary, Saturday Night Live....