I had previously lived in Ireland, which is much more similar to America than America is to Japan or Korea, but I had felt all these things. The enormous joy, the intense strength of friendships so new, the distance between you and so many others, what it meant to be American, to be American abroad, to be human: Barzak had captured it all in the interweaving stories that make up The Love We Share Without Knowing, and so I could not wait to read his short story collection Before & Afterlives.

It does not disappoint. These are stories published between 1999 and 2011, covering his career, and they are all fall under the umbrella of speculative fiction, but as you read this collection you are reminded how silly genre distinctions are, because why can’t a love story be between a person and a haunted house? Who is to say that the unreal and the real cannot inhabit the same pages? Barzak’s skill here is making a foundation in reality so solid and believable that when the world’s glimmering shifts fantastic you are so swept up in it that it had to be that way. His fiction does not contain magic and monsters to illustrate magic and monsters but to show how beautiful and unknown and haunting our world is.

Reading these seventeen stories that stretch over twelve years we are given an overview of his career, of his concerns as a man. Identity, culture, sexuality, Ohio, rural and suburban youth, family, and always love. I believe love and the transition to adulthood stick out most clearly in his fiction and these are perhaps best captured in “The Language of Moths” and “Maps of Seventeen,” which are two of the longest stories in the collection, and, to me, the most perfect. Burgeoning sexuality, the disconnect of generations, the competitions and barriers that form within families, between siblings, the desire to get away from small town life, the comfort of home, and all the while, just beneath this so real reality, there is a bubbling, a slow rise of magic that shifts everything from a simple story about being a teenager and creates this sublime image of a girl and moths, of a man painting his lover.

While many of these stories traverse similar ground, they are surprisingly varied. There are ghost stories, steampunk adventures, distant future prostitution, surviving an apocalypse, cloning, saving a mermaid, and on and on. There are playful touches, surreal imaginings, harrowing hauntings, and beautiful masterpieces.

To put it short: this is a fantastic collection of fantastic fiction by a man soon to be a household name. His first novel, One for Sorrow, is being made into a film titled Jamie Marks is Dead, and you will know his name, so say it now, write it down, and look for his books. And if you are looking for an overview of Barzak’s writing, start here, with Before & Afterlives.

You will fall in love and it might hurt but it will be glorious.

Sure, these two stories have a relationship (compromised lives of one sort or another) and combine together into an interesting whole. However, there is an impressive range of writing ability between the two.  They are crafted quite differently, function differently, and impact the reader in different ways.

A brief sample from each demonstrates the variance of the two prose styles. Contrast the following “I Can Make It to California Before It’s Time for Dinner” sample:

I watch the TV for my girlfriend Megan. She’s fourteen and I am fifteen and every day she’s on the show that I watch about her. She’s pretty and I wish we could hold hands and kiss. My brother Josh is seventeen and doesn’t play with me and doesn’t like Megan. His girlfriend is not on TV and she’s not pretty. Josh and his girlfriend call me retard and laugh. My name is Jimmy but I laugh too.

with the following “May-September” excerpt:

In the living room Sandra found the sheet music, Concerto in F by Gershwin. For years she had known most music by heart, but the last few years a note would fall out here, there, and she could not find it, would stop playing and begin again, only to drop a note someplace else. She began to forget entire songs altogether. Sometimes she could not reach quickly enough to the high notes or the lower notes, and her soles hurt when she pressed on the foot pedals. She had had enemies in her life, surely everyone did. But she hadn’t expected her hands or her piano to turn against her.

Obviously, the prose of “I Can Make It to California Before It’s Time for Dinner” is much simpler than that of  “May-September.” It has to be, since the former is told through the voice of mentally challenged Jimmy whereas the latter alternates between the heads of the older woman, Sandra, and the young writer, Alice. Regardless, I was impressed by the prose difference between these two novellas. For me, this was a significant part of the joy of reading the book.

Of course, variety in prose style is not the only aspect in play in these two pieces. As I mentioned, they operate differently, though both in ways that I enjoyed.

“I Can Make It to California Before It’s Time for Dinner” seems to function by contrasting the innocence of Jimmy’s voice with what the reader understands about Jimmy’s situation. Jimmy is a good kid, but there are bad things around him (or involving him) that he cannot understand:

I am on the deck now. I want to hug her goodbye. She pushes at me.

“Get away, you retard!” She screams and I put my hand on her mouth.

Megan bites my hand. I push her away. She is smaller than me and falls against the glass door. I feel bad and put my arms around her to pick her up. We are up half the way. She hits me in the chest and the face. I get mad like I get when Josh hits me and leaves marks. She hits me in the face again and it hurts bad. I put my hands on her neck and twist real hard, back and forth. She puts her hands on my hands but I am bigger. Her face turns all red and it’s kind of funny how red. She keeps moving and kicking and I try to stop her. We are up half the way when she falls asleep on me. She is so heavy I let her fall and then I wait for her to stop make-believing because people on TV are always doing make-believe. The way Josh fake sleeps until I go away.

We understand, but we know that Jimmy does not. This creates an amazing amount of tension despite Jimmy’s pleasant and simple talking. We want to yell to Jimmy to protect him, but he couldn’t understand us anyway.

On the other hand, “May-September” waves back and forth between Sandra and Alice, between their past and their present:

Oh Sandra, you’re never any fun. Georgi got in on the passenger side, pulled on the radio knob. Do you know the way to San Jose, I’ve been away so long. Come to Bali without Jack. We can do girl stuff.

Alice met Sandra by the closet. She moved so quickly, from couch to closet, that Sandra dropped the coat.

I’ve got it. Alice threw it onto the couch and then put her arms around Sandra.

Sandra leaned over and cupped Georgi’s right cheek in her left hand, brushed her left cheek with her lips. She could smell Georgi’s hair, her breath.

Sandra, stop. Georgi pushed at her.

Sandra stood stiffly, feeling Alice against her.

The resulting effect is as complex as Sandra’s and Alice’s emotion. Through that slipping between the two lovers, and between their situation and their history, what they feel and how they act against it, the reader gets closer to experiencing life as Sandra and Alice.

Really, I am not sure which story I prefer. “I Can Make It to California Before It’s Time for Dinner” crafts Jimmy’s voice marvelously and brings me to the edge of my chair. However, though “May-September” doesn’t have the same simple charm, the more sophisticated story is captivating. I guess I’ll just have to like Could You Be With Her Now as a whole and not worry which novella is better.

The Chicago Review keeps this substance in its rawest form, displaying copies of unpublished, typewritten, hand-edited drafts. (It even has the scroll of Ammons’ long poem Tape copied on its spine.) And the volume also provides sufficient analytical footwork, via four well-crafted essays, to catch the reader up to speed on the major readings of Ammons’ premier poems.

Early on we’re introduced to Ammons’s philosophical drive – “the plenitude of nothingness,” – and given two competing perspectives on how his work fulfills, or does not, Kantian notions of self-contained works of art. These are integral discussions, which Ammons’ invites in his notes, lectures, and the discursive moments of his verse, and they pay-off when the reader arrives at the heart of this volume, the unpublished drafts.

Of course, these unpublished poems lack the completeness one might desire in a thoroughly revised, mature group of poems, but even in his published volumes, Ammons mode was to resist or exclude revision, as he does in Tape for the Turn of the Year, which catalogs a year’s worth of quotidian on a two-inch-wide adding machine tape. That whole 300-plus-day effort is drafted under the pretenses of a whim:

today I

decided to write

a long

thin

poem…

 

…it was natural for

me…

… to contemplate

this roll of

adding-machine tape.

Ammons’ is clearly comfortable in the bathos-laced, short-line free verse that has many different manifestations in contemporary poetics, but what I enjoy in this volume (Tape is only quoted) is the quatrain-constructed “Scarcities,” whose narrative and artistic reach has shades of Bishop, suggesting the preeminence of “a long, / long poem… // an ongoingness too reliable to /conclude;” the serial evasiveness from “How to Find Wisdom in Writing and Painting” – whose most direct advice is, “don’t force ice / it can burst shingles / crack rocks:…;” and the oddity of Canto 57 – whose most parse-able lines are surrounded by phalanxes of capital X’s and constellations of question marks offsetting the tautology,

the meaning of life consists in

not being dead

In sum, this is a compilation of impressive scope: the essays illuminate a body of poems, photos, and correspondences that bring this major poet to life, and at 272 pages, this volume contains only a few moments of over-reaching and just enough room for some well-framed verse that make the life and art of Ammons’ seem aptly described as “an ongoingness too reliable to conclude.” This is a fitting review for Ammons – in that it is expansive, intelligent, and empathetic, but also aware of its finite existence, its “untidy edges,” that happen to be where the person of the poet can be most fully seen.

Sightings aptly begins with a quote from Ray Bradbury’s The Halloween Tree:

“It was a small town by a small river and a small lake in a small northern part of a Midwest state. There wasn’t so much wilderness around you couldn’t see the town. But on the other hand there wasn’t so much town you couldn’t see and feel and touch and smell the wilderness.”

Like Bradbury, Hollars manages to invoke the sights, sounds, and smells of small town America through the eyes of his teenage heroes — and with as much ease. A small town. A small river. A small lake. Bradbury’s writing seems too easy, too simple. But it works so well. As it does in Hollars’s work.

Here’s an example. “Loose Lips Sink Ships,” one of ten stories in Sightings, introduces us to a mother with a wooden leg, and a father who is an expert leg-maker. The mother has a problem with her leg. The father bends to fix it. The son tells us, “From where I stood, it looked sort of stupid, like he was trying to shine a baseball bat or polish a rifle. But after a while it started looking less stupid, like maybe he was just trying to push a little life into a dead thing.” Here we are handed a child’s take on life, one that skims the surface, and then leaves us with a splash. Sightings is a collection of coming-of-age stories where naïve language comes out complicated, where moments of purity intersperse the comedy of pre-pubescent boys.

Here’s what I mean about the comedy of prepubescent boys. “Indian Village,” my favorite story in the collection — and the first — sets up the landscape as follows:

“Ever since school let out, we’d fallen into a routine of baseball in the mornings and pool in the afternoons, a schedule that allowed us ample opportunity to show off the scraped knees we’d earned from our heroics on the field. For several sweltering afternoons, we took turns parading past Georgia Ambler’s peripheral vision (our farmer tans in full bloom), waiting patiently for her to acknowledge our existence.”

We find in this passage the Bradbury-esque, Indiana charm of a young boy’s playing field, but also a suggestion of the somewhat un-charming fascinations of boys that trickle in and out of Hollars’ stories. A more blatant example of this would be the opening sentence to “Loose Lips Sink Ships”:

“I asked the Eskimo if he’d ever seen a vagina before.”

Or there’s Couch Housen’s huddle-up speech in “Line of Scrimmage”:

“Okay, all together, now. Whip dicks on three. . . .”

And the comedy doesn’t stop with boyhood erection discoveries; it seeps into the characters’ very makeup — there’s an Oregon Trail fanatic father, a prom-date-ready Sasquatch, and a twentieth-century Confederate whose wife can time travel. Hollars’s writing sets you up for a nice bike ride around the neighborhood, and before you know it, you’ve tipped over in the grass laughing out loud — then you wonder if you should be.

Here’s what I mean by that. Remember the wooden leg that the father was shining like a baseball bat? Polishing like a rifle? Then, suddenly, the whole scene changed? The thing about Hollars’s writing is that you’re running along, full-throttle, enjoying the scenery, chuckling here and there — and then you get to the end of a sentence and realize what just happened. There’s a sadness at the end of Hollars’s stories. Sasquatch may look ridiculous in a suit and bowtie, and it’s funny all the different ways Hollars manages to both humanize and make fun of him, but at the end, you’re sad that the big monster’s become an alcoholic. You’re sad the clowns can’t find a job. You’re sad because a father is no longer loony for Oregon Trail. And it’s not only that. There are bigger issues at play. A father deserts his child, a child dies, stereotypes are questioned, dreams are broken.

These small splashes create a lasting rippling effect, which will make you go back and read the stories all over again.

Yes, I am horny for art.

This is “Book 0” of the magazine, and it’s a great way to kick things off. It’s ballsy. Its contents are as androgynous as its cover image. They may be poems, and they may be short stories. They may be accurate quotations from Richard Simmons, or they may be outright lies. Who the hell cares?  theNewerYork is less concerned with category, and more concerned with touching its readers inappropriately.

I don’t think that there is a radical idea circulating around the literary community to galvanize a definable and legitimately new avant-garde. The cynic in me might extrapolate from this observation to conclude that there is nothing “new” to be done in the making of literature. With the turn of every page of this Book 0, I am excited by the new stuff I get on every page.

Between these horny bindings, there is a Craigslist “free items” thread about the meaning of life. There are very many upside-down pages. There are instructions on stargazing, diagrams of atoms, God, boogers, badly-defined jellyfish, and bluesy loving no one wants. The remarkable thing is that each page, whether it is Annabel’s letter from Danny or a full-color glossy of a man in an uncomfortable chair, compels this reader forward.

A disclaimer on page one cautions readers to temper their expectations: “You won’t like some of this work.” I disagree; you’ll like all of it, but it’s likely to make you feel just a little dirty.  In an afterward, editor JSR admits the work is “all over the place,” which is true to an extent. The magazine is disjointed by design, but all of these weird little literary gems share a common impulse. They’re all exciting, they’re all challenging, and some of them are even beautiful.

theNewerYork is a hell of a project. Issue #2 is out, and I’m pumped for #3. Book 0 was new, and I have every confidence that Issue #3 will be even newer.

The book starts with the death of his father and while outwardly, it’s a biography revealing strips from Big Ray’s life, it evolves into an autopsy of their relationship, a dissection of sundered identity. Anecdotes, vignettes, and observations give us glimpses of who Big Ray is, though it reads less like a novel and more like a candid conversation with a good friend over drinks. In fact, the prose is so natural and free-flowing, it almost vanishes into the backdrop. Physical traits become character sketches as in the case of his father who is “morbidly obese” and suffers sleep apnea.

The snoring it caused was turbulent, violent, and full of animal sounds. The snoring was also part of why my mother divorced my father. She couldn’t get any good sleep either. Plus, my father took up most of the bed. There was just enough room for my mother to lie there and not move.

That paralysis his mother suffers becomes emblematic of their relationship that eventually leads to its fissure.

Daniel tries to find a map to navigate his father’s life, but contradictions abound, from his early military career that was mostly non-existent, to the quirky, almost accidental way his parents met (yelling at each other on the street). His father gambles, argues with his mom about everything, and scoops up all the leftover food at the dinner table. I was always waiting for a moral climax, the moment where the son would gain some insight into his father that would help the two bond. It was refreshingly authentic, then, that so much was left unresolved. The dysfunctional family never finds itself and there’s a morbid beauty in their disastrous interactions which is part of the allure of Big Ray.

The narrative jumps from the present to the past, but the transitions aren’t jarring and are handled as branching conversations that segue into different areas including a whole lot of fat jokes. Like most people, Big Ray is full of dichotomies that the narrator struggles with. Daniel seeks answers, not just for the sake of resolution, but his curiosity too. For example, his father has an argument with his mother because she sets out slices of bread rather than dinner rolls. It seems extremely petty until we’re told:

For my father, good bread was an important distinction between the poor farm family he grew up in and the middle-class family he expected us to be. That is why we had family dinners on Sunday. That is why we ate so many pot roasts.

The grossest memory of his father was when he’d make breakfast and he’d “stand over a frying pan wearing nothing but tight, stretchy, red bikini briefs. His underwear was always too small for him, so the crack of his butt stuck out above the waistband. . . He liked his eggs greasy and over easy. He fried his bacon until it was burnt. . . Even today, the smell of greasy eggs still makes me feel queasy.” The father makes for a ridiculous figure in the tight briefs, but he’s intent on cooking his bacon to crisp because that happens to be the way he likes it. The son endures the oily mornings because he has no choice, although he resists his father’s will by leaving before finishing the breakfast. Scenes like this form a thematic link throughout illustrating their conflict and hint at the bigger issues rotting their connection.

I went through a stage where I would walk into whatever room my father was in and turn the lights off. I never told anybody why, but I was trying to make him disappear.

Daniel is still turning off the lights paragraph by paragraph. Part of his anger comes from the abuse, both physical and mental, that is inflicted by his father on both him and his sister. It’s uncomfortable to read and there’s a final revelation near the end that left me feeling both depressed and ill. To the book’s credit, the scene is handled with brutal honesty but never feels like exploitation or a pity-seeking confessional.

It’s a gutsy truth to share with strangers (us the readers) and I know it’s a delicate balance to render this painful experience without coming across as sensational. I felt like Daniel was performing a mental baptism to exorcise that past trauma through this recounting and the loose structure of the book becomes more poignant as we realize it’s his attempt at finding answers in the nuances and details that comprise the jumbled mass of his memories.

In the end, there’s an interesting cycle revolving around weight that weaves an organic analogy for the cycle of the book. When Big Ray was born, he was six pounds. He ballooned up to 500 pounds, which “is also the size of the largest kind of lion, a full-grown male.” But as Daniel notes after his father is cremated, “My dad’s ashes weighed just over six pounds, which means he lost around 500 pounds after he died.” His dad went right back to where he started, and there’s an ambivalence and yearning that haunts the book from beginning to end originating from that lack of resolution. “If you take the e out of dead, you get dad.” Likewise, strip out the ‘Big’ from Big Ray, and all you have left is Ray.

In Kali Beheaded, the gorgeous virgin goddess Kali is massacred by jealous fellow gods, who re-attach her head to the body of a whore, and she roams the world in furious confusion, seducing and destroying everyone she encounters with vengeful innocence — a unity Yourcenar may have invented — the slave of her own craving to connect with other beings. Yourcenar writes, “. . . the liquefied fortunes of men clung to her hands like strands of honey.” For Kali, now goddess of sex and death, desire and destruction are the same, and she is just as much a prisoner of this binary as everyone else.

In Our-Lady-of-the-Swallows, a priest becomes convinced that nymphs are living in a cave and seducing his parishioners, so he blocks the cave’s small mouth and tries to starve them. But as he celebrates their death-song, the reader learns the nymphs are really swallows, who, indeed, are really starving.

In Aphrodissia, the Widow, the widow of a minister in what probably is Greece — a Greece abandoned by the gods, but not the passion that made them necessary—mourns the death of her illicit lover Kostis, a thief who terrorized a village full of hypocrites and cowards. Aphrodissia’s love for Kostis is both skeptical of love as social custom, and deeply, almost violently tender, and places love itself outside convention and squarely in the realm of the transgressive, where true desire abides in Yourcenar’s work.

Yourcenar sees the social realm as stifling and criminally banal; her characters are desperate for a vehement divorce from their communities and a union with the rage of their emotion. Aphrodissia rescues her lover’s head from the top of a spear and tries to run away with it, but she is chased, and, in a scene that is unbelievably moving, she slips into a canyon, where she dies.

###

If Oriental Tales has a flaw — beyond the way it uses an exoticized and mythical Far East as an environment for stories that transcend the banal, in an “everyone is crazy over there” kind of way — it’s the way her stories veer too easily into the fabulous. Wealthy servants give away their fortunes to benefit their masters, murder victims come back from the dead, imprisoned artists paint a flood and then a lifeboat to escape with, and all that from just one story: How Wang-Fo Was Saved, which Yourcenar adapted from an ancient Taoist fable.

Literary fairy tales have to find a way to navigate the pitfalls of facile magic. Italo Calvino does it by writing prose that slyly critiques the reader; Angela Carter does it by violently exploring latent assumptions about gender. When Yourcenar fails, her stories seem too formulaic or have no sense of the hassle of reality. Their endings read like punch lines.

In a way, Yourcenar is one of her own characters: a zealot on a fool’s quest to embody, in a story, that which cannot be contained. At her best, she’s like a physicist who briefly but revealingly controls the ineffable unseen before the operation blows up her collider. She writes as if she knows the edict from Blanchot that says that to toil with the elements in the only true realism.

Most of us grow out of the idea that life is either death by boredom or immolation in desire, but every now and then, as we look drearily out the window, we remember all our deepest loves and hates, all of the desires we’ve left unacted. Oriental Tales is for these moments, when the loss we keep repressed comes rupturing unbearably through our lives.

Now, the first thing I would like to say is that I really ended up enjoying this book of poems. I found the writing to be very approachable. That may not be a big deal for some of you, but I’m not exactly a poetry scholar. I like reading poetry, but I haven’t devoted the same kind of rigor to its study that I have to fiction. Really, I just like being able to pick it up and enjoy.  And, though the poems in this collection are skillfully composed, they still just let me sit back and enjoy.

When he was a young boy,
there was one promise he made
to himself, the same promise
that you made, that I made, that she made.

(from “Remembering”)

One aspect I enjoyed about this collection was the variety. Some of the poems possess simple and straightforward, honest emotion. This can be seen in this selection from “In the Maternity Ward”:

He can’t help it,
sniffs the newborn’s head;
there’s a slight smell of sweet musk—
fresh peached in spring.
His lips graze the child’s scalp,
nuzzle the vernal pelt.
How soft the flesh,
so prone to bruising;
it must be cradled,
tended with care—
but he’s a big man,
and the child is so small.

Others have such surprising twists and turns that it is delightful just to follow the flow of Stobierski’s mind. It’s an interesting mind, fluid and logical but certainly not predictable, as this bit from “Gastronomica” illustrates:

My girlfriend puts her heart and soul
into everything she cooks,
and it’s nice to know she loves me enough
to tear out those essentials and share—
don’t get me wrong—
but I don’t think she realizes just how chewy valves can be,
or how difficult it is to eat a waffled soul,
however much syrup is applied.

Some of the poems have humor, and some are softly dark. Some are strange, but some have a resonating simplicity. All together, these poems span an impressive range. Whatever you are looking for, it’s probably here. And, more importantly, along the way you will likely find things you should have been looking for without knowing that you should have.

Now, I do admit that poetry isn’t my first love. In fact, I often read it in secret so I can just enjoy the poems and not let anyone know that I’m not an expert. Regardless, I do read it and I do read enough to know what I like. That’s all I really needed to know for Chronicles of a Bee Whisperer, and that’s all I need to know to know that I like it.

Jensen’s characters are aware of these weather patterns to some degree, their awareness strongest in “Sight and Other Hazards,” where a woman deals with her dying mother while overseeing an apartment building that used to be the Holcomb hotel. Hotels are also a character in From the Hilltop — whether abandoned or lived in as much as a hotel can allow others to “live” in it, materializing the promise of change present in all these characters’ lives.

While some of Jensen’s characters share her Métis background, (a mixed Native American and European ancestry from the Northern U.S. and Canada), many of her characters are men. Not only does Jensen craft both male and female voices realistically, she lets them sing, creating a sharply grounded view of life “off the rez.” This sharpness comes from her use of details — a pony-like dog near a canyon, fruit-bearing trees rooted unnaturally on the high plains of West Texas. The experimental, loop-like structure in “From the Hilltop” shares qualities with the shifts in time and clustering/threading of detail present in Stephen Graham Jones’ work, whom Jensen thanks in the acknowledgement section of her book. Like the fluxuation of weather (present in the book), the language cycles as the narrator’s mind cycles, each section of the story beginning with a different lead in, such as “If,” “Because,” and “Given.”

Jensen’s stories open with impact and close in a wonderfully subtle way, putting a tiny weight in your lungs — one forgets to breathe for a moment, and then realizes these characters will be alright, life continues for them. You will learn from “Still” how to cradle infertility, how to nurture it with silence. From “Butter” one learns about statistics and beauty and butter-headed replicas of local Dairy Queens. In “From the Hilltop,” one learns about the highest point in West Texas and, at the same time, through the honest voice of a man, how to lose a brother when you’re just a rebel kid, how to grow old with a story, telling a story again and again, hoping one day to get it just right. And you will feel as the character already has.

* * *

MaryAnne Kolton: When you were little, what did you dream of being when you grew up?

Deborah Crombie: Such fun to think about this, MaryAnne.

I think the very first thing I wanted to be was a cowgirl. I have photos (somewhere—the childhood album is missing . . .) of me at six in my cowgirl outfit, complete with six-shooter. Then a horse trainer and breeder—I was horse mad. King of the Wind, the Black Stallion books—loved them!

And then came the “ologists.” My grandmother, who lived with us, was a retired schoolteacher. She had a subscription to National Geographic and we read every issue together, cover to cover. I had a rock collection and wanted to be a geologist, then an archeologist, a paleontologist, a marine biologist, a zoologist, a botanist . . . you get the picture. I think “world explorer” figured in there somewhere. And I wanted to climb Mount Everest.

Later, I started college as a history major, finished with a degree in biology. The one thing I never imagined I would do was write novels.

(And Charles Darwin is still my hero.)

MAK: Do you see these childhood dreams resonating in your writing in some way?

DC: Obviously, I liked learning new things, and that’s certainly carried over into the books. Not only do I tend to research new geographical areas, but most books throw me into new subjects, such as rowing in No Mark Upon Her and rock guitar in The Sound Of Broken Glass. You could say that writing satisfies my magpie instincts.

But even more than that, I see the thread of curiosity, and I think that curiosity—about people and places and life in general—must be the driving force of the novelist. We are, most of us, the elephant’s children. We always want to know WHY.

MAK: You’ve said you have felt that the UK is your “real” home for most of your life. So many Americans are Anglophiles to some degree. How did this feeling you have come about?

DC: This is hardest question to answer, and I’m not sure I’ve become any better at it over the years. I no longer trust what is actual memory and what I’ve spliced in, trying to find some logic in my own life. . . . Did it really start with A.A. Milne? I still have my treasured first editions, so perhaps that is true. I’m sure there were other children’s books, and then there were Tolkien and CS Lewis, T.H. White’s The Once and Future King, and on to Sayers and Christie, Mary Stewart and Josephine Tey, Dick Francis and James Herriott. But it was more than stories—there was always landscape, even in my dreams as a child.

I’ve said this often, but it remains a lodestone in my perception of my life: I didn’t actually visit England until I graduated from college (my parents took me as a graduation gift.) And on that first bus ride between Gatwick Airport and London, I looked out at the rolling hills and fields and red rooftops of Surrey, and felt I had come home. That feeling was profound, heart-deep, and has never gone away.

MAK: There is such a sense of interiority about your characterizations. It tends to give the reader permission to care a great deal about Gemma and Duncan. How do you do that?

DC: Some of it is instinctive, I think. I heard Duncan’s voice in my head so clearly before I ever began to write him, and that’s how many scenes and characters begin for me — with a line of thought or a line of dialogue.

Then there is that perpetual writer’s curiosity. Even as a child I looked in the windows of houses in the evenings, wondering about the families that lived there — What were their names? Did they have pets? What did they eat for dinner? What did they talk about? So I think this fascination with detail carried over into — or perhaps spurred — my writing. And these details do tell the reader things about the characters.

And the third thing—I’m viewpoint obsessive. I never, never write omniscient viewpoint. I never shift viewpoint within a scene. And I always try to make it very clear at the beginning of a scene whose head we are inhabiting. I think this gives the readers a very strong sense of identification with the characters—and of course we are in Duncan’s and Gemma’s viewpoints most often.

MAK: Are you more like Duncan or Gemma and in what ways?

In the beginning I would easily have said Duncan. I understood how he thought and how he reacted to things. And although I very deliberately made Gemma’s personal situation one that I understood very well—a young woman trying to meet her responsibilities as a mother AND get ahead in a job that she cares passionately about—I saw her as much more assertive than me, and perhaps more emotionally open.

DC: But the characters have grown into themselves, sometimes in ways that surprised me. Duncan turned out to be the more willing to take emotional risks, while it was Gemma who was reluctant to make a commitment. It’s a journey of discovery these days. And interestingly, the character that I identify with most strongly might be Kit.

MAK: It might be helpful here to give a brief background summary of the story of Gemma and Duncan. Then tell a bit about why you identify so strongly with Kit?

DC: Duncan and Gemma began the series as professional partners. I set out with the idea that I wanted to write characters that experience growth and change, whose lives evolve. Even so, I think it was as much a surprise to me as it was to them when Duncan and Gemma’s
relationship moved into the realm of the personal. That’s a very dry way of saying they fell in love . . . but that’s what happened, as it does in real life, no matter how inconvenient.

Kit, who came to Duncan when he was eleven, is now fourteen, and he is so like me when I was that age. (I should say here that I was never a very “girly” girl.) Kit wants to be a biologist. He loves animals. He likes to collect bits and pieces of things, rocks and plants and insects, as did I. Kit is a noticer, very aware of atmosphere and other people’s emotions. He also has a tendency to feel responsible for other people’s safety and emotional well-being, which can be a dangerous trait. And Kit is a dreamer. He sees stories in things, and in people. Who knows—he might even grow up to be a writer…

(Gemma) “Did you ever see any indication that Mr. Arnott was into anything . . . kinky?”

“Vincent?” Kershaw looked astonished. “Kinky? I’d say you couldn’t have found anyone more sexually straight ahead than Vincent.” . . . Kershaw went on, thoughtfully, “I never thought he liked women.”

You mean he liked men?” asked Gemma, wondering if they’d got the whole scenario wrong.

No. I mean he didn’t like women. . . . I learned years ago that he would never make a real effort to defend a woman. It was as if he made an automatic assumption of guilt.

—from The Sound Of Broken Glass

MAK: Your fans are quite anxious to read your newest book, The Sound Of Broken Glass, if their Internet posts are any indication of their loyalty to you and love of Gemma and Duncan. I don’t want to talk too much about the book itself so as not to give away any tense-making plot maneuvers. But I am wondering how far ahead you are plotting when you are writing the book you are working on? One book, two?

DC: I’m usually thinking at least two books ahead with Duncan, Gemma, and their family’s continuing story arc. And with the particulars stories for each novel, sometimes farther back than that. I introduced Andy Monahan, the character who is the focus of The Sound Of Broken Glass, three books ago, in WHERE MEMORIES LIE. He had a walk-on part as a witness to a murder, and I found I couldn’t get his voice out of my head. I gave him very brief cameos in the next two books, and a personal connection to Duncan and Gemma, knowing I wanted to devote a
book to his story.

MAK: Melody is another character that seems to have found a place in your heart and is gaining more page space.

DC: Ah, Melody. One of the most fun things about writing a long-running series is the evolution of characters. When Gemma took that promotion to detective inspector and could no long work with Duncan, I knew they would both need new partners. Melody showed up in the first few books as a bit of an eager-beaver, always bringing Gemma coffee. She still likes to bring Gemma coffee, but she’s a detective sergeant now, and she’s turned out to be a very complex and interesting character with an unexpected background (no spoilers!) She’s a mass of contradictions, very sure of herself in some ways and lacking confidence in others.

Melody’s rather prickly friendship with Doug Cullen, Duncan’s sergeant, is now one of the driving story arcs of the series for me. Neither of them is quite sure who they are, but in trying to build a relationship they learn things about themselves as well as each other.

MAK: In addition to your excellent characterizations, which make the reader want to check in with Gemma and Duncan on a regular basis, the novels also contain a splendid sense of place. How much time do you actually spend in the UK gathering details?

DC: I usually go to England (most often London) a couple of times a year, for about three weeks at a time. That’s about as long as I can manage to be away from home without complete domestic chaos!

I usually stay in a flat in London, most often in Notting Hill. That’s the best way to really get the flow and rhythm of my characters’ lives, and I especially love being on Duncan and Gemma’s “patch.”

MAK: What are your feelings about touring and all the promotional work that’s required in today’s very competitive world of selling books?

DC: It’s a necessity except for the very top of the list authors — and perhaps even for them. In a way, it’s nothing new. Authors have always had to sell themselves. I organized my own book tours with other writer friends in the early days. But the social networking certainly takes up more time than anything we did in the past. On the downside, that’s time that could be spent writing. On the upside, it keeps you connected with readers and the reading community in a way never before possible. And it’s fun. You can’t do everything and I think each author has to find the niche that suits them. I’m better at Facebook than Twitter, for instance.

As for touring, I love it. It’s such fun to meet and visit with readers. And the best thing about touring — making connections with the booksellers, hasn’t changed.