NANCY CANYON

Interview with Nancy Canyon

Ms. Canyon began writing and painting as a child. In 1997, she studied with Natalie Goldberg in Taos, New Mexico. She holds a Certificate in Fiction Writing from University of Washington and an MFA in Creative Writing from Pacific Lutheran University. She is a member of Allied Arts of Whatcom County and RWA. She has completed three novels,CELIA’S HEAVEN, STEALING TIME, and WHISPERING, IDAHO. Ms. Canyon lives in Bellingham, Washington with her Tuxedo Cat, Sid.

What are you reading right now?

I’ve had a resurgence of reading my astrology books, because I’m an astrologer. I’ve been reading about Dark Moon Lilith, a gravitational point that keeps the moon in the orbit. I’m also reading a book called LONGING FOR DARKNESS: TARA AND THE BLACK MADONNA by China Galland. It’s about this woman who goes on an adventure looking for the tara and it starts with her in Nepal climbing this mountain and she falls and breaks her leg. I like the adventure and the search for something, especially for meaning in life. In all my books that’s what I’m doing - searching for meaning.

What first sparked your interest in writing?

When I was a kid, I would go to the library, which was just down the block from where I lived and I would just fill my basket with mysteries. And I liked getting out of the kids section into the adult section and smuggling books home so my mom didn’t know I was reading more adult material.

I also started two novels in grade school and they were both mysteries. One was THE MYSTERY OF THE TIN BOX, but I never got much farther than the opening.

What do you love the most about writing? The least?

I like it when things just happen that are unexpected. Suddenly I have a story unraveling so that I’m surprised, too.

I don’t like the length of things going on and on with editing and the feeling like this will never ever be finished.

Tell us a little about your writing process.

I write with other people and I - we - use start lines. I write with a syntax so I vary the types of sentences I’m writing from short to run-on. I know what my topic is, but I don’t know what’s going to come out. It’s pretty stream-of-consciousness. Writing with other people is good, because I can connect with their minds as well as my own mind and I can learn from them. I don’t outline anything either.

What are your passions?

Writing definitely! Painting is one. I like meeting with other people in the studio and doing art together. I like getting out and hiking and camping. I really like shamanism and journeying. I love photography, too. That’s another thing I’ve been doing since I was a kid.

What inspires you?

I think nature is my main inspiration. And dreams. I wrote a poem this morning from a dream I had last night and I think the dream was inspired by the full moon.

Why speculative fiction?

Because there’s that magic involved that is like the journey or the dream. Things happen that are surreal or out of the ordinary and I really like that. It’s fun for me.

As both a writer and reader, do you prefer either science fiction or fantasy over the other?

I’ve read more fantasy than science fiction. Science fiction seems harder and fantasy softer. Fantasy is more fairy tale-ish. Science fiction feels closer to reality in some ways.

How was “Ghost Rocks” born?

In my writing practice, Tony the shaman came about and then he went on this vision quest up to the ghost rocks. I had actually been working with a shaman who had been taking people on vision quests to the mountain. He was an interesting man and I was learning a lot from him about the Native American medicine wheel and the animal totems. I really desire to go on a vision quest myself, but it felt far too frightening to go out there by myself without food for three days. I really aspire to it and I still aspire to it, but I think I might probably die! I guess that whole story came out of the aspiration. The closest I come to doing a vision quest is when I go camping and it really does scare the bejesus out of me, but I still do it. I don’t go without food, though.

The text says “Ghosts Rocks” is an excerpt from the novel STEALING TIME. Was it challenging adapting a portion of a larger work for a shorter format?

Yes, it was slightly challenging. It became more standalone and also a much tighter story than the rest of the book was at the time. It became a standout part of that book, to make it work as a piece in itself. Then I had to rewrite the rest of the book to bring it up to that level!

Do you have any advice for aspiring authors?

The main thing that I like to encourage people to do - because I teach writing - is to let themselves be free and let the story go will it will go and don’t try to control it. When authors say this story came alive and wrote itself, that’s truly a gift. The story becomes a gift to the writer. I think it’s better writing that way and it’s more fun that way!

Is there anything else you would like to tell us about yourself?

I sometimes think maybe I will meet Tony or another one of my characters in real life.

I really love adventures. I think writing about people having adventures makes me feel like I’m having that adventure.

KRISTOPHER JANSMA

Interview with KRISTOPHER JANSMA

Kristopher grew up in Lincroft, New Jersey. He received his B.A. in The Writing Seminars from Johns Hopkins University and an M.F.A. in Fiction from Columbia University. Kristopher Jansma's debut novel, THE UNCHANGEABLE SPOTS OF LEOPARDS, was published by Viking/Penguin in March of 2013.

What are you reading right now?

At the moment I'm reading a science book called HIDDEN REALITIES by Brian Greene, a physicist who teaches at Columbia and who is a guest I like on WNYC's Radiolab podcast. The book is all about string theory and multiple universes and hidden dimensions that scientists believe exist far beyond our ability to ever detect them. It's partly research for a new project I'm working on, but also just something I love to think about. There's a weird overlap, I've noticed, between physicists and writers...I know several writers who once thought they'd go into physics. Both fields involve asking a lot of big questions about the nature of the universe. Fortunately only one requires a working knowledge of Calculus.

What first sparked your interest in writing?

Well, like the little boy in the Author's Note of my book, I wanted to be a writer since I was very young. Like him, I wanted to be a writer even before I knew that was a thing you could do. When I was in 3rd or 4th grade I would write down all the imaginary adventures I'd had with my friends during recess each day, mostly just so we'd be able to remember them. Then in 7th grade I had an English teacher, Mrs. Inglis, who saw how much I liked to read and how much I liked to write our little vocabulary essays, and she was the first person to point out to me that there were real people whose job it was to write books. I had always thought that books just existed, or that they'd been written long before I'd been born. I didn't really put it together that you could still write new ones.

What do you love the most about writing? The least?

The best thing about writing is when you look back at a full page and remember when it was blank only an hour ago. The worst thing about writing is when someone comes along and tells you to cut half of this genius stuff you think you wrote, even though they're usually right.

Tell us a little about your writing process.

It changes all the time, depending on what else is going on in my life. When I was writing LEOPARDS I was teaching six or seven classes a semester and working at night at a tutoring desk. I had to get my writing time in there any free second that I had. But that was exhilarating. I thought about my book all the time, even when I wasn't working. Now my teaching schedule is a bit more manageable, thankfully, but I'm taking care of my newborn son several days a week, so that presents a whole new set of scheduling challenges.

What are your passions?

Outside of writing? I love cooking...I love good theater - I used to be the President of my college theater group, The Barnstormers. I get pretty passionate about certain television shows. I think novelists are supposed to be kind of anti-TV. When I was coming up in the MFA world it was pretty common that my friends would not even own TVs, sort of as a stance against a supposedly lazier form of entertainment I guess? Meanwhile I think I learned more from binge watching The Sopranos and The Wire than I did from half the books I read during those same years.

What inspires you?

It's hard to predict! I've gotten flashes sometimes from paintings, songs, news headlines, even words in the dictionary. Most often I'm inspired by people. Some little behavioral tic or expression. Even just the way someone says something, sometimes, can launch my mind off into storytelling mode.

How was THE UNCHANGEABLE SPOTS OF LEOPARDS born?/div>

In 2009 I started an online writing project called 40 Stories. I was fed up with trying to write a novel and failing over and over, so I thought I would clear the cobwebs by writing a series of stories...a new one almost every week, and posting them online. It was a lot of fun and it did indeed get me into a whole new groove. Then suddenly I wrote the 13th story, which I called "The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards" and it was so exciting that I knew I'd accidentally struck on something with a lot of potential. So then over the course of that year I wrote 7 or 8 more stories that used similar characters and themes, and as time went on, I realized I had a novel on my hands.

Was it fun and/or challenging writing about writing?

It was a big challenge, but one I'd always been curious to try. The problem is that most readers aren't as interested in how the book gets made as a writer is. You don't go to a bakery to hear all about how cake gets made; you just want to eat some cake. So what I realized is that you have to let them eat cake (if I can get away with that!) and the cake needs to be so good that they just have to ask the chef how it's made. I love postmodern books that are full of metafictional stuff, but lots of readers are turned off by it. Too self-involved and too often the story and characters are lost to the ideas. I wanted to write a book that would bring the joys of postmodernism to readers who still enjoy the satisfactions of modernism. On that note, I'd love to just add that post-this and pre-that are just awful and misleading terms when it comes to literature. The two most postmodern books I ever read were DON QUIXOTE and TRISTAM SHANDY and they were written hundreds of years before there was a modernism for them to be post- of.

Did you enjoy writing such an unreliable narrator?

Absolutely! Unreliable narrators are the wickedest kind of fun you can have in writing. You're constantly walking this very fine tightrope with the reader: the trick is that they can lie as much as you want, so long as they're absolutely earnest about it. To me, that's the very heart of great fiction.

Do you have any advice for aspiring authors?

The two most powerful words for anyone aspiring to do anything are "we'll see.” It takes a long, long time to get good enough. So all along the way you're going to face disappointment and rejection. People are going to tell you that what you're trying to do cannot be done - by you for sure, and sometimes by anyone. People told me I couldn't write a book about writers. "We'll see," I said. Quietly, to myself, a lot.

Is there anything else you would like to tell us about yourself?

Just that even though my narrator is a terrific liar, you should know that I'm a terrible one in real life. That's what made him so much fun to write...and it's also why you can trust everything I'm saying to you here.

NICOLE KIMBERLING

Interview with NICOLE KIMBERLING

Nicole Kimberling lives in Bellingham, Washington with her partner, Dawn Kimberling, two bad cats, and approximately 100,000 bees. Her novel, TURNSKIN, won the Lambda Literary Award for Science Fiction, Fantasy Horror. She is the editor for Blind Eye Books.

What are you reading right now?

At the moment I’m re-reading GLINDA OF OZ by L. Frank Baum. I’ve always been a huge fan of the Oz books.

What first sparked your interest in writing?

I first started writing fiction in an attempt to impress the girl who is now my wife. (Those stories were really bad, but they did the trick.)

What do you love the most about writing? The least?

I love the deliberateness and editability of text. I’m not a good extemporaneous speaker—I tend to think faster than my mouth can move—but the written word gives me time to communicate what I really mean instead of just saying the words I can manage to spit out before my brain goes on to the next topic.

Perversely, what I love least about writing is that it takes so damn long.

Tell us a little about your writing process.

My creative process involves a lot of time spent not writing. I’m a firm believer in roaming around town brainstorming and muttering to oneself—especially in the generative stage. Once I’ve got an idea that I think I can run with, I jot down the beginning. After that, I write the very last pages.

Once I’ve got those two tacked down I go back and try to figure out how to connect those two points in a meaningful and cogent fashion.

 

What are your passions?

I’ve never really thought of myself as the sort of person who has passions, but I guess I must. I spend much money and brainpower on food and cooking. I adore manga.

 

And I love cats—I love every kind of cat. (Seriously.)

What inspires you?

Without question—travel. I get so much material from going to new places and seeing the enormous diversity of people and ways of life in the world.

Why fantasy?

I think it has to do with spending my childhood years on a farm Nebraska. There’s not a lot of entertainment available—or at least there wasn’t in the seventies—and so in order to not die of boredom I had to make up stuff to amuse myself. And when you’re a little kid there’s no reason that a propane tank can’t transform into a giant white panther that you ride through the prehistoric jungles a la Land of the Lost.

I suppose I just never outgrew that propensity for make-believe.

How was TURNSKIN born?

I started writing TURNSKIN at the Clarion Workshop. All I was trying to do was evoke an emotional tone—the naïve and yearning feeling of being a young person who lives on a farm in the middle of nowhere, but who dreams of going someplace else. (As you can see there is an element of autobiography to that one.) The other participants in the workshop seemed to respond to it well so I kept going. Eventually I had a novel. It took a long time though. About two years from start to finish.

How was “Cherries Worth Getting” born?

Out of necessity. It’s the first story of the shared-world anthology IRREGULARS, but actually the last story to be written. When the four of us (Josh Lanyon, Astrid Amara, Ginn Hale, and me) decided to work together, we knew that we wanted our stories to be strongly linked to one another but none of us wanted to curtail the others’ creative freedom, so Lanyon, Amara, and Hale wrote their stories more or less at the same time, knowing only the basic premise and the order in which they would appear in print. Afterward, they negotiated the details via our wonderful continuity editor, Jemma EveryHope-Roser.

As the primary editor of the anthology, I realized that one of the simplest ways to link all the stories together was just to wait until everyone else was finished and then engineer my contribution to deliberately incorporate and introduce elements from the other authors, which would give a greater sense of cohesion.

As for my own protagonist, Agent Keith Curry, I have long wanted to write a chef character. I’ve worked in restaurants for twenty-odd years now, so I had a lot of unique grist for the mill. I particularly wanted to tap into the current Fear of Food that seems pervasive in our West Coast culture today. Agent Curry was one of the easiest and most enjoyable characters that I’ve ever written. I like him a lot.

Do you have any advice for aspiring authors?

Everyone says, “learn your craft” and I’m not going to be the exception to that rule. But what I suggest is that writing commercial fiction is not one activity, but many different skills used in concert.

Learning to make coherent, interesting sentences is critical, but understanding the elements of dramatic storytelling is just as important.

Getting feedback from readers is absolutely key, because writing is a form of communication and without input from readers you don’t know what parts of the message are reaching the audience and what parts aren’t.

Armed with feedback, take a look at your writing, try to identify the strongest and weakest points, and then focus on bringing the weaker aspects of your project up to the level of the strongest. Try not to monkey around with what’s working too much. Just make an effort to bring the whole product into balance. Consistency is more valuable than you might realize.

There are many wonderful and effective workshops for speculative fiction writers these days. Apart from the Clarions, there is Odyssey, as well as the workshops hosted by the Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction at the University of Kansas. I cannot stress strongly enough the value of these workshops—not only for honing your skills but for providing a venue to connect with the like-minded writers who will be your primary source of assistance and support for the duration your writing career.

The greatest myth about writing is that successful commercial authors somehow make it all on their own. This is simply not true. Sure, talent is important—it’s the price of admission. Talent allows you to enter the field of play. It buys you a chance to prove yourself. But it is your ability to meaningfully connect other writers (and editors and agents and critics and booksellers and * gasp * readers) that will determine your trajectory thereafter.

This is especially true in the age of self-publishing and marketing via social media, but that’s a whole different topic.

Is there anything else you would like to tell us about yourself?

One of my greatest secrets that I will now publicly reveal for the first time is: I don’t like ice cream. I’ll eat it to be social, but I always feel guilty about it afterward. So many people love the stuff and there I am forcing my portion down like medicine. I wish there were some way I could donate my lifetime allotment of ice cream to the needy, impoverished sundae lovers of the world. But the technology that would enable instantaneous Tooty Fruity teleportation has not been invented yet, alas.

MINA SAMUELS

Interview with MINA SAMUELS

Mina Samuels is a full-time writer, editor, and performance artist, and in a previous incarnation, a litigation lawyer and human rights advocate. In addition to her own writing, her current editorial work may include, at any particular time, a diverse range of ghostwriting or editing projects from motivational to biography and memoir to business strategy, sports, and human rights. Mina's most recent book, RUN LIKE A GIRL, for which she appeared on The Today Show, came out in March 2011.

What are you reading right now?

I'm reading Colum McCann's TRANSATLANTIC. I haven't quite gotten into yet, but have high hopes. I just finished Kevin Barry's CITY OF BOHANE, which I loved, and before that Elena Ferrante's, MY BRILLIANT FRIEND, which was also wonderful. As you can tell, I love fiction!

What first sparked your interest in writing?

I loved writing as a child, but then moved away from it for a long time. My father has a picture of me when I was about 6 years old, sitting on the front steps of our house selling "my volumes,” as I called my writing projects.

What do you love the most about writing? The least?

I love the feeling of re-reading something I read and being surprised by it.  Least pleasurable is the aftermath of writing - that is, engaging with the publishing industry, which has nothing to do with the creativity of the words.

Tell us a little about your writing process.

I am much sketchier with my writing discipline than I am with my workouts! In general, I try to write in the morning and set a specific goal. But I am, sadly, all too easily diverted into "practical" projects, or really anything to avoid the writing at times. But I have learned that writing on the hard-to-write days is where some of the best writing actually happens, when I feel squeezed dry, but force myself to sit down and do it. The creative process is not a sit-around-waiting-for-inspiration activity. Just as anything else, it requires spending a lot of time committed to the work, even when the work feels fruitless./div>

What are your passions?

So many!...reading and writing, movies, being outdoors and active, chocolate...to name a few.

What inspires you?

The strangest things. I never know in advance what is going to hit that inspiration spot. Sometimes it's the smallest, most mundane thing (I literally wrote a whole one-act play that sprang from looking at the warning stickers on scaffolding), and other times it's seeing someone else's astonishing creativity. Nature, of course, is incredibly important, but more by way of being a place of calm and reflection, as opposed to the "aha, that's what I want to write about..." Nature is where I go to find the inspiration for problem solving, as opposed to sourcing a new creative project.

How was RUN LIKE A GIRL born?

I was brainstorming non-fiction book ideas with a friend and she kept saying, "But what do you love?" And I woke up the next morning to go for my run, and I thought, "This! I love this - running and how it makes me feel. That's what I should write about."

Why did you decide to write specifically about women running rather than running and athletics in general?

I believe that the impact of sports on girls and women is different (at least for now - the future may hold a different world). I think that women need safe places where they can explore their ambition and their aggressiveness, and sports is an incredibly apt microcosm in which to test those aspects of ourselves, and learn how to bring them out into the world in other parts of our lives.

Did it take a lot of brainstorming to come up with so much to say on this topic or did you find that you already had plenty you wanted to say just waiting to be said?

There was plenty waiting to be said. There was, of course, a lot of brainstorming around finding the right topic areas into which to gather the myriad observations I made through all the 100 plus women I interviewed.

Along those same lines, do you feel you have more to say? Could you fill another book about women and athletics? (I’ll read it!)

There is certainly more that could be said. Each of the topics could be dived into more deeply. I didn't deal with the dark side of many of the issues. For example, the line between sports enhancing our lives and sports becoming an escape from our lives, a way of not actually dealing with things. I also think there is a whole world of interesting material around the international opportunities relating to women and sports. In the book, HALF THE SKY, the authors deal with the plight of women around the world - health issues, education issues, and sexual exploitation, but they totally miss the incredible value that introducing sports into girls' lives could have on solving these problems. There's a lot of talk in women's rights and women's empowerment about creating "safe spaces.” I think the first safe space we create is the one inside our own bodies and sports is a way of reclaiming our sovereignty over our own bodies. If we're engaged in a serious sport, we are far less likely to think that our only alternative is the sex trade. We are more likely to value our education and take care of our health. And so on. I think that's a rich vein that could be mined for another book.

Do you have any advice for aspiring authors?

Oh my goodness - I feel uncomfortable with advice; it can be so individual. I think the biggest thing is to keep going. As with athletics, writing is rain or shine, emotionally and psychologically. Write when it feels good and you're inspired. And write when it feels crappy and you think you suck!

Is there anything else you would like to tell us about yourself?

There is so much to explore and try and do. I've been on a venture into playwriting and even the performance side in a couple of one-act, one-woman pieces I've written. It's incredibly scary and challenging and every other day I think I should just give up. I don't know where it's going and whether I'll get "there" - wherever "there" is! But it's quite something to realize that I'm still exploring the possibilities and don't know for sure where I'll be with those possibilities in 5 years.