FAQ

High Point, North Carolina

Memphis, Tennessee in a suburb shamefully called Whitehaven (supposedly “after a man named Colonel Francis Marion White—1810–1887—an early settler, slaver, railroad executive and major property owner”* *Source: Wikipedia: Whitehaven, Memphis). I hope I live to see the suburb renamed.

Yes—I’ve been in a committed relationship with Dr. Nicholas (Nick) Rubashkin since 2001, and happily married since 2013.

The short answer is well-written books with complex characters. The book can be of almost any genre—Sci-FI, Historical Fiction, Horror—as all as the characters and writing draw me in.

That’s a hard anyone to answers, much less a writer. I used to say War and Peace, because I love the way in which Tolstoy (and Dostoevsky and many Russian novelists, including Ayn Rand) weave together philosophy, theology, political ideology into a heluva good story with compelling characters. But, while I still believe this, I’ve ready so many good books over the years that I can’t say I have a single favorite. Four that stand out are Memoirs of Hadrian, by Marguerite Yourcenar,A Little Life, by Hanya Yanagihara, Blindness, by José Saramago A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, by Anthony Marra. All these books are so utterly compelling in their own way that they have made me question why I even bother try to write.

The Hobbit got me to read as an adolescent and the Dune series completely swept me away, but while I hate to admit it, Atlas Shrugged, had the biggest impact on me. It made me believe in the power of the individual. It made me believe I could do anything I set my mind to. Later, when I realized the book (and its author’s) philosophical flaws and the manipulated premises of both it and The Fountainhead—which I also loved, especially given I wanted to be an architect from the time I was six until I went to college, I was disgusted at myself for having fell under Ayn Rand’s spell. In quoting someone I once heard talk about their similar youthful adoration of these two novels, “Ayn Ran gave me my first philosophy to later abandon.”

Not at all. I don’t think it ever crossed my mind until a conversation with my ex where, after reading a good book, said I’d like to write a novel some day. He said I couldn’t—that I didn’t have the educational depth in literature to write a novel. I don’t like bing told I can’t do something, so his rebuke always stuck with me.

Not long after that conversation. I was running internal communication for Silicon Graphics, a large multinational technology company. When I started in the position, I didn’t have a background in communications so I intuitively decided to structure my team as a news organization that reported on the news of the company. I even hired a foreign correspondent who had worked at Newsweek. When this employee was speaking at a conference about I was running the organization, he was approached by a former publisher of his at Jossey-Bass (now a subsidiary of Wiley). When this employee asked me if I’d be interested in writing this book with him, I sais Sure. That book, Beyond Spin, The Power of Strategic Corporate Journalism led to another business book, Customer.Community, Unleashing the Power of Your Customer Base.

Yes—The Hours, by Michale Cunningham. I read it after a bad breakup with the aforementioned ex. It was just before a vacation he and I had planned to Europe. I was determine not to cancel the vacation so I asked friend. a t the last minute, I packed a random book from my bookshelf to bing along. It was Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Wolf. Completely unaware of the book I was bringing, my friend brought The Hours. We exchanged books midway through the trip. I was utterly entranced by The Hours and though that our bringing these two books was some sort of night. It’s probably because I was so emotionally raw, but by the end of that trip I was determined I would prove my ex wrong and write a novel some day?

I was at a dinner party at my neighbor’s house. She sat me beside another neighbor I hardly knew. Somehow that neighbor and I began talking about how one’s life is shaped by relatively few turning point events and that sometime we don’t even realize how pivotal the event is until long after the event has taken place. For some reason, that idea stuck with me. Later I thought how disorienting it would be if the most pivotal event in one’s life happened in a place that was totally unfamiliar and maybe even unplanned. The inciting incident in Able Was I—an experience the protagonist has on an unplanned adventure to locale he never intended on going (Elba), and then years later he comes to believe that event shaped his entire life.

Well, after the thematic idea came to me (i.e. having an pivotal event in your life happen and a place that was completely unknown to you—maybe even a place you never intended to go), I thought back on my life a spontaneous visit to Elba during my first trip to Europe. This trip exactly like it did for Grey Tigrett, the protagonist of Able Was I (though all of the events that happened to Grey after arriving on Elba are purely fiction—none of them happened to me). Only after I locked in on Elba as the site of the inciting incident did I come up with the idea to name the book after the alleged Napoleonic palindrome: Able was I ere I saw Elba. It's funny to consider this sequence of events now, because so much about the trilogy is palindromic, even though I didn't realize it as I was writing it.

I answer this question in the second interview with Frank Stasio of WUNC (about my second novel, Ere I Saw Elba) that is linked from the Press section of my site. When I wrote Able Was I, I never planned to write a sequel / prequel, much less a trilogy. Until my father suggested it. The fact that my father even read Able Was I astounded me on so many levels that I couldn’t help consider it seriously. It may have been the most significant suggestion he made to me in his lifetime. Unfortunately he died before I published Ere I Saw Elba, which is why I choke up when Frank asks me to relay the story in that interview. Choking up on live radio—not my finest moment ;-)

In the final throes of writing Ere I Saw Elba, my husband and I were on a vacation in Paris and I was up all night editing. The next morning, he issued an ultimatum: Either a start-up, or a novel. Not both. Given no start-up, meant no paycheck, I couldn’t afford to write I Before E until I retired.

I have a couple of ideas—actually I have several—but I’ve no idea which one will out. I do no that there’s one book I will write at some point in the next decade, if I get the chance to. It’s a biography of sorts of my great great grandfather. He was one of the first traveling evangelical ministers in North Carolina (during the prohibition era) and I have his diary and the original letters he wrote to his wife while he traveled from town to town. He was a brilliant writer and thinker, and in this diary and letters, he grappled, sometimes in despair, with his beliefs and the impact he was having in the communities in which he ministered. One thing he never grappled with though was the love of his wife over the forty years of their marriage. Each letters reads as if he was as besotted with her as he was the day they met. I have no idea how I will compile his diary and these letters into a book, but I hope that some day I will.