< Back Made by Mary Laura Catherine Brown December 28, 2018 It’s 1999, and Ann is a guitar-playing thirty-year-old preschool teacher who dreams of having children even though she was born without a uterus. As Laura Catherine Brown 's novel Made by Mary (C and R Press, 2018) opens, Ann and her husband Joel have been rejected as adoptive parents, and their plan to host and pay medical expenses for a pregnant teen goes terribly wrong. Then Ann’s 49-year-old mother Mary, a jewelry-designing, goddess-worshipping, lesbian hippie, offers to carry her daughter’s baby. Brown’s debut novel, Quickening , was published by Random House and featured in Barnes & Noble’s "Discover Great New Writers" series. Her short stories have appeared in several literary journals, including The Bellingham Review , Monkeybicycle , Paragraphiti and Tin House ; and in anthologies with Seal Press and Overlook Press. She received her BA from the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan and supports her writing habit by working as a graphic designer. Her writing education came through many writing workshops including the Bread Loaf Conference and the Sewanee Writers' Workshop where she was a fiction fellow. She has also taught yoga since 2003 and has been a yoga practitioner for almost 30 years. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

< Back The Forgetting Flower Karen Hugg August 15, 2019 Planted in her mind while the author was working as a professional gardener, The Forgetting Flower (Magnolia Press, 2019) tells the story of Renia, a working- class young woman who left Crakow to live in Paris. She manages a flower shop for the obnoxious, oblivious owner, who is tone-deaf regarding business, money, and people. Renia has built a secret nook to store an unusual plant whose blossoms make people forget just about everything. The plant belonged to her twin sister, still in Crakow, and it turns out that there are lots of people interested in getting their hands on it - questionable people with guns, and drugs to sell. Karen Hugg loves plants and is thrilled when new cultivars or varieties are discovered. She is often reminded that “if she didn’t exist, they would live on just fine anyway.” Karen is a Seattle-based certified ornamental horticulturalist and Master Pruner and is also a graduate of the Goddard MFA program. When she is not actually digging in the dirt, Karen likes to write mysteries and thrillers that are set in the world of plants. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

< Back Underground Fugue Margot Singer September 6, 2018 Listening to NPR one day in the summer of 2005, author Margot Singer heard a report about a mute pianist who had washed up on the northern coast of England. That was also the summer of the London rush hour bombings that paralyzed the city and killed and maimed hundreds. Those news reports marinated over the years and finally led Margot to write her first novel, Underground Fugue (Melville House, 2017). The novel intertwines the lives of four people, each one of whom is grappling in some way with loss, fear, and betrayal. Esther, the main character, is in London to care for her dying mother and to escape from the breakdown of her marriage. Esther’s mother, Lonia, tosses in bed remembering her escape from Nazi Germany, and her beloved brother’s failure to make it out alive. Esther’s neighbor, Javad, is the Persian doctor who is consulted about a mute piano player who washed up on the beach in the north of England. He is also the long-divorced father of nineteen-year-old Amir, who comes and goes at odd hours, and seems to be involved in something secretive. The story weaves the lives and thoughts of these four characters before and after the shocking 7/7 terror attack in London’s underground. Underground Fugue won the 2017 Edward Lewis Wallant Award for American Jewish fiction. Singer’s 2007 story collection, The Pale of Settlement , won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the Reform Judaism Prize for Jewish Fiction, the Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers, and an Honorable Mention for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Margot Singer’s work has been featured on NPR and in many publications such as theKenyon Review, the Gettysburg Review , Agni , and Conjunctions . She is a professor of English at Denison University in Granville, Ohio. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

< Back Beneficence Meredith Hall October 19, 2021 Today I talked to Meredith Hall about her new novel Beneficence (Godine, 2020). A beautiful family is torn apart by a shocking loss, and three of its members blame themselves. It’s the middle of the twentieth century, their farm in Maine needs tending, and the seasons move swiftly with specific chores and tasks. The cows need calving, the chickens need feeding, the laundry needs washing, the rugs need airing, the food needs preparing. But each member of the family is numb from their huge loss, and they go their separate ways, telling small bits of the story as their lives unfold. Their dreams and hopes change, and some decisions have harsh consequences, but slowly, through the changing seasons, they struggle to make their way back to the family they once loved. Meredith Hall taught in the MFA program at the University of New Hampshire for many years. In her late fifties, she wrote an essay that won the Pushcart Prize, and on the basis of that encouragement, she was awarded the Gift of Freedom Award, which provided two years of dedicated writing. Her memoir Without a Map was named a best book of the year by Kirkus and BookSense and was both a NYT bestseller and an Elle magazine Reader’s Pick of the Year. She was a recipient of the 2004 Gift of Freedom Award from A Room of Her Own Foundation and her work has appeared in Five Points , The Gettysburg Review, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, The New York Times, and many other publications. Hall writes while listening to Gregorian chant, and when she is not writing or reading, she is outdoors, finding beautiful wild places. She spends her time in Northern California and Maine, so beauty is available all around her, vital sustenance. She loves and needs the arts and spends each winter in the Bay Area gorging on performances of contemporary dance, modern and classical music, and drama. She wanders museums and galleries a lot. Her family and friends are at the center, always. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

< Back Home So Far Away Judith Berlowitz July 26, 2022 After author Judith Berlowitz found both Gestapo and Soviet records about a relative named Klara Philpsborn, she began thinking about writing Home So Far Away (She Writes Press 2022). Set in diary form, the novel opens in 1925 with a visit from Berlin to an uncle living in Sevilla, Spain. "Onkle" Julius has not told his wife and children that he is Jewish, so his visiting family can only celebrate a quiet, hidden Passover, but Klara is intrigued by the language, food, and culture of Spain. A few years later, she takes a job as a chemist in Madrid. 1n 1936, when the Spanish Civil War breaks out, Klara, now Clara, enlists and ends up putting both relationships and her life at risk. Although she must hide her Jewish and communist identity in Spain, Clara is passionate about fighting for human rights and equality. The tale ends in 1938, just as the Nazi movement is picking up steam in Clara’s homeland. Los Angeles-born genealogist Judith Berlowitz fluttered through various career phases before settling on historical fiction as her life’s work. Tools acquired during all these phases are visible in her debut novel, Home So Far Away (She Writes Press, 2022). Her years as a musician (classical guitar, oboe, singer, arranger), language teacher (Spanish), cultural studies teacher, tour guide, peace activist, and genealogist converge in a fictional diary about a relative from Germany in the Spanish Civil War. Judith lives in San Francisco with her husband and sings in the San Francisco Bach Choir while serving as a volunteer curator with the genealogical website, Geni.com. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

< Back The Moon Always Rising Alice C. Early May 29, 2020 At the dawn of the new millennium, Els Gordon finds herself adrift – she’s in mourning for her fiancé and her father, she’s lost the inheritance of her Scottish Highlands estate, her mother left when she was two-years-old but it her only living relative, she’s about to be unemployed, and she’s just bought an old plantation house on the island of Nevis in the Caribbean. It’s a little haunted by the previous owner, who needs help making amends, and in exchange, helps Els fall in love with a man who has, like Els, survived heartache and loss. Listen in as I speak with Alice C. Early about her book The Moon Always Rising (She Writes Press, 2020). Early ’s career spans academia, commercial real estate, international executive recruiting, and career-transition coaching, and has included many ‘first woman to…’ roles. Her college English/creative writing major and professional roles requiring listening and shaping stories eventually pointed her back to her first love—writing fiction. In her cherished Martha’s Vineyard community, Alice sings in a local group and fosters sustainability and women’s rights and voices. An avid gardener and cook, she nurtures friends and neighbors with local bounty and her experiments in gluten-free baking. Alice and her husband have visited Nevis annually since 1996 and otherwise share a hand-built life in view of the sea. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

< Back Kickdown Rebecca Clarren August 30, 2019 Two sisters are struggling to save their land when a gas well explodes on a neighboring ranch in western Colorado, setting off a disturbing chain of events. Their father has died, the older sister has become unraveled and the younger sister is mauled by an angry cow. Her ex-boyfriend is buying up oil and gas rights and downplays a spate of cancer-related deaths near his wells. The company offers the sisters bottled water when the river starts bubbling. There’s also an Iraqi war veteran who helps the sisters while he’s on probation from his job as a police officer, putting his own marriage at risk. This is a moving debut novel about family, land, and the preservation of both in rural America. Award-winning journalist Rebecca Clarren has been writing about the rural West for twenty years. Her journalism, for which she has won the Hillman Prize, an Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellowship, and nine grants from the Fund for Investigative Journalism, has appeared in such publications as MotherJones , High Country News , The Nation , and Salon.com. Her debut novel, Kickdown (Arcade, 2018) was shortlisted for the PEN/Bellwether Prize. She lives in Portland, Ore. with her husband and two young sons. When she’s not writing, Rebecca can be found hiking, running with friends, or telling people what books to read. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

< Back Four Dead Horses KT Sparks April 13, 2021 Today I talked to KT Sparks about her debut novel Four Dead Horses (Regal House, 2021) On May 1, 1982, eighteen-year-old Martin Oliphant watches a horse drown off the shore of Lake Michigan—the first of four equine corpses marking the trail that will lead Martin out of the small-minded small town of Pierre, Michigan, onto the open ranges of Elko, Nevada, and into the open arms, or at least open mics, of the cowboy poets who gather there to perform. Along the way, he nurtures a dying mother, who insists the only thing wrong with her is tennis elbow; corrals a demented father, who believes he’s Father Christmas; assists the dissolute local newspaper editor; and serves stints as horse rustler and pet mortician. For thirty years, Martin searches for an escape route to the West, to poetry, and to his first love, the cowgirl Ginger, but never manages to get much farther than the city limits of his Midwestern hometown—that is, until a world- famous cow horse dies while touring through Pierre, and Martin is tapped to transport its remains to the funeral at the 32nd Annual Elko Cowboy Poetry Confluence. KT Sparks is a writer and farmer whose work has appeared in The Kenyon Review, Pank , and elsewhere. She received an AB in Politics, Economics, Rhetoric, and Law from University of Chicago, an MA in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics from Oxford University, Brasenose College, and an MFA in Creative Writing from Queens University in Charlotte, an educational grounding that matches her lifelong interest in everything and mastery of nothing. She spent twenty-five years in Washington DC, most of it in the US Senate, as a policy analyst and speechwriter and continues to be involved in progressive politics. When she's not reading fiction (all types) or trying to banish weeds from the vegetable garden, she practices Zen Buddhism, binges British detective series, and cooks stuff grown on the farm (or by her more talented neighbors). Her greatest passion is her large distended family, which includes children, stepchildren, grandchildren, nieces, nephews, siblings, parents, in-laws, exes, and seemingly unending concentric circles of spouses, partners, fiancés, more exes, and more spouses—shining bright and swirling outward, like the rings of Jupiter, but less dusty. KT lives in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia with her husband, dog, a fluctuating population of barn cats, and no horses, dead or alive, waiting for the kids to come visit, or at least call for God’s sake. Four Dead Horses is her first novel. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

< Back A Song from Faraway Deni Ellis Béchard October 27, 2020 A young man visits his half-brother in Vancouver and steals a book that changes his life. An archeology student is befriended and brought to Iraq by a brother and sister who need his help in assessing a family art collection. A man who fought for the British in South Africa’s Boer War enlists as an American to fight in WWI Germany. Spanning decades and continents, the stories in Béchard's haunting novel A Song from Faraway (Milkweed Editions, 2020) slowly reveal themselves to be connected. In these pages, the lies of one generation are inherited by the next, homes are burnt to the ground, wives are abandoned, and innocent people suffer. With gripping portrayals of fathers and sons, mothers and siblings, passion and pain – this is a moving, non-linear novel about the relationships to family and society upon which all humanity rests. Deni Ellis Béchard is the author of eight books of fiction and nonfiction, including Vandal Love (Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book); Into the Sun (Midwest Book Award for Literary Fiction and chosen by CBC/Radio Canada as one of 2017’s Incontournables and one of the most important books of that year to be read by Canada's political leadership); Of Bonobos and Men (Nautilus Book Award for investigative journalism and Nautilus Grand Prize winner); Cures for Hunger (an IndieNext pick and one of the best memoirs of 2012 by Amazon.ca); Kuei, my Friend: a Conversation on Racism and Reconciliation , (coauthored with First Nations poet Natasha Kanapé-Fontaine). A traveler by nature, Béchard has a habit of changing homes as often as every three months, and the place he has lived in the longest over the past ten years was a community circus. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

< Back Zahara and the Lost Books of Light Joyce Ruth Yarrow December 15, 2020 Seattle journalist Alienor Crespo flies to Spain to apply for citizenship as a descendant of Jews expelled from the Iberian Peninsula during the Inquisition, in 1492. She meets a long-lost cousin and begins to discover her family’s history. A strong and self-aware woman, Alienor is also invited into the hidden tunnels of a fantastic library, which for half a century has been preserving medieval Jewish and Muslim scholarly books that were saved from the Inquisition’s fires. The library is called the “Zahara” and is protected by a secret society of caretakers in a hidden fortress. But there is a violently fascist political group trying to restore the pure blood line of Iberia, trying to make Spain great again. And one of Alienor’s cousins is a member. Meanwhile, she has been connecting with her female ancestors in moments of spiritually awakening time travel. Today I talked to Joyce Yarrow about her new book Zahara and the Lost Books of Light (Adelaide Books, 2020). Yarrow began her writing life scribbling poems on the subway and observing human behavior from every walk of life. Her published novels of suspense include Ask the Dead (Martin Brown), Russian Reckoning available in hardcover as The Last Matryoshka (Five Star Mysteries), and Rivers Run Back , co-authored with Arindam Roy (Vitasta, New Delhi). Yarrow is a Pushcart Prize Nominee with short stories and essays that have appeared in Inkwell Journal, Whistling Shade, Descant, Arabesques, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Weber: The Contemporary West. She is a member of Sisters in Crime and has presented workshops on "The Place of Place in Mystery Writing" at conferences in the US and India. A New York native now living in Seattle, Yarrow is a trained musician, a writing tutor at the local community college and a prolific reader. When she is not reading, writing, or teaching, she loves being outdoors in nature, hiking, and canoeing in nearby Lake Washington. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

< Back LOOT Tania James June 13, 2023 Tania James' novel Loot (Knopf 2023) is about a young woodcarver who is ordered by Tipu Sultan, ruler of the Kingdom of Mysore in late 18th century India to carve a large wooden tiger. The tiger seems to devour a life-sized European man. As the apprentice of an alcoholic French clockmaker, Abbas has a short time to create this gift for the sultan’s youngest sons after they return from being held captive by the British. Later, British forces attack Mysore, kill as many as they can reach, and ship everything of value back to England. Abbas survives the attack and then the sea and other adventures in order to reach Rouen, where his teacher’s teacher lives. Spanning 50 years and two continents, Loot is a hero’s quest, a love story, and an exuberant heist novel that traces the bloody legacy of colonialism across the world. Tania James is the author of the novels The Tusk That Did the Damage and Atlas of Unknowns and the short-story collection Aerogrammes . Her fiction has appeared in Freeman’s , Granta , The New Yorker , O, The Oprah Magazine , One Story , and A Public Space . Tania has been a fellow of Ragdale, MacDowell, the Sustainable Arts Foundation, and the Fulbright Program. She teaches in the MFA program at George Mason University and lives in Washington, D.C. When she's not writing, James likes to dance--whether it's the classical Indian dance form of kuchipudi or simply busting a move in her living room. Her favorite mode of transport is bicycle and her favorite place to chill is the terrace of the Martin Luther King Jr library. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

< Back Devil by the Tail Jeanne Matthews August 10, 2021 Today I talked to Jeanne Matthews about her new novel Devil by the Tail (D.X. Varos, 2021) It’s 1867, and a 20-something civil war widow has just set up a detective agency with a former rebel soldier named Gabriel Garnick. She uses a professional name, Mrs. Paschal, so nobody connects her with the former in-laws who are trying to stop her from receiving her dead husband’s estate. Garnick and Paschal get two cases on the same day – the first to help prove a man innocent of murdering his wife, the second to find reasonable doubt for an accused murderer. Imagine their surprise when the cases turn out to be linked? And imagine 19th Century pre-fire Chicago, teeming with corrupt politicians, gambling parlors, and bawdy houses of ill-repute. Also, someone is trying to murder Quinn Sinclair, aka Mrs. Paschal. Jeanne Matthews graduated from the University of Georgia with a degree in Journalism and has worked as a copywriter, a high school English and Drama teacher, and a paralegal. She worked for litigators for twenty years, and there was seldom a day when she didn’t fantasize about murder. So, it was no wonder when she turned to writing murder mysteries. Matthews’ five-book Dinah Pelerin mystery series published by Poisoned Pen Press between 2010 and 2015 received glowing reviews from Library Journal, Booklist, and Publisher’s Weekly. The settings for these books (Bones of Contention, Bet Your Bones, Bonereapers, Her Boyfriend’s Bones and Where the Bones Are Buried) range from the Australian Outback to the Norwegian Arctic to the sophisticated noir of Berlin. Matthews and her husband, a law professor, currently live in Washington State with Jack Reacher, their Norwich terrier. She loves travel, hiking, and photography, plays old torch songs from the 1930’s and 40’s on piano after a few glasses of wine, and enjoys cooking and baking. She also plays a mean game of Scrabble. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next