Crossing the Threshold of Grace: Part I of an Interview with Shann Ray
Peter Geye talks with Shann Ray about Montana wilderness, intimate landscapes, and Ray’s debut novel, American Copper.
Peter Geye talks with Shann Ray about Montana wilderness, intimate landscapes, and Ray’s debut novel, American Copper.
“The Farallon Islands are an extreme environment. I think that in that kind of environment, we are all stripped down to our essentials.”
Barrett Bowlin sits down with Jennifer Pashley over cocktails just before her tour to promote the release of The Scamp, talking with her about this new book, her literary and musical influences, true crime sagas, and, inevitably, dead bodies.
“The events of 9/11 are integral to the novel’s structure and meaning, and to the Amendola family’s history and identity, but neither novel nor family are defined or constrained by the event.”
“Along the way, listening to writers at my dinner table speak of their work, their contracts, their advances, their sales, their ratings on Amazon, their competitors, etc, I came to realize how much it takes to carve out a career as an author, to live by the pen. At my present age, none of these concerns are mine.” Elena Delbacno discusses the perks of publishing later in life.
“I think influence is everywhere, right? We are influenced by places, people, what we overhear, what we see, what we do and what is done to us, various states of being.”
“Eventually, I made peace with the artifice: all of it is manipulated, all of it designed to form a cohesive whole. And then I really began to figure out potential connections between characters and events.”
“I knew I wanted the book to have one foot in the past and one in the present. It was the only way to really explore the themes that interested me, namely how much impact does the past have upon our present? “
“Then you sit back one day and think, ‘Who really will care about this? It’s just another story that’s been told so many times, just in different ways.’ Yet there is that illogical reasoning, or rather lack thereof, that makes you continue.”
Post Hurricane Katrina and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the characters in Tom Cooper’s debut novel, The Marauders, struggle to survive in a world whose customs and cultures are rapidly “disappearing, crumbling to the Gulf.”
