Photo: courtesy of trashotron.com

By Rick Kleffel

“We all question ourselves from time to time.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

Karen Joy Fowler is a literary superstar, with a bestselling novel, ‘The Jane Austen Book Club,’ that was adapted into a hit movie. As we sit down to talk about ‘We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves,’ she’s her usual calm and friendly self. She seems like the fabulous college professor who knows all the cool stuff, the great genre fiction and literature; everything excellent and fun to read.

I’ve known Fowler for a few years now; I met her shortly before she moved to Santa Cruz. I’ve known this book was in the hopper for quite some time, and even much of what it was about. But it still knocked me out when I finally had the chance to read it, because Fowler is such a talented writer. Much of the book is quite funny. It made me laugh out loud often and with great pleasure. And the more somber moments work with all the eloquence that life itself summons, usually when we are least prepared to deal with it.

It was quite a treat to sit down and talk with Fowler about the book, and not quite as challenging as I thought it would be. On one hand, I was loath to discuss too directly much of what happened in the book. As with any book, reading this book and experiencing the events as the author intends — with some surprise — is preferable. This is to say; I thought it would be harder to talk about the book without just spilling directly into the exciting bits.

But Fowler has created a novel that is really easy to read, utterly unforgettable, and yet, when you start to break it down and talk about it, it proves to be quite complicated. There is a lot to talk about in terms of technique, composition and creation that does not address the central events and themes here.

Fowler took an unusually long time to write the book, and unusually, she can quite precisely pin down the date on which it began. As readers, I hope that you encounter this book cold. Partway through this interview, a bit more than 40 minutes in, we give way and discuss events that are best heard about after reading the book. There’s plenty of warning in the interview itself. You can easily listen to most of this interview, be better prepared for the book, and then come back for the final segment.

If you listen to this interview before you read the book, prepare to hear Karen Joy Fowler’s voice telling you the story as you read. It’s a wonderful voice. You can hear her talk by following this link to the MP3 audio file.

Photo: courtesy of trashotron.com

Here’s the ninety-ninth episode of my series of podcasts, which I’m callingTime to Read. Hitting the one-year mark, I’m going to make an effort to stay ahead, so that podcast listeners can get the same sort of “sneak preview” effect that radio listeners get each Friday morning.

My hope is that in under four minutes I can offer readers a concise review and an opportunity to hear the author read from or speak about the work. I’m hoping to offer a new one every week.

The ninety-ninth episode is a look at Kate Atkinson and ‘Life After Life.’

Photo: courtesy of trashotron.com

By Rick Kleffel

“I’d done a story on flatulence…”

— Mary Roach

Mary Roach knows how to have fun on the printed page, and you’ll find evidence on every page of ‘Gulp.‘ her latest work of science and humor. Here’s the only book you’re likely to read that will not only make you snort milk out through your nose while reading the book it’ll explain why that happens.

I was fortunate enough to speak with Mary in her home, in the cozy confines of a room full of books. I was more than a little daunted by the fact that I’d already heard her on three different NPR shows, and had been told she’d been on various TV shows as well. But once you sit down to speak with her, her enthusiasm for her subject takes over and everything she says is informed by the fun she clearly had writing the book.

I did spend a bit of time talking to her about how she wrote the book, as opposed to having her tell the best stories from the book, though there are a few that I had to ask about. Roach writes about mealworms in ‘Gulp.’, and their reported propensity for eating their way out of the stomachs of your pets. As the one-time caretaker for a rather large leopard gecko, I had to know if the rumors were true and she talked about the experiment she conducted to dig up the facts.

We also spent a little time on the sense of smell, which has long been an interest of mine. Smell plays a part in a variety of places in the book, from our initial experience of taste to the smells engineered into pet food to bring our dogs to the bowl.

Roach also spoke about her sense of taboo, and how it informs not just this book, but all of them. Taboos give her an easy source of subjects, or at least, subjects that are less likely to fall under the gaze of another writer. She goes to places like the state prison, where she finds herself face to face with a most unsavory gentleman, to learn about hooping.

Photo: courtesy of trashotron.com

By Rick Kleffel

“Ironically, confession is a little bit addictive.”

— Glennon Doyle Melton

When I sit down to talk with Glennon Doyle Melton about her book ‘Carry On, Warrior,’ I feel just a bit out of place. I’m not quite in the expected audience for Momastery, her blog, but books are a different matter. And ‘Carry On, Warrior’ is wise, well-written and fun to read. That puts me right where I am, talking to the author about how and why the book came to be.

Glennon is hot off The Today Show when we sit down to speak, already well beyond the confines of my literary domain. As far as that goes, she always was, what with a blog post that went viral (my closest brushes with viral tend to involve viruses you need a microscope to see), and her dedicated followers that hang on her every word. (My readers tend to hang on the words of the writers I interview, and I try very hard to stay out of their way.)

But Glennon Doyle Melton has written an excellent book, one I can hold in my hands, and indeed, did hold in my hands as I read it and filled it up with stickies. So once we get the studio set up in her hotel room — her associate is there to keep us on time — conversation unfolds at a rather startling pace and I have to run my tiny brain just as fast as I can to stay in place.

The big fun part of this is that Glennon managed to be as spontaneous in person to the xhundredth interviewer to ask her about her blog as she is in her blog for her umpty-ump readers. She’s a great speaker, quite straightforward and without any hesitation. The girl you meet in the blog, the girl you meet on the pages, is the girl you meet in person. We talked about as much as we could until the clock ran out. You can hear just how much ground we covered (a lot!) in 51 minutes by following this link to the MP3 audio file.

Photo: courtesy of trashotron.com

by Rick Kleffel

“…people are hesitant to make their own building into a ruin…”

— Ben Katchor

I had not yet twigged just yet to how much of a work of science fiction Ben Katchor’s ‘Hand Drying in America‘ was until I sat down to talk with him. It’s a matter of degree; I might have thought that the fantastic aspects were there for fun, which they are. But Katchor is very deliberate about his creative imagination.

He and I talked about the inclinations that drive him to create his work. He’s pretty straightforward about it. Ben Katchor is writing subversive science fiction hoping to tear apart the world and find a new, better one behind the walls. He’s interested in writing subversive political stories, and averse to being imprisoned. It seems like a reasonable expectation to me.

Given that much of the work is visual, our challenges were many. But rather than spend too much time describing what was there, we tried to focus on how and why it got there. You’ll find a smart use of color in these strips, something we covered at length.

Driving the work is a low-key subversive philosophy that Katchor talks about with great clarity. Were Katchor to beat his readers about the head with his beliefs, he feels he might drive them away. Instead he uses his fiction to make friends first, and get in our heads with the comic strip equivalent of a prion disease and ask questions later.

Katchor also has a great speaking voice; it matches his written voice to degree. You can hear our conversation about cities real and imaginary by following this link to the MP3 audio file.

Photo: courtesy of trashotron.com

by Rick Kleffel

“I wanted it to be accurate…absolutely accurate.”

— Danielle Trussoni

Given the sprinting pace of ‘Angelopolis,’ it’s appropriate that Danielle Trussoni is herself almost sprinting. Her travel schedule is daunting to say the least, but she’s as composed as her angels might be as she checks into her hotel before our interview. She did not even have time to unpack before we started.

We spoke in a small meeting room upstairs at the Claremont Spa in Oakland, an opulent resort that looks like a chalet, a delicate white gothic structure in the hills above Oakland. None of that’s on display in the room where we talk however, so we’re able to focus on her two novels, ‘Angelology’ and ‘Angelopolis.’

I must admit given the title of her first novel, that I expected something a bit more along the lines of the new age books she tells me she did NOT find in the convent where her series began, for her as a writer. She already knew Evangeline in her heart, she told me, but finding what would become of the character took some work.

This involved research, and it was an aunt who helped her. Danielle’s story of writing these books is just about as compelling as the books themselves, and there are more than a few similarities. You can easily imagine Danielle herself in that library at night (she was in its model at the same time of night). She was her own gothic heroine, which might have made the characterization a bit easier.

But the real interest in these novels is the secret history she creates and the rich feel of the prose and the world she evokes. We talked about how she creates her secret history; that is, how she chooses the focal points that will act as story pivots. In spite of the fact that she loves history and writes well about it, it is not within history that she finds to lynchpins of plot.

Trussoni and also talked about her prose. In the first novel it is dark and detailed. In the second, it’s a bit sleeker, while being equally evocative. When Danielle and I talked about locations, it never occurred to me until afterward how appropriate a location the Claremont Spa was for our conversation. As I write, I’m wondering if the gothic aspects of this world follow her wherever she goes.

Photo: courtesy of trashotron.com

by Rick Kleffel

Here’s the ninety-first episode of my new series of podcasts, which I’m calling Time to Read. The podcasts/radio broadcasts will be of books worth your valuable reading time. I’ll try to keep the reports under four minutes, for a radio-friendly format. If you want to run them on your show or podcast, let me know.

My hope is that in under four minutes I can offer readers a concise review and an opportunity to hear the author read from or speak about the work. I’m hoping to offer a new one every week.

With this episode, I hope to be getting closer to catching up from the gap left by my recent voice loss. If I can finish editing Ruth Ozeki and get her book reviewed and the script for the Time to Read written, we’ll be back in what I consider the proper sequence. But next week may be devoted to much reading, I hope!

The ninety-first episode is a look at Lawrence Wright, ‘Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief‘.

Photo: Courtesty of trashotron.com

by Rick Kleffel

“…through the act of writing, she would somehow conjure the reader into being…”

— Ruth Ozeki

I had the pleasure of speaking with Ruth Ozeki at the Capitola Book Café, in the morning before she appeared to talk about her new novel ‘A Tale for the Time Being.’ My little studio in their tiny back office was already set up when she arrived, so we sat down and I had her read the beginning of the novel.

It was amazing to hear Ozeki read, to hear her bring the voice of Nao alive with such ease. It was a transformation, an instantiation, a bringing-into-being that was accomplished with complete ease. In a trice, she handed the book back to me and we began to speak. The effect was something like stepping from one reality into another.

The novel seems so intricately woven and immaculately conceived that hearing the story behind its creation is nearly as interesting as the story itself, and to a degree, given the self-referential nature of the story, that’s to be expected. It’s fascinating to hear the many worlds that night have resulted had Ozeki take any one of a number of different turns in the course of creating ‘A Tale for the Time Being.’

Apparently, none of the interviewers she had spoken to hade twigged to what seemed to me to be a major element in the novel. I really don’t know whether that is to be attributed to the fact that perhaps other simply did not want to see those elements, or did not consider them important, or perhaps unseemly, that is, un-literary to discuss. I was happy to discuss these aspects with Ozeki, to the degree we were able to without stepping on the reading experience.

And that was the true goal of this conversation, to offer readers and listeners insights that would enhance their reading experiences whether they read the book before or after they heard the interview. We’ll give listeners clues about the novel, but you’ll want to read it yourself if you want to explore the world anew; and that’s entirely in keeping with this wonderful novel.

You can hear my conversation with Ruth Ozeki by following this link to the MP3 audio file.

Stephen Kessler. Photo: courtesy of trashotron.com

By Rick Kleffel

Here’s the ninety-third episode of my series of podcasts, which I’m calling Time to Read. Hitting the one-year mark, I’m going to make an effort to stay ahead, so that podcast listeners can get the same sort of “sneak preview” effect that radio listeners get each Friday morning.

The podcasts/radio broadcasts will be of books worth your valuable reading time. I’ll try to keep the reports under four minutes, for a radio-friendly format. If you want to run them on your show or podcast, let me know.

My hope is that in under four minutes I can offer readers a concise review and an opportunity to hear the author read from or speak about the work. I’m hoping to offer a new one every week.

The ninety-third episode is a look at Stephen Kessler and ‘Scratch Pegasus.’

Photo courtesy of trashotron.com

By Rick Kleffel

“…without intention or recognition, we’re playing important roles in the lives of other people…”

— MacKenzie Bezos

I have a very specific goal in most of my interviews, which is to speak as little about the actual events in a book as possible. I told this to MacKenzie Bezos as we sat down to talk about her novel ‘Traps,’ because to me the less you know about this book going in, the more you will enjoy it.

On the other hand, I do think it is possible to speak about the techniques used within a book in a manner that does not hinge on discussing the plot details. My hope is that readers can listen to an interview either before or after they read the book and enhance their reading experience. To me at least, this all sounds great in theory, but in practice it can be very difficult.

I explained this to Bezos and she agreed to work with me to this end, with, I feel, great success. Bezos is a crafty writer, in both senses of the word. She’s smart and kind of sneaky, in a good way, when it comes to putting together an intricate plot that offers lots of surprises, tension and suspense. But she also pays close attention to her craft in terms of prose, characterization, and the gut-level art that pulls the parts into an organic whole.

Bezos also thinks about all the aspects of craft as she writes her book, and in our interview she spoke quite eloquently about the ineffable parts of the creative process, the organic growth of a narrative as you write. In general the type of writing she does is very difficult to talk about if you don’t talk about plot, but she’s clearly thought enough about her writing process to speak about creating a work without addressing the specifics of the work.

The contingent of readers and writers who want to get a clean, crisp glimpse into the creative writing process will find a lot of very interesting techniques and attitudes described here. You can hear our conversation by following this link to the MP3 audio file.