Local Author Spotlight 2018 & 2017

Interview

How does living in the Amherst area affect your writing?

This is going to sound like I'm apple-polishing, but it's true. The biggest effect that Amherst has on my writing is that the area has a whole bunch of good libraries, the Jones among them. The resources here are tremendous, and far easier to use than, say, the New York Public Library, amazing as that place is. I used to live in New York City. There's something about the ease of living here — not to mention the clean air and beautiful seasons — that seems to make me more productive than I was there.

What is your favorite local place to go for inspiration, relaxation, or peace and quiet? Why?

When I get tired of pushing pixels around the screen I take my dog on the trails near my house. When I want to work someplace different, I usually head to Amherst Coffee.

Do you have a special library memory or story?

My great-grandfather was a trustee of the Boston Public Library. According to my grandfather, trustees got to have a basket by the front door where they could leave their borrowed books. Somebody from the library would come by once a week to pick them up. My grandfather said that this was the origin of his lifelong habit of leaving library books by the front door and forgetting to return them. My father got the habit from his father. You see where this is going. I'm doing the best that I can to shake this hereditary curse.

Why did you write your new book?

When my daughter was born, it suddenly occurred to me that when she was my age, there would be ten billion people on Earth. I thought, how is that going to work? I'm a science journalist. I began asking questions to researchers. The Wizard and the Prophet represents my best attempt to lay out how researchers think about the future. I hoped it would be a book that people her age could read in school, explaining the situations they will face — but not telling them what to do.

Interview

How does living in the Amherst area affect your writing?

Before living in Amherst, I never lived near other writers, but here I have a wonderful community of literary friends to share in my struggles. I meet up almost every day with Kelly Link and Cassandra Clare and I am so lucky to have them to read my works in progress and to commiserate with about our strange job.

What is your favorite local place to go for inspiration, relaxation, or peace and quiet? Why?

I love swimming in Puffer’s Pond. I grew up near the ocean, so being able to swim out to the middle of a lake, with trees on all sides, is magical.

Do you have a special library memory or story?

I remember that in middle school, after reading Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire, I spent a lot of time in the library, reading vampire (and werewolf, and faerie) folklore. It was a great time!

Is there a member of this community who has been instrumental to your writing?

I am lucky that in addition to the writers with whom I work pretty much every day, my long-time collaborator on Spiderwick, Tony DiTerlizzi, also lives locally. And just outside of Amherst are Jane Yolen, Mo Willems, Grace Lin and so many other wonderful writers and illustrators. That community is really significant to me — something I always dreamed of having and am immensely grateful for.

Why did you write your new book?

I had the idea to write what is sort of a reverse changeling story — a mortal girl finds herself growing up in Faerie, being raised by the murderer of her parents, who is also her sister’s father. And since Faerie is what she knows, she wants to make a place for herself there, although she’s thwarted by the youngest and worst of the princes of Elfhame. I was interested in Jude because I wanted to write about someone with an upbringing that made them good in a ridiculous spy-and-swordfight crisis, but not so great at being okay when nothing was going wrong. [NOTE: The Cruel Prince was published in January 2018 and is due out in paperback in December.]

What was the last book you enjoyed reading?

Alex London’s Black Wings Beating

What was your favorite book growing up?

Probably Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain Chronicles

Interview

What was the last book you enjoyed reading?

Actually I am still reading, and enjoying, Matthew Zapruder’s 2017 book, Why Poetry. It helps me to ask the right questions, maybe even to find an answer or two. He teaches that the purpose of poetry is to stir a poetic state of mind in a reader, and that poetry is language freed from all other purposes, such as story-telling or argument or political gain or factual description. Language freed from utility. What a noble purpose his is, to help the reader or writer to understand poetry, as we seek to find the truth buried in our language. For explanation, for advocacy, he says, prose has the advantage; for beauty, to explore the possibilities of language itself, we need poetry.

Why did you write your new book?

When I retired from UMass in 1997, I had begun work on a scholarly, theoretical book. I thought that this project was to be the core of my post-retirement writing. But I had been writing poetry for forty years or more, and I went back to my folders, became absorbed in the old poems, kept at work on new ones as inspiration visited me, and set aside the plan to do scholarly writing. No need now to prove each year that I had been a diligent, productive fellow, so poetry conquered prose, beauty outmuscled scholarship. My first poetry book was heavily dependent on poems written over the years. Thereafter I have published three more volumes, because I had accumulated enough poems each time so that it seemed the thing to do. I have not sought a single theme or other obvious unifying element for each book; if I am a wanderer as I write, so be it, and the books only claim to be footprints of the same author, who is free to go where he will, seeking neither fame nor fortune. I write poetry because that is my chosen, most rewarding activity when the spirit moves me.

Interview with Nicole Blum

Why did you write your new book?

Writing Stitch Camp seemed like the logical outgrowth of my long friendship with Catherine and how that friendship has always been a super fun place for learning and sharing new skills — with each other and with our kids. We share the basic fundamental philosophy that it is deeply satisfying and indeed important to make things with your hands — and to do so without the worry of perfection or the insecurity of being a beginner. It is a “go for it” philosophy as skills will be accumulated through experimentation and, lucky for us, we both see great beauty in imperfection. We really hope that message came through alongside the detailed instructions.

What was the last book you enjoyed reading?

I recently finished a book that caught my eye on the return rack at the library while I was waiting to borrow books — The Unsettlers: In Search of the Good Life in Today's America by Mark Sundeen. It was excellent. Mark Sundeen traces the search for a simpler life — one intentionally separated from a corporate and war based economy — by telling the stories of 3 very different couples forging unique and radical lives in America. The book is steeped in American social history and reflects on the lessons and examples of his subjects and other creative people who are seeking lives that look very little like those living in the mainstream of our society. The window in was deeply inspiring and made it much easier to imagine not just a better life but a better world. In addition to all of that, it was written so well — with humor and humbleness. I was trying to scheme ways to read during the work day.

Interview with Catherine Newman

What is your favorite local place to go for inspiration, relaxation, or peace and quiet? Why?

The Amherst Survival Center. Not for peace and quiet! Or relaxation. But definitely for inspiration. I’ve been serving lunch there weekly for five years, and I always leave feeling deeply soul-nourished by our community of guests and staff and volunteers. It makes me feel like I’m in love with the whole world.

Do you have a special library memory or story?

The library is special to me, period — from the old days when I sat around reading the fabulous Becoming the Parent You Want to Be while my babies read board books and played with the train set and contracted norovirus from stuffing the caboose into their mouths*, to these days, when I borrow upwards of ten trillion books a year. My daughter Birdy was in last week (she participates in your tutoring program), and when she went up to the circulation desk, they said, “Oh, we’ve got a book on hold for your mom.” She thought it was so funny that they recognized her as the kid of the person who checks out so many books. Thank goodness you're there to enable my extreme reading habit. (And I’m also grateful to Amherst Books for being such a warm and wonderful local resource for authors and readers.)

* Library note: ask us for a disinfecting wipe!

Heroes of the Frontier
by Dave Eggers

I read this book last year and it is still on my mind – and in the part of my mind that is holding all of the stories and critiques of life in our current social landscape. This is the story of a mother who drops everything and heads out on a hapless road trip around Alaska with her two young children. A lot goes wrong, and she is a bit of a mess, but Eggers is clearly soul searching the middle-class American experience and through her struggles and spiritual awakening, there is a good shot of hopefulness the reader is left with – at least this reader was.

The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
by Naomi Klein

This is probably one of the most eye opening and important books I have ever read. Thoroughly researched and with Klein’s very clear and thoughtful voice, the book exposes the “thinking, the money trail and the puppet strings behind the world-changing crises and wars of the last four decades” that led to the exploitation of the people most affected by them – Bush’s post 9/11 “War on Terror”, a tsunami in South East Asia, Hurricane Katrina, and more. It explains how neoliberal policy has been shaping (and failing) our society and is highly relevant today. I felt armed with knowledge that helped me better understand the “shock and awe” politics of disasters and how things are likely to play out after – including our most recent hurricane disaster in Puerto Rico. And, of course, the more we all know, the better prepared we are to demand better and see our role in the way we hope to see social change. I love Naomi Klein for her vision, but also for her encouragement to envision a world we want to live in and policies and commitments we should make that will help us achieve that.

The Star of Kazan
by Eva Ibbotson

My family has listened to this epic story no fewer than 3 times as an audiobook – starting when the kids were pretty young on roadtrips, but spanning into the teenage years. It is so beautifully written (and so well read by Patricia Connolly) that you will drive around a little extra to finish a chapter, if necessary. It is the story of a girl named Annika who was left as a baby in a mountainside church and discovered by two women who work as a cook and maid in the Vienna household of three eccentric professors. They live a good life that gets very complicated, very quickly. The story shows the ugly side of class, uplifts the value and satisfaction that comes with a strong work-ethic, and celebrates those who are most deeply kind and brave. It is great to listen to mostly because of the excellent names such as Edeltraut von Tanenberg, Bad Huchenfeld, and Spittal. The character development is magnificent, like with many of Ibbotson’s novels, and the story will leave you deeply satisfied.

"When it's over, I want to say: all my life / I was a bride married to amazement" (from “When Death Comes”). I read Mary Oliver poems pretty much to get my soul flung open. I feel expanded by her loveliness and love, her open heart and clarity. And then it is very humbling to contract again, around my own smallness. She makes me try harder, be better, spend more time out of doors. Plus, you can reread the same poem a hundred times, and it’s never the same twice.

Interview

How does living in the Amherst area affect your writing?

My novels are set in Western Massachusetts, and my protagonist, David Norcross, lives in Amherst. The geography, the social diversity, the history, and the occasional sheer lunacy of this part of the planet provided the backdrop for my first two books, and inform the third, which I'm working on now. People often tell me that they can picture the locations where events in my stories take place, and they seem to enjoy that. There is great delight in crafting a plot unfolding in the landscape of one's home ground. Apart from familiar settings, the Amherst area provides a rich community of writers who are a great support and inspiration.

What was the last book you enjoyed reading?

I just read Alice Munro's collection of short stories, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, and I was flattened. I had never read anything by her. She captures within a short story the moral power and complexity of a novel. Her ability to create an emotional universe with the lightest and most exact touches is astonishing. Her characters are sometimes heartbreaking, but their courage and poignance linger. I can't wait to read more of her work. Each story is like a brilliant writing tutorial.

Interview

What is your favorite local place to go for inspiration, relaxation, or peace and quiet? Why?

The bike path is the hands-down winner there. I notice this is becoming a popular answer in the author profiles, and I am not surprised. I am not great at sitting still and relaxing, so a place where I can be in motion and spend time with my thoughts in a quiet forest setting is ideal.

Do you have a special library memory or story?

At the moment my favorite library memory is discovering Beyoncé’s Lemonade album on the new CDs shelf at the Jones Library just this past fall. That was my first time hearing the album (which tells you something about my relationship to social media and popular culture — I’m an analog kind of guy trying to keep up in a digital world).

A more general answer is that libraries are my favorite venue for doing author/illustrator programs.

Is there a member of this community who has been instrumental to your work?

At one time David Milgrim, Jeff Mack, Aaron Becker and I would meet about once a month for a picture book writers’ critique group (till David Milgrim moved closer to Boston). Each of them is insightful in a different way about picture books, so there are any number of ways their comments — and just hanging out in that group and hearing what they had to say to each other — influenced my work. Here are two specific examples that are easy to point to. There’s a line in Little Pig Joins the Band where Little Pig asks if there are any piccolos among the musical instruments on hand, and his sister Sally tells him to look in the refrigerator. That joke was written by David Milgrim. So was the last line in that book: “You can call me Little Pig!”

Do you have a favorite book that is set in, or is about, the Pioneer Valley or New England?

That would have to be the Penderwicks series by Jeanne Birdsall.

Why did you write your new book?

One reason was that I was interested in making a book in which the problem was low-stakes in the grand scheme of things, but mattered a lot to the central character. The climactic crisis in Little Pig Saves the Ship is that the toy ship he and his grandfather made together might be lost in the current of the stream. In the big picture, the worst outcome wouldn’t really be that bad, but it mattered a lot to Little Pig. I was interested in the scale-model grand adventure that children experience with their toys.

What was the last book you enjoyed reading?

Do audiobooks count? I listen to a lot of them in my studio — I’ve noticed that’s true of many illustrators — and in the car on long drives to the schools I visit. I recently enjoyed listening to The Star of Kazan by Eva Ibbotson, read by Patricia Connolly, and The Watsons Go to Birmingham – 1963 by Christopher Paul Curtis, read by LaVar Burton.

What was your favorite book growing up?

Frog and Toad All Year by Arnold Lobel

Interview

How does living in the Amherst area affect your writing?

Although Amherst is a wonderful place to live and write, it is Amherst College that has had the greatest impact on my writing. It has allowed me to teach what I want when I want to, to write at a pace that suits my projects rather than to produce publications according to some rigid schedule, and to let me test my ideas out on talented undergraduates who approximate the general readers I try to write for.

What is your favorite local place to go for inspiration, relaxation, or peace and quiet? Why?

The bike path in Amherst and Hadley. I try to ride it every other day, sometimes stopping to view the meadows and smell the flowers, often just pedaling down to Station Road and back.

Do you have a special library memory or story?

I’ve written all my books in a small faculty study in Amherst College’s Frost Library. I love being able to wander in the stacks outside my study looking for books I need and, when they're not available, I can obtain them quickly either from one of the other four college libraries in the Valley or via inter-library loan.

Why did you write your new book?

Although I am by training a political scientist specializing on the USSR/Russia, and political scientists don’t often write biographies, I found my way in the 1980’s and 1990’s to writing a biography of Nikita Khrushchev, which turned out to be the most satisfying project I had ever undertaken. I settled on Mikhail Gorbachev as my next subject because other Soviet leaders were already “taken” by other biographers (Lenin and Stalin), or didn’t seem fascinating enough (Leonid Brezhnev), and because Gorbachev continued and vastly extended Khrushchev’s reforms by seeking (against overwhelming odds it turned out) to change his country and the world for the better.

Learn more about William Taubman and his books at williamtaubmanbooks.com.

William's Favorite Books

(with his comments)

Anatoly Chernyaev was Mikhail Gorbachev’s closest aide both when Gorbachev was in power and afterward. Chernyaev’s diary, covering the period from 1972 to 1991, is both an extraordinary inside account of Kremlin politics and a pleasure to read. Excerpts from the diary are available in English in his book, My Six Years with Gorbachev. [NOTE: This book is not currently available in the CW MARS consortium.]

Ari Shavit’s My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel taught me much and made me weep.

Isaac Deutscher’s Stalin: A Political Biography was the book that, more than any other, inspired me to major in Russian history in college, to concentrate on Soviet politics in graduate school, to embark on a career as a teacher/scholar of Soviet/Russian affairs, and to end up writing biographies.

I don’t read enough fiction, but recently I read and particularly liked Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See — for its simple, almost minimalist approach to the violence and war.

Interview

How does living in the Amherst area affect your writing?

The literary atmosphere that suffuses Amherst can’t help but be inspiring; being surrounded by so many writers (at various times I have been handed poetry chapbooks from the person bagging my groceries, the person writing me a parking ticket, and the person picking up my recyclables) can keep the competitive juices flowing, while at the same time being totally nurturing.

Do you have a special library memory or story?

I used to regularly get detention in my high school library after various misdemeanors — and it is there I became intrigued with literature. I even used that memory in my book Busing Brewster, where Brewster is introduced to the world of reading by the librarian, after his own hallway fight.

Do you have a favorite book that is set in or about the Pioneer Valley or New England?

So many, but since I just loaned my copy of Outwitting History by Aaron Lansky, I will mention that one. I’ve also loaned Julius Lester’s Lovesong on numerous occasions (and I’ll note both authors were Jones Library Sammy Awardees).

Why did you write your new book?

I have 3 “recent books,” all written for different reasons. More Money than God, because poetry serves my soul. Fascinating: The Life of Leonard Nimoy, because Leonard was a dear friend, and I wanted people to know who he was beyond the Spock persona. And most recently, The Language of Angels: A Story about the Reinvention of Hebrew, because it is an incredible tale; a dead language, unused for over 2000 years (aside from prayer), brought back to daily use within a generation by one man with a dream. Imagine having to invent words for everything that didn’t exist — bicycles, ice cream, libraries — when Hebrew stopped being in daily use. This book combined so many of my interests — politics, history, Judaism, and most of all, a love of language.

What was your favorite book growing up?

As a child, I looked forward to the Sunday comics (I didn’t fall in love with picture books till I was well into “adulthood"). As an older teen and young man, Crime and Punishment.

Rich's Favorite Books

(with his comments)

Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment was the first “serious” book that I could not put down, and it opened up my world, appealing to my young man’s conflicted thoughts of invisibility and grandeur. The psychological and moral considerations remain absorbing with each rereading. And keeping with the Russians, Anna Karenina, for the literary reason that I met my wife in a Tolstoy class, and I still managed (barely) to pay attention to the text.

Open Closed Open by Yehuda Amichai is the book of poetry I keep in my car’s glove compartment, and his Collected Poems graces my bedside table. A master of metaphor, to me he is the pre-eminent poet of both love and war, mixing the personal and historical in a way I try to emulate in my own poetry.

And lots of favorite books by locals, but since so many are my friends and I can’t list them all, I’ll leave it here.

Interview

What is your favorite local place to go for inspiration, relaxation, or peace and quiet? Why?

The Bike Path: where else can you get blue herons, beavers, and turtles all in one place?

Do you have a special library memory or story?

I grew up across the street from the public library in Granby. Its hours of operation were Tuesday and Friday, from two to five and seven to nine. When the librarians, Miss Winifred Fiske and Miss Gertrude Taylor, saw that I was an insatiable reader, they used to put aside the new books so I could have the honor of being the first in town to read them.

Is there a member of this community who has been instrumental to your writing?

Holly Davis deserves a shout-out for starting a book group in the early eighties and inviting me to join in around 1990. (I am still one of the new girls.) The women in the group are all brilliant and far better readers than I am: heaven!

Why did you write your new book?

I always say writers write the book they want to read. More specifically, I find that whenever I am in turmoil about something, it usually is a subject worth pursuing. Mixed feelings = material. In the case of To the New Owners (to be published on July 4, 2017), in the summer of 2014, I felt sadness and anger at losing a house that had never actually been mine. What was that about?

What was the last book you enjoyed reading?

I am reading Alice McDermott’s new novel, The Ninth Hour (forthcoming), to review for The National Book Review, on online publication run by Liz Taylor, an MHC alum. McDermott combines seemingly simple, intensely thoughtful word choices with close-ups of the kind of people and places that might otherwise be ignored. I think she must have imbibed James Joyce’s Dubliners with her mother’s milk.

What was your favorite book growing up?

So many, but at the top of the list is The Secret Garden, featuring a cross, sallow, sullen young girl orphaned in India when cholera wipes out everyone in her orbit, including her self-absorbed parents as well as all the servants she abuses verbally, and then she is sent to live in the middle of nowhere with relatives in England who want nothing to do with her. Now that is an example of a character forced out onto the far end of a frail branch at the top of tree which is pretty much swaying in a Force Five Hurricane.

I want to add here that I didn’t start reading until the first grade when I six years old. In those days, Granby did not have a kindergarten and by the time I got to school I was raring to go. The first book I remember loving was The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins by Dr. Seuss, which we read in a circle and one lucky child got to wear a hat.

Madeleine's Favorite Books

(with her comments)

All of these books take you to obscure, easily overlooked worlds that, in the absence of the author’s insistence to the contrary, would otherwise go unnoticed. They combine some of the elements I love most in a piece of writing: forlorn or lonely landscapes, the search for identity, great emotional struggles among easily dismissed people, childhood as a time in italics, and the question of how to help someone who is struggling. I should say that despite or perhaps because of the subject matter, these books also offer from time to time a welcome dose of wry humor.

Local Author Spotlight 2018 & 2017

Charles Mann

Interview

Recent Books by Charles

Charles's Favorite Books

Holly Black

Interview

Recent Books by Holly

Holly's Favorite Books

Lewis Mainzer

Interview

Recent Books by Lewis

Lewis's Favorite Books

Nicole Blum & Catherine Newman

Interview with Nicole Blum

Interview with Catherine Newman

Recent Books by Nicole and/or Catherine

Nicole's Favorite Books

Catherine's Favorite Books

Michael Ponsor

Interview

Books by Michael

Michael's Favorite Books

David Hyde Costello

Interview

Recent Books by David

David's Favorite Books

William Taubman

Interview

Recent Books by William

William's Favorite Books

Rich Michelson

Interview

Recent Books by Rich

Rich's Favorite Books

Madeleine Blais

Interview

Recent Books by Madeleine

Madeleine's Favorite Books

Cammie McGovern