An Interview with Anna Solomon, Author of The Little Bride

“Minna continued pulling up grass in big fistfuls. . . . One day she would decide to learn the names of her torture and be disappointed when she found them nowhere near as precise as how she’d identified them then: Sharpest grass, shiniest grass, curly grass, hardest-to-pull grass. She pulled all of it up from the roots, giving in to the slices in her palms, watching the dry soil break into dust….” ~ From The Little Bride

 

When dreams turn to fantasy and take on a life of their own, and it becomes inevitable that they will fracture or crumble in the face of reality. Anna Solomon’s debut novel, The Little Bride, is the story of Minna Losk, a Jewish mail order bride on a journey to pursue her dream of life and freedom in America, which she assumes will include a handsome husband, a large house with running water, and servants of her own. What Minna discovers instead is the stark reality of life on a South Dakota homestead, marriage to a husband twice her age, and a forbidden attraction to the man who is her stepson.

Using subtle but rich details, Anna Solomon quietly introduces readers to each character in The Little Bride and takes us through the seasons of rugged South Dakota and through Minna’s self-discoveries. The characters are perfectly balanced, so that minutes after an unfortunate decision is made that casts a negative light, their stories still pull at the heartstrings of the reader. Today, I am honored to host Anna Solomon for an interview, where she discusses her novel and writing, and offers her best advice for others on the road to publication.

At the end of the interview, drop your name in the comment section for a chance to win a copy of The Little Bride. Random.org will choose the winner on Tuesday, January 3rd, at noon.

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CC: In a post on Beyond the Margins, you talk about a musical-literary collaboration, with musician Clare Burson (called A Little Suite for The Little Bride) as an innovative way to introduce readers to your novel. Can you talk a bit about the structure of these performances and how readers have responded to them?

AS: That’s a great question, because until people have seen Clare and I perform together, it’s hard for them to picture exactly what we’re doing. Basically, Clare wrote five songs inspired by scenes from my book. On stage, she starts playing a musical score, then I come in reading one of those scenes over her score, then my reading ends and she plays/sings the song that was inspired by it. Sometimes we break one of my readings up with music – I stop mid-scene for a musical interlude and then begin again. And sometimes the music drops out and I read in silence for a little bit. But that’s the basic rhythm of the work.

And there are projected images, too: old drawings or maps that Clare played around with in Photoshop, thrown up on the wall behind us in black and white. The images are there to accompany the various sections, and provide context; often they have text, too, maybe a line from the book, just to set the scene and give the audience a footing in our story. We wanted to create a narrative arc through the piece, which is similar to the novel but also can exist on its own, for the purposes of these performances. I find that aspect very satisfying – that we’ve created something inspired by but separate from the novel. It kind of mirrors the experience of publication, when you see your book go off and become something different in each reader’s mind. Maybe the performance process helped prepared me for that letting go. In any case, I’m excited that we already have more performances of our “Little Suite for The Little Bride” scheduled for 2012!

CC: Some of my favorite scenes in your novel are the early interactions between Samuel and Minna, the simple dialogue and how Minna describes his gestures. When he finds her pulling grass, helps her, and then leaves, her recollection of his departure says so much with so little — about his character, and hers. What was your favorite scene to write, and why?

AS: I did like writing that scene – especially after he leaves, when she’s replaying it in her mind. (Did he mean to breathe on her, or did he just breathe, like people have to do?) Minna’s a tough character – a survivor – and scenes like that let me into her tenderness, her humor. It’s funny – at some point I thought that the same scene might take place when she’s trying to milk the cow, that Samuel would wind up behind her, showing her how to do it, but then I thought: gag! My favorite scene to write might be one that comes pretty late in the book. I won’t give away too much, but it also involves Samuel and Minna – they’re standing outside at dawn and though nothing very physically intimate happens between them, it’s probably the closest they come to a true emotional intimacy in the whole book, without the walls they usually have up. Also, it involves a circus and gunshots, so those parts made it fun to write, too.

CC: You recently started up a blog on your website. How do you like the blogging platform? And, do you find it offers more freedom in writing?

AS: Honestly, I’m not sure about blogging – for me. I held off for a long time (aren’t new blogs sort of passé at this point?) and now that I’m attempting to do it I feel a kind of pressure and I’m starting to think I’m not going to be able to fulfill my idea of what I want to do with it. I like the posts I’ve done, and writing them was fun, but especially as I dive deeply into my second novel, I feel like I only have so many things I can pay attention to. In some ways I think I’m just not cut out for multi-tasking in my writing, or for quick, off-the-cuff pieces. I enjoy them, and they do offer a different kind of freedom – there’s something nice about just pitching my voice into the soup and seeing where it goes – but I’m also not entirely comfortable with the process. I’ve found this with writing for online formats before: I’m not prepared to move so quickly. Editors get frustrated with me. I think I’m a slower thinker, a slower writer.

That said, I’m loving being part of the wonderful Beyond the Margins blog. That gives me a way to try my hand at blogging without having to be the sole proprietor, so to speak – and more importantly, it’s introduced me to this amazing, incredibly supportive group of writers, all at different stages in our careers, eager to offer other writers bits of our own experience.

 

So we’ll see. I’m going to stick with my blog for a while, see if I can make it fun for myself, and also experiment with different kinds of posts.

 

CC: What are you reading these days?

 

AS: I’m loving Amos Oz’s A TALE OF LOVE AND DARKNESS. Not crazy about the title – it’s so generic, I forget it every time I put the book down – but the book itself is wonderful: a memoir of Oz’s childhood in Jerusalem, and also of course the story of Israel itself. I’ve loved hearing Oz speak about conflict, war, and peace, and I find his book adds a complexity to those soundbytes – it’s very rich, very generous, and beautifully written, too. I’m also reading a totally different kind of book, a novel that came out last June, DAUGHTERS OF THE REVOLUTION by Carolyn Cooke. It’s about the first black girl (admitted by clerical error!) at an elite New England boarding school. But it’s about so much else, too – Cooke’s characters are totally real, often eccentric, always struggling to hang on to their individual selves even as they scramble to belong within “society” (theirs or others’). Her writing feels almost anthropological: look at these things, they’re called people, they create institutions like this, and they run around like that trying to get in or out.

 

CC: What advice do you have for writers on the rise?

 

AS: Stay focused on the work itself. I think the hardest thing about having my first book published was how obsessed I had to become – at least for a few months, while on tour – with my “career.” It’s so important, of course, I wanted to give my book the best chance possible, but it was also easy to lose track of the whole point: writing. When I was in an MFA program, just starting to publish short stories, I had this very rigid boundary for myself between writing and submitting stories – I would only deal with submissions at night, after my “real” work was done, and I wouldn’t think of it most of the time, I’d forget that the question of publication even existed. This gets tougher, of course, as you’re lucky to publish more, but I think it’s important to try to keep that boundary there. Now, as I start back in on my next novel, I’ll put up my wall again: in the morning, when I’m writing, there will be no phone calls, no internet, no criticism or praise to ingest, just me, my characters, my story. For me, this is the only way – I need rules, to bring my back to the work.


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From Anna Solomon’s website:
Anna Solomon’s fiction has appeared in One Story, The Georgia Review, Harvard Review, The Missouri Review, Shenandoah, and elsewhere. Her stories have twice been awarded the Pushcart Prize, have won The Missouri Review Editor’s Prize, and have been nominated for a National Magazine Award.
For more information about Anna or for a chance to explore The Little Bride, visit her website. You can also follow her on Twitter or like her page on Facebook. Also, don’t forget to leave a comment to enter the book giveaway!

Welcome Jenna Blum, Bestselling Author of The Stormchasers

Go get him, Karena, he said. You’re the only one who can.

And Karena knew this to be true, from the nights she was the only one who could sing Charles to sleep, the only one who could coax him off the roof, keep him from climbing the water tower, make him stop chanting that song, stop bouncing that ball, stop kicking that door. She ran out into the lot, tasting the dirt in the air, positioning herself…where Charles would either have to stop or run her down….
~ from The Stormchasers

More than once, I’ve fallen victim to the belief that I could save someone: a friend in despair, a parent on the brink, a loved one chasing a false god down a dark road. I’ve set my voice on an uncomfortable high note in hopes that enthusiasm was contagious, played counselor during marathon phone calls,  stood in the way of the inevitable and gotten pinched in the middle. Painful lessons are never pretty.

But in Jenna Blum’s amazing novel, The Stormchasers, we find a story that mixes the agony of mental illness with the beauty of landscape, the power of devotion, and the miracle of unexpected healing. A novel as much about mental illness as it is about storms, The Stormchasers gives readers vivid images of how both phenomena mirror each other in the way danger brews and crescendos, then crashes and leaves a path of destruction.

The main character, Karena Jorge, is driven in her work as a journalist and in her search to save her twin brother, Charles, from himself. She sets out on a stormchasing expedition, one that puts her in danger at times and brings her closer to a different discovery: Charles is not the only one who needs saving.

The Stormchasers, touching and poignant, is a story that I will read again. I’m so honored to host Jenna Blum today for an interview about her novel, about writing, and about karma. At the end of the interview, leave a quick comment to be entered into the drawing for a copy of The Stormchasers. Random.org will choose the winner on Tuesday, August 30th, at high noon.

**UPDATE: Because of Irene’s visit to the East Coast, and subsequent power outages over the weekend, I’m going to postpone the drawing for a copy of Jenna Blum’s novel until Thursday, Sept. 1st.**

CC: In a recent and compelling essay on the website, Style Substance Soul, you talk about a childhood fascination with tornadoes and reasons why you chase storms (even after the novel has been published). Did the idea for THE STORMCHASERS stem from your personal experience on the road with Tempest Tours, or was it your research with them that took root and sealed your strong connection with the chasing community?

JB: That’s a great question! I had the idea for THE STORMCHASERS–a novel about a bipolar young man who chases tornadoes when he’s manic and his twin sister, who basically chases him–long before I started chasing storms with Tempest. In fact, I wrote an abbreviated draft of the novel in my graduate MA program at Boston University, back in 1996.  I didn’t have a stormchasing community before I started chasing with Tempest to research subsequent drafts of the novel, and what I didn’t expect were the lifelong friends I would make chasing.  I chase with the same people every year, my esteemed mentors and friends like me who are still learning, and they are my storm family. THE STORMCHASERS continues to introduce me to new folks in the chasing community, for which I’m profoundly grateful.

CC: All of the characters in your novel are written in such a way – authentic and relatable – that readers will think of them long after they close the cover of your book. Do you have a special technique you use, early on in your writing, for developing characters?

JB: Thank you for the generous comment about my characters!  I suppose they come off as real because to me, they are real.  They just happen to exist in a dimension halfway between the ether and the paper, hovering somewhere above my head.  My first job as a writer is to get them out where others can come to know and love them the same way I do.  I’ve been told that my characters are lovable despite their flaws–or sometimes hateful because of them or sometimes just plain flawed–and I take that as proof I’ve succeeded in getting them down as real people.  Because who among us isn’t flawed?

When I’m first getting to know the characters, I start by writing down everything I know about them, which ranges from macro big-picture stuff–basic family history–to the fact that Charles Hallingdahl, for instance, the brother in THE STORMCHASERS, ate only green food as a child. Not all the details make it into the novels.  But because they’re part of the character, I write them down.  More details reveal themselves as I go along, and the biggest struggle is to remain true to the characters’ characters, to not graft behaviors onto them because it suits the plot or it’s something I myself would do.

CC: In your career, you’ve traveled all over and seen a variety of landscape. Do you have a favorite place that you’d love to call home or visit time and again?

JB: Again, a great question, and one that strikes a poignant chord with me these days, because although I’m proud to say I have a home in Boston and a house in rural Minnesota where my mom and grandmother were born, I’ve been on the road at least 300 of 365 days in the past year.  One night, when I was checking into a hotel in Florida, the desk clerk looked at my MA license and said, “Wow, you’re far from home.” I thought: Yes, I sure am, both literally and metaphorically. I’ve traveled and divided my geography so much that I’m not sure where my central home is.  But I love my writing community and friends in Boston.  And geographically, my heart belongs to the heartland.  The landscape of the Midwest and the High Plains makes sense to me and allows me to breathe freely–all that space and big sky.

CC: What are you reading these days?

JB: Galleys!  I have the privilege of reading books before they’re published to supply authors with quotes for their book jackets (you’re like Ah-ha, *that’s* where those come from). It’s a great kind of sneak preview.  I read Rebecca Rasmussen’s incredible debut THE BIRD SISTERS and Kaira Rouda’s inspiring novel HERE, HOME, HOPE.  Three novels I highly, highly recommend for 2012:  Anna Solomon’s THE LITTLE BRIDE, about a Jewish mail-order bride who ends up in the Dakotas.  Nichole Bernier’s THE UNFINISHED WORK OF ELIZABETH D., about a woman discovering her best friend’s secret life after that friend’s death.  And Jami Attenberg’s THE MIDDLESTEINS, which is about food, family, love, life, and loss–all the important stuff–and will tell you why it’s vitally important to include cinnamon in pastry.

CC: What advice do you have for writers on the rise?

JB: Usually I would cite Winston Churchill here:  “Never give in, never give in, never give in.” And that’s still true. But in today’s swiftly changing publishing landscape, it’s also important to be open to new ways of doing things. There’s no room for a lazy writer these days (if there ever was!).  Expect to do your own legwork, your own homework, your own promotion.  Use social media. Reach out to and support as many other writers as you can.  It’s good karma, and that must always come back to help you in the end.

Thanks, Jenna. And, for all you readers out there, don’t forget to drop your name in the comment section for a chance to win a copy of The Stormchasers.

JENNA BLUM is the New York Times and # 1 international bestselling author of THOSE WHO SAVE US and THE STORMCHASERS.  She is also one of Oprah’s Top Thirty Women Writers. For more information about Jenna Blum and her bestselling novels, visit her website, follow her on Twitter, or Like her page on Facebook.