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Q&A with Joanna Rose, author of A Small Crowd of Strangers

“Wonder,” she said. “We are seeking wonder.” . . . Wonder is a lifting in the heart. Wonder is belief in the fleetest moment. Time stops and starts, goes away and comes back from somewhere. Frankie called Bullfrog the Wonder Dog. “He wonders what’s going on,” he said. It is a wonder she and Michael ended up married.

~ from A Small Crowd of Strangers. (Forest Avenue Press, 2020)

In these times of a pandemic/firestorm/unrest, time stops and starts. We are carried along by the news. We’ve stayed inside so long that our friends become strangers and strangers–in the grocery store, at the gas station–become friends. And like Pattianne Anthony, the protagonist in Joanna Rose’s new novel says, we too are seeking wonder, seeking answers. Watching for signs.

Though A Small Crowd of Strangers is a novel, it is easy to find bits and pieces of one’s own life in the unfolding of Pattianne’s. A young woman who seems to fall into life, Pattianne feels at first that if she was led to a place or a person, she must stay there in that city and in that relationship. 

Then, she begins working at a tiny bookstore run by a woman with a huge personality. Pattianne meets stranger after stranger and Bullfrog the Wonder dog, and they become her guides so that she is no longer falling into life but feeling grounded.

I’m honored to host Joanna Rose as she shares more about her new novel, about writing (this whole interview is a lesson in craft!), and about her favorite pandemic pastimes. Plus, there’s a giveaway (courtesy of Forest Avenue press!)

Enter HERE by Wednesday, September 30th.

Now welcome Joanna Rose!

Christi Craig (CC): What a cast of characters in A Small Crowd of Strangers! From Even-Steven, Pattianne’s “sometimes-boyfriend,” to Michael Bryn, the perfect husband (until his Catholicism gets the best of her). There is the interrogator priest and the priest gone rogue, Pattianne’s indifferent mother and Mrs. Taskey, who is everything her mother isn’t. And those are just a few of the people we meet! As each character rises to the page, we feel their pull on Pattianne, giving the story a natural ebb and flow as she is carried along from one place to another to what begins to feel like “home.” Do you build your characters from scratch or do they form from traces of personality in people you see on the street?

Joanna Rose (JR): Early in the story process I start with people I have known, and they are almost always people from my past. I am haunted by my own past and have connections to people I have lost, not necessarily to death but to time. Early in my life, as my parents moved around the country, I formed the habit of letting people drift away. I have spent most of my life interacting with strangers.

Every time we moved I would make up a new past for myself. When I was very young that past was rather absurd; my dog was the original Lassie. I was related to the Queen of England. I had a brother who died of polio. By the time the truth was out it was usually time for us to move again. I was never called out for my lies. Lying was a big problem for me.
 
What I know now is that in making up myself I was putting a wall around myself, and no one could get in. I am no longer in the habit of telling whoppers but that habit of not getting to know people, of assuming I don’t know people, in is a very basic part of who I am.

What else I know now is that I have always been making up stories and characters.

People are a mystery to me. Do I reconstruct them to seek out the roots of this mystery?

My characters come from all different places in my life. Miss Mimi Stein was very loosely based on my own dear Aunt Mimi, who was not Jewish (very Presbyterian) but who never had children, and was beautiful, and gracious, and had a lovely home. She treated me kindly and warmly and with humor – not something I ever got from my own parents.

Even-Steven is an amalgamation of several boyfriends (none named Steven!).

Jen is an exception; she is my own sister in pretty much every way. Smart-alecky and smart and funny, and we’re not close. I feel like I have managed to immortalize my sister’s smirk.  And Pattianne’s parents are my parents in that they were cold and distant.

But I have never known priests like either Father McGivens or Father Lucke.

Michael Bryn was made up out of whole cloth. He was the hardest character to write, and he didn’t even get  his own point of view until a very late draft.

So were Mrs. Taskey, and Mr Bleakman and Josie.

Mr. Patel is based on a really kind man who runs the QuickPrint shop near my house, who always helped me with the copy machine. Mr Patel looks like this man, and he’s kind like this man.

Lakshmi and Maya were easy; I’ve worked with youth for 20 years, and I know how funny and fun and annoying they are.

What I see as I consider them all is this: I start out with a character like me and a couple people whom I give characteristics that are like people I know. Brushstrokes of reality just to get me started. But as I create the story they become who they need to be in the story, and my work is in fleshing them out. I have to pay very close attention to what they do in the story, and I have to understand why they do it, and not only I terms of story dynamics. They all have to be real in their own stories even if their own stories never emerge. They develop from the story itself.

It’s the same with place. I have to make it up, but for a reason.

I have even never been to Montclair New Jersey, but I lived near there quite a bit as a child, and I loved the name Claire  – St Claire was kind of a female St Francis, who was a big hero to me from very early on. I had a little paperback book called The Lives of the Saints, and while I was too young to read many of the stories, which are mostly pretty gory, I did learn that St Francis could apparently talk to animals, and somehow I learned that St Claire was a female St Francis.  One of the first churches we went to was St Francis Church in Edison new Jersey. This might be a good time to say that while I was never a believer when it came to God in the clouds or Jesus and miracles or guardian angels, I loved going to Mass. The Latin chanting, the music, the priest in his beautiful robes. So I learned that St Francis talked to animals, and they to him. I actually equated him with Shari Lewis. When I got a Lamb Chops puppet for Christmas I was disappointed that she didn’t talk. My mother explained that Lamb Chop only talked to Shari Lewis. I remember thinking Aha! Just like St Francis.

Is this a good reason for making Montclair the beginning of the story?

These beginnings are sacred to me: my love of the drama of the liturgy and my love of animals and the natural world. So it made sense for Montclair to be the beginning of the story.

CC: I’d love to know a little more about Bullfrog, the unassuming hound-dog like companion that Pattianne calls her “spirit guide…St. Francis’s Brother in Christ.” He’s made famous in gracing the cover of your book. Were you anticipating that he would make the cover design?
 
JR: Bullfrog. That’s an easy one – he was my first dog (as a grown up.) We’d always had dogs when I was a kid, and a few of them were basset hounds. When I was about 20 I got this basset mix puppy, whose name was Bullfrog but whom I renamed Frisco,  after the little mountain town I was living in then. He became my hitchhiking  buddy – I was the girl on the side of the road with a dog, thumb out, just me and him. There were some dark years there. I had him until he was 17.

When he died I cried for a year. I’ve had other dogs – I’m on numbers 5, 6 and 7 now. But he was the first creature that I had to take care of, and taking care of him meant taking care of myself. Get home at night. Make sure there’s some food around. Like Pattianne and Bullfrog, alone against the world.

And I do find animals, dogs in particular, to be spirit guides. I am kind of crazy for dogs.

Frisco has been gone for 40 years, and here he is again. I find his presence both in the story and on the cover compelling. There is my past, haunting me.

And no, I never thought of Bullfrog being part of the cover. Gigi Little, the artist who created the cover, came up with that. I love it. She looked at a few old fuzzy Polaroids I have of him, and she got him perfectly, which thrills me. The cover speaks to a gentler, funnier side of the story.

CC: One of the things I love most about your book–about Pattianne, really–is the way she takes in the world around her, often in bits and pieces. Small bits and pieces…a bobbing Adam’s Apple, the short painted fingernails of a woman who drinks too much, “Cuticles, too, bright red.” Sometimes we never get a full glimpse of a character, but we get just enough details from Pattianne’s perspective that we know that character. Putting those kinds of telling details together in such a way isn’t easy. But I know you write poetry as well as novels. Does your craft in poetry play a big part in how you craft your novels?

JR: My poetry owes much to the tendency of the ordinary. I love the drama of objects and the physical world.

When we pay close attention to the sensory world we are strangers in a strange land. This may be the influence of Alice in Wonderland, which was my favorite book as a child, and quite possibly still is. I still read it every so often.

I love how the concrete world can be stepping stones through a story.

Sound is also important to me. Mark Twain said “The difference between the right word and the almost-right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.”   I understand this to go beyond content. The sound of words can build create or ease tension and can affect pace.

A longer line in poetry goes by a little slower. A short line speeds things up. Same with sentences, and clauses within sentences, in prose.

And vowels and consonants have specific sounds that resonate in the body. Harsh sounds like Ks and Ts cause tension. Low vowel sounds like Os  or short Es can create calm or dread. High sounds like long Es or long Is can create a sense of excitement or panic.

CC: What are you reading these days?

JR: Ack! I always have several books going at once. I eat up UK crime novels (Anne Cleeves, PD James, Elizabeth George) and am always looking for new ones. I love the way language is so different from character to character, and the landscapes of the north of Britain. They usually stay on my bedside table for when I wake up and can’t go back to sleep in the middle of the night. That’s when I need a good plot to carry me along.

I usually have beefy non-fiction book going. I just finished The Architecture of Happiness (Alain de Botton) which is actually about architecture. Now I’m reading The Gene (Siddhartha Mukkergee).

I had to stop everything to read the new Anne Tyler. And dear friends gave me the new Carl Hiasson, which means I won’t get any work done on Sunday.

And poetry: Norman Dubie, Jack Gilbert and Brigit Pegeen Kelly tend to float around the house these days. And I love poetry essays. Right now I’m reading What Light Can Do (Robert Hass)
David Biespiel has a new memoir called A Place of Exodus: Home, memory and Texas. This one I’ll probably save for when I can dive deep into it. Like take it away for a rainy beach weekend. He was one of my poetry mentors at the Attic Institute and this is prose but his sentences are each small journeys.

CC: Favorite Pandemic Pastime?

JR: Watching re-runs of Perry Mason and Big Bang Theory.

Going for long walks in Lone Fir Cemetery. It’s a big and it’s easy to veer wide around d other walkers. It’s a pioneer cemetery, and I read the gravestones and it helps me remember that there are entire lives that have come and gone during other times, troubled times and peaceful times alike. Gravestones are beautiful. I’ve always loved going into cemeteries anyway, and now it feels particularly powerful to be among the dead. 

And while it’s not really a pastime, I like getting up at 3 AM. As do many people I have trouble sleeping now. I finally gave trying up at one point and just started getting up and going downstairs and puttering about. I find it a particularly good time to read those beefy non-fiction books I mentioned  I find it soothing to be up then. Since the shut-down the streets of my urban neighborhood are depressingly still. The busy little cafes are closed, and the shops are closed. No music from the bars, no outbursts of rowdy laughter. At 3AM all that stillness feels normal. I look out and see lights on in here and there and know there are other people awake and it’s comforting. It plays hell with my productivity though. I would like to cultivate the habit of napping.

JOANNA ROSE is the author of the award-winning novel Little Miss Strange (winner of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Prize, and finalist for the Oregon Book Award). Her poetry, essays and short fiction (as well as other pieces that don’t fall into any of those categories) have appeared in Oregon Humanities, High Desert Journal, VoiceCatcher, Calyx, and Bellingham Review, among others. Her essay “That Thing With Feathers” was cited as Notable in 2015 Best American Essays. She works with youth in Portland Public Schools and cohosts the long-running critique group Pinewood Table. When she’s not at the beach she lives in Portland OR with her husband and, at any given time, several dogs.

A Small Crowd of Strangers (Forest Avenue Press) is part slightly sideways spiritual journey, part coming of age: a middle-aged librarian from New Jersey accidentally gets married and ends up in a convenience store on the wild west coast of Vancouver Island playing Bible Scrabble with a Korean physicist and a drunk priest.

DON’T FORGET: Enter the book giveaway by Wednesday, September 30th, for a chance to win a copy of A Small Crowd of Strangers!

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Sunday Series: Sharon Hart-Green on Why I Write

In this Sunday Series, you’ll meet writers new and seasoned as they share what inspires them to put #PenToPaper. This week, welcome Sharon Hart-Green, who shares her apprehensions about becoming a writer of Jewish Fiction and her realization that historical fiction provides greater understanding of actual events.

Photo by Majkl Velner on Unsplash

I must admit that before writing Come Back for Me, I felt a sense of trepidation about writing a Holocaust novel. Since neither my parents nor grandparents are Holocaust survivors, I did not feel that I had the “right” to do so. At the same time, I was caught between two opposing pulls: a sense of obligation to somehow give voice to those who were brutally murdered; and the knowledge that no book could ever do justice to what they suffered. How could I possibly resolve what seemed to be an impossible dilemma?

I believe that I was able to negotiate a solution to this impasse by taking what I would call an “indirect” approach: writing about the lingering effects of the Holocaust on two generations of Jewish families, rather than trying to write directly about the Holocaust itself.

Since I had grown up in a neighborhood full of Holocaust survivors and their children, I felt well equipped to undertake this task. This allowed me to explore the event through the experiences of those who survived as well as how it affected their offspring. History, after all, is composed of many layers of experience, and if I could approach it from this indirect angle, then perhaps I would be able to unearth some truths about it that could not be otherwise revealed.

Indeed, one of the most effective ways to teach about history is through fiction. Why? Because fiction beckons the reader to enter another person’s life—to “live” that life on an emotional level—even if only for a short while. That is not to underestimate the value of learning from history books as well; to be sure, reading about the rise and fall of great leaders and analyzing the causes and effects of historical change is vital. However, historians rarely tell stories about ordinary people. Fiction has the unique ability to draw a reader into the personal life of everyday individuals. In fact, this might be the best way for readers to learn most deeply about a historical period. When reading about characters from other eras, they not only acquire factual knowledge, but also emotional affinity.

Yet teaching about the Holocaust through the use of fiction is a particularly complex matter, partly because the enormity of the Holocaust itself makes it a difficult subject to convey in any form. How can any of us fathom that it was only seventy-five years ago that a regime arose which attempted to systematically murder every man, woman, and child of Jewish descent in all of Europe? The victim toll alone is so massive that most people who read statistics like “six million” can barely grasp what that means.

However, I think that if a work of Holocaust fiction is written with historical accuracy, then it can serve as an invaluable resource for teaching about this dark period, especially in schools.  By this I mean that a writer of fiction must be absolutely unwavering in representing the brutal facts of this event before taking on this task. I say this because some novelists in recent years have tried to commercialize the Holocaust, and in doing so, misrepresent it, sometimes in grossly distorted ways.  For example, there have been some novels that inject elements of romance into their storylines in order to make their plots more exciting. (The Tatooist of Auschwitz is only one such example.) What does this convey to the reader?  It gives the impression that the Holocaust “wasn’t all that bad,” which of course is not only a contemptible distortion of history but it also trivializes the suffering of the victims.

I hope that writers continue to write fiction about the Holocaust—about the factors leading up to it, the people who were destroyed by it, and the world that allowed it to happen. My main hope however is that they do so with caution and with a deep sense of duty to represent it with accuracy. It is the least we as writers can offer as a gesture of respect to those who perished.

SHARON HART-GREEN is a Canadian writer and academic whose debut novel Come Back for Me (University of Toronto Press) is a gripping story of trauma, loss, and the redemptive power of love.  Come Back for Me was chosen as an Editors’ Choice Book by the Historical Novel Society and was shortlisted for the Goethe Award for Historical Fiction. Dr. Green holds a Ph.D. in Judaic Studies from Brandeis University and has served as an Associate Professor of Hebrew and Yiddish literature at the University of Toronto for many years.

She is the author of two previous non-fiction works: a book on the fiction of Hebrew writer S.Y. Agnon; and a volume of original translations of the Hebrew poetry of Hava Pinhas-Cohen.  In addition, her short stories, poems, translations, and reviews have appeared in numerous publications, including The Jewish Review of Books and The Jewish Quarterly. She is a popular speaker who has delivered talks in Jerusalem, Boston, New York, Vancouver and Toronto. You can find Sharon on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn.

ABOUT THE BOOK: Come Back for Me tells the story of Artur Mandelkorn, a young Hungarian Holocaust survivor whose desperate quest to find his sister takes him to post-war Israel. Intersecting Artur’s tale is that of Suzy Kohn, a Toronto teenager whose seemingly tranquil life is shattered when her uncle’s sudden death tears her family apart. Their stories eventually come together in Israel following the Six-Day War, where love and understanding become the threads that bind the two narratives together, revealing the scars left by tragedy and the possibilities for healing. Purchase a copy of her book from Indigo.

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Guest Post: Mary Fleming on her new novel, Paris, & Place as Character

Many writers talk about the idea of place as character in fiction or nonfiction, where the setting of a story may reveal the tone or even deeper insight into a main character. In Mary Fleming’s guest post, she writes on place and the bigger role it plays in her new novel, The Art of Regret (just released from She Writes Press). You can read an excerpt below, and, courtesy of She Writes Press and Caitlin Hamilton Marketing & Publicity, there’s a book giveaway! Enter the giveaway by Tuesday, October 29th for a chance to win a copy of The Art of Regret. Now, welcome Mary Fleming!

novel: cover image, The Art of Regret

It’s no accident that Paris takes up so much space in the opening paragraph of The Art of Regret. The book actually has two protagonists. There’s the narrator Trevor, who has undergone more than his fair share of personal tragedy but who has yet to come to terms with those crippling events. The novel recounts his long road to redemption.  

The other main character is Paris. She is as present in Trevor’s life as his family and friends and the novel is also the story of his relationship to the city. It traces the way boyhood feelings of resentment and alienation grow into a more positive force so that by adulthood she provides solace and a reminder that life goes on, no matter his own suffering.

novel: Paris at sunrise

The city’s complications contribute to this sense of Paris as a character, as more than a mere backdrop to everyday life. Like a friend she is multi-faceted and can continue to surprise you, even after many years. My breath still catches when I see the morning light on the Seine and its bridges or look down a yet undiscovered little street. Trevor too, later in the novel, is taken aback when he visits a friend who lives in a house surrounded by the remains of a vineyard, all hidden from street view by a perfectly ordinary building in Montmartre.

As someone who has also lived in Paris for many years, I can testify that Trevor is not the only one to feel that symbiotic relationship. Whether it’s her long history or her great beauty, there is something close to human about the city. She is in fact one of the reasons I wrote the book, as an ode to this great lady.   

novel: Paris monuments up close and in background

The monuments become like friends, which goes some way to explaining why Parisiens were so upset by the burning of Notre Dame earlier this year. For Trevor the iconic relationship is to the Sacré Coeur that sits atop the hill of Montmartre and pops up on the horizon from many points in the city. Since he first caught sight of the church as a child, he associated the towers with his family before his father and sister died. The one big and the three small ones that were visible represented his mother and the three children, the basilica his father. As a young man he saw it from a room he rented. Now he sees it every day when he walks out of his bicycle shop Mélo-Vélo.

Like a friend Paris helps in times of trouble. While recovering from an accident and a betrayal as a young man, Trevor finds that the city coaxes him out of his pain and misery. Ditto in the second half of the novel, when walking becomes an integral part of his daily routine. The city helps him see beyond his own troubles, to feel part of a bigger story. It’s done the same for me on many occasions.

All of which doesn’t mean the city is static. She continues to evolve. Fortunes change; quartiers rise and fall. The rue des Martyrs, for example, may have been deemed unremarkable by Trevor in 1995 but it’s since been gentrified, has moved upscale.

Change or no change, Paris remains a steady friend to the end.

Excerpt: The Art of Regret, Part I, Chapter One

          For many years, in what might have been the prime of my life, I lived and worked on the rue des Martyrs. This narrow market street, which begins its climb at the northern edge of the banking and insurance district and ends in the skein of streets that wraps around the Sacré Coeur at the heart of Montmartre, is not on the tourist circuit and has no pretensions to Parisian grandeur. Behind and above its modest shop fronts are forgettable lives. Lives like my own, which I had reduced to a box, a one-room apartment on top of a one-room shop. Though the two were once a unit, at some point and for some reason—to make more space, to rent the shop and studio separately—the connecting stairs had been disconnected and my room could only be reached by an enclosed stairway in the courtyard. It’s not unusual in a city with a long history. Buildings change their function and configuration, and one structure is squeezed in front of, behind, or beside another. It’s just such quirks that have made Paris Paris, a city of endless layers and perspectives, a city of story upon story.
          Though my story began in New York, the firstborn son of two Americans, it was moved across the Atlantic with a mother and a brother, minus a father and a sister, when I was eight. There on European soil the story reluctantly remained, until near the end of a resentful adolescence. Unfortunately, the long-awaited return to the United States of America, via a small college, proved a disaster, and back the story came to Paris, where it drifted into young and not so young adulthood. By the time it had settled on the rue des Martyrs, I had hoped that that was where it would end, the unremarkable tale of a not-so-proud bicycle shop owner.
          One October morning in 1995, I pulled up the orange security grille to Mélo-Vélo. No matter how carefully I coaxed it, the clang of juddering metal scraped my nerve ends. It seemed such an offensive start to every day, I was thinking, as I walked to the back of the shop and assessed my morning’s work, a bicycle that had spent the last twenty years in a basement. The airless tires were cracked, the handlebars rusty. Cobwebs draped every spoke, and the leather saddle was speckled with mold. The wheels squeaked and wobbled. A complete overhaul was in order, but for Camilla Barchester, the name I had noted on the repair slip, it might prove to be worth the trouble. I turned the bicycle belly up on the repair stand.
          The Tibetan chimes jangled while I was contemplating which bit of the wreck to attack first. It was Madame Picquot, the concierge, with the morning post. Though I had long ago made it clear to her that I was not receptive to morning chatter, that I had no interest in the secrets and rumors, the scandals and grievances that scurried through the building and up and down the street, that I wished she’d just drop my post at the bottom of the stairs to the studio, she passed by the shop every morning to deliver my letters in person.
          “Voilà, Monsieur Mic-fa,” she croaked. “Registered letter. I saved you a trip to the post office and signed for it. Ca va?”
          “Yes, thank you.”
          Normally, since I received little of interest, registered or otherwise, I would have been in no hurry to look at my correspondence, but for some reason—perhaps a fundamental lack of interest in the task at hand—I went straight to the counter and looked at my misspelled name: “Monsieur Trévor MACFARQUAHAR.” If my name is systematically shortened when spoken in French, it is lengthened when written, unfailingly adorned by superfluous vowels and unnecessary accents, and forever a reminder of my general square-pegged existence in a round world.
          I sighed, ripped open the envelope, unfolded the slim sheet of white paper, and in the few short paragraphs saw my life crumbling before me.

Mary Fleming

Mary Fleming, originally from Chicago, moved to Paris in 1981, where she worked as a freelance journalist and consultant. Before turning full-time to writing fiction, she was the French representative for the American foundation The German Marshall Fund. A long-time board member of the French Fulbright Commission, Mary continues to serve on the board of Bibliothèques sans Frontières. Having raised five children, she and her husband now split their time between Paris and Berlin. THE ART OF REGRET is her second novel. Find her online at https://www.maryfleming.co/.

Don’t forget: Enter the giveaway by Tuesday, October 29th,
for a chance to win a copy of The Art of Regret!