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Q&A with Jamie Duclos-Yourdon, author of Froelich’s Ladder

“Imagine my voice brother: I am here with you, Harald. We are not alone.” ~ from Froelich’s Ladder by Jamie Duclos-Yourdon (@JamieYourdon)

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Take two brothers, one very tall ladder, and a quest for fortune. Or fame. Or maybe just love. Mix in a bit of betrayal and a few carnivorous clouds and you have Froelich’s Ladder (Forest Avenue Press, August 9, 2016), a well-told tale by debut novelist, Jamie Duclos-Yourdon.

Froelich's coverSet in the 19th century, Duclos-Yourdon’s novel introduces readers to brothers Froelich and Harald, who set off from Germany to Oregon Country in search of land and prosperity. While Froelich is the mastermind for the journey, it’s the older brother, Harald, who finds fortune–in love and in living–and Froelich, who settles into resentment (with the land and later with Harald). But even in bitter need for retreat Froelich doesn’t slip off to a cave or disappear into the woods, he instead rises up to the sky on his very tall ladder for escape, holding on to the rungs in tight retribution while Harald bears the weight of it, ladder and all, for the next seventeen years.

Froelich’s Ladder catches the eye with its cover and holds attention with its curious tale about the ladder as a touchstone, marking determination loyalty and acting as reminder that we are never alone. I’m thrilled to host Jamie Duclos-Yourdon today for an interview and am offering a book giveaway as well. Leave your name in the comments for a chance to win a copy of Froelich’s Ladder (deadline to enter is Tuesday, August 9th). Now, welcome, Jamie!

CC: From the first pages of your novel, readers embark on a journey where clouds run like cattle and may very well devour man, where a beautiful girl escapes her isolated prison only to discover the world twice as dangerous and lonely, and where a crazed, old man appears long enough to blur the lines of reality and make everything clear all at once. What sparked such a fantastic story?

Jamie DYJDY: What a generous and succinct summary! It certainly sounds fantastic by your description.

The (unpublished) novel I completed before Froelich’s Ladder involved a lot of totems: scarecrows, bicycles, etc. I had a few leftovers when I was finished—among them, a ladder.

To me, a ladder begs the questions Who’s on top? Who’s on bottom? What’s the nature of their relationship? That’s how I conceived of the brothers Harald and Froelich. One thing led to another, and suddenly I had man-eating clouds.

CC: Mid-way through the book, Lord John insists that ‘Without Froelich, there can be no ladder [and] without a ladder, there can be no meaning!’ In his mad cry, he cinches the idea of Froelich’s ladder as more than an object of escape; it is a crucial connection between one person and another, past and present. Who do you think faces the bigger challenge: the man who climbs the rungs, records “odd scripts and patterns over the years,” and clings to the history, or the man at the base of the ladder who balances the weight of wrongdoing while desperately trying to live in today? 

JDY: Hmm … that’s a metaphor, right? My guess is that each reader will approach this question from his or her own unique perspective. Me, I’ve got more sympathy for the person at the bottom of the ladder than the person on top. I think we all carry the burden of responsibility; everyone can feel that weight against his or her back. And certainly there’s a lot to recommend personal responsibility! But when I think of anyone who’s trapped under-rung, I feel a tremendous sadness. First Harald and then Binx sacrifice their happiness for Froelich’s sake. That’s no way to live.

CC: On your website, you link to Tall Tales, essays and stories you write based on experiences from your book tour. When searching for a story, where do you turn first: to the people or the place?

JDY: People—always people. I’m primarily interested in the relationships we share, not in the sense of boyfriend/girlfriend but how two or more people relate to each other in a specific context (like on a ladder, say). In fact, my editorial conversations tend to go, “There are these two guys driving in a car, and—” “Where are they?” “I don’t know—Long Island? Anyway, the first guy is blind! And the second guy—” “Long Island, when? Like, contemporary Long Island?” “Holy crap, I don’t know! Who cares? Long Island a thousand years ago!” “Then how are they in a car?” “Forget the car. There are these two guys, in a cave, in Long Island, a thousand years ago, and one of them is blind …”

CC: What are you reading these days?

JDY: I impatiently await the arrival of Tracy Manaster’s new novel, The Done Thing. While I do, I’m reading The Golem and The Jinni, by Helene Wecker. I wish I’d picked it up a year ago—I would’ve pleaded for a blurb!

CC: As editor, author, and parent, I imagine your plate is full. What’s your favorite technique or bit of advice for managing multiple projects?

JDY: In all honesty—and I don’t recommend it for everyone else—it’s waking up insanely early. When my kids were little, I could only depend on the hours before 6:30 AM to write, so I set an alarm for 5:00. Now that my kids are older, it’s still a time when no one’s going to interrupt me. No one’s going to text me or expect a response to their email—and I stick to this schedule seven days a week, Christmas and my birthday included. By 7:00 I can face the day knowing that I’ve written 300 words; whatever else I accomplish is gravy.

Jamie Duclos-Yourdon, a freelance editor and technical expert, received his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Arizona. His short fiction has appeared in the Alaska Quarterly Review, Underneath the Juniper Tree, and Chicago Literati, and he has contributed essays and interviews to Booktrib. Froelich’s Ladder (Forest Avenue, August 2016) is his debut novel. He lives in Portland, Oregon. Contact him at info@jamieduclosyourdon.com.

Don’t forget to enter the book giveaway by Tuesday, August 9th! Just drop your name in the comments below.

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Q&A (& giveaway!) with Jessamyn Hope, Author of Safekeeping

“We are all pawns of history.” ~ from Safekeeping by Jessamyn Hope

Safekeeping+CoverOne of my all-time favorite quotes about story comes from E.L. Doctorow in his lecture, “Biography in Fiction” (available as a podcast from CUNY), where he says, “What is the past if not the present and the future?” He’s talking about historical fiction, but his quote speaks to the importance of stories for writers and readers.

As a writer, stories allow me to untangle and reason through life experiences, past and present; as a reader, they offer different or new perspectives to understand the world around me and consider the future. Stories act as a bridge between generations and cultures and the human spirit.

Doctorow’s quote fits well into the heart of Jessamyn Hope’s debut novel, Safekeeping, a book that weaves generations together with an ancient and precious brooch and with themes of loss and survival in the face of recurring physical, mental, or political hardship. The book’s cover reflects the beauty and intricacy of the well-drawn novel, and once you enter the “Fields of Splendor” with one of the protagonists, Adam, you won’t be able to put it down.

I’m honored to host Jessamyn Hope today and am thrilled to offer a giveaway as well. Read her excellent Q&A below, then drop your name in the comment section for a chance to win a copy of her novel. Deadline to enter is Tuesday, June 14th, at noon.

Now, welcome Jessamyn Hope!

Christi (CC): In your interview on Tablet Magazine’s Unorthodox Podcast (readers, click in at 11:57m for Jessamyn’s spotlight), you hint that this book has been years in the works. As a novelist-to-be who has nurtured a story for many moons, I’d love to hear about the beginnings of Safekeeping and how it finally fell into novel form?

Jessamyn+HopeJessamyn (JH): Safekeeping was eight years in the making. Why did it take so long? Party due to outside factors (I had a day job most of that time), but mostly due to the work itself: I am a very slow writer, and Safekeeping is a sweeping book with multiple protagonists, spanning seven centuries and several countries. My advice to aspiring first-time novelists would be keep a sense of urgency, otherwise you won’t write regularly, but not so much urgency that you needlessly suffer. The book is going to take as long as it is going to take. You can lengthen the time frame by not dedicating enough hours each week to the book, but can you hurry the labor of bringing a certain novel into being? I don’t think so.

CC: The brooch, a family heirloom that Adam carries in his pocket, serves a dual purpose in this story as the reason he travels to the kibbutz and (even more important) a symbol of Jewish history and preservation. Even so, Adam is careless with it at times. As the story of the brooch is revealed, what do you hope readers will come to understand about what it truly represents?

JH: There isn’t one thing the brooch truly represents. As you suggest, the heirloom embodies a lot: the burdens of our personal and national histories; the inevitability of loss; our astonishing will to survive. I was particularly interested in the fact that although we sometimes know exactly what happened in the past—to us personally or to our ancestors—that affects our present, often we don’t.

I remember my college professor, novelist Mark Dintenfass, explaining this image from Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom: a series of pools are connected by a narrow channel so that a stone tossed in one pool sends ripples endlessly into the others. Long after the stone is forgotten, lying on the pool’s floor, its effect is still rippling into the future. In Safekeeping, the reader learns about the brooch’s far-flung past and future, things that happened to it in a medieval Jewish ghetto, in WWII Dresden, in present-day New York City—things the characters holding the brooch in 1994, the novel’s main setting, never find out. And yet, the reader can see, whether the characters know the history or not, it still affects them and the world they live in.

CC: Ziva as a character intrigues me. We know from the beginning that she is quite ill, but we never find out exactly why or how she became sick. After reading your book, I wonder if her resistance to change on the kibbutz is what ails her. I know only a little about life on a kibbutz, but I understand the ones of today are quite different from those in the early 1930’s and ’40’s. Change is inevitable in your book (and in the world at large), but often something lost means something else is gained–a life saved, a future procured, a mind brought back to sanity. Do you think the modern-day kibbutz makes way for a greater future, or does it hint at what Ziva fears: a collapse under the pressures of society and a repeat of history?

JH: I am so happy Ziva intrigued you! Her character—her fortitude and single-mindedness—intrigue me too.

I don’t think Ziva’s failure to adapt makes her physically sick. She is simply growing old, something even the most adaptable of us cannot avoid. But you are right: I was exploring Ziva’s inflexibility, the pros and cons of it. I am fascinated by the type of person who is so dedicated to a cause that she is willing to relinquish everything to achieve it—her personal relationships, her comfortable life, perhaps even life itself. Although it must be painful to be the child or spouse of such a person, I believe without these dedicated people we would have far less medical breakthroughs, great works of art, advances in human rights, and groundbreaking, if at first unpopular, ideas.

So although evolution teaches us that adaptability is important to survival, I wonder if human beings need to have in our ranks a few uncompromising idealists, even if, like Ziva, they can be difficult to be around. Maybe we wouldn’t have the theory of evolution if Darwin had been more chill about his studies.

CC: Pieces of ourselves sometimes weave their way into our fiction. Is there a character in Safekeeping with whom you relate most? 

JH: I do not relate to one character more than any other. A dimension of me lives in each of them. Sometimes the battles between the characters dramatizes a tension within me: for instance, the tension between Ziva and Franz that complicates their love affair, her dedication to the community versus his strong individualism, reflects a tension that exists in me. As an artist who has suffered through many a day job, I relate to Ofir’s frustration at having to be in the army rather than working on his music; and as someone who has suffered from severe OCD, I identify with Claudette’s struggles. I have felt the way drug-addict Adam does: racked with guilt, afraid I am too weak to be as good a person as I want to be. Sometimes people tell me how much they hate Ulya, the Soviet émigrée, which means they hate something that exists in me: the part I drew on to bring to life her selfish survivalism, as well as her fondness for dramatic eyeliner.

CC: What are you reading these days that most feeds your writerly self?

JH: I almost exclusively read novels. Right now I am halfway through A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, which most Americans read in their youth, but that I didn’t hear much about growing up in Montreal. Now every day I walk down the exact streets whose previous incarnations the novel describes in such lively and heartbreaking detail.

Jessamyn Hope is the author of the novel Safekeeping—a recommended read for summer 2015 by The Boston Globe; acclaimed by The Globe and Mail, Tablet Magazine, The Montreal Gazette, The Jerusalem Post, and Booklist; a New York Public Library Staff Pick; a finalist for the 2016 Paterson Fiction Prize; and found at number two on BuzzFeed’s “53 Books You Won’t Be Able to Put Down.” Her short fiction and memoirs have appeared in Ploughshares, Five Points, Descant, PRISM International, Colorado Review, and other literary magazines. Recent accolades include two Pushcart Prize honorable mentions, in 2015 and 2016, and selection for Best Canadian Essays 2015. She was the Susannah McCorkle Scholar in Fiction at the 2012 Sewanee Writers’ Conference and has an MFA in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College.

Born and raised in Montreal, she lived in Israel before moving to New York City.

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Don’t forget: drop your name in the comments for a chance to win a copy of Safekeeping!

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Q&A with Robert Hill, author of The Remnants

There are acts that happen upon us, and moments that happen for no reason, and if we are to survive what comes our way to finish our rotations around the sun…then we who are able must deliver ourselves from the aftermath to where we need to go. it was true with the serpent in the garden and it has been true ever since. The snakebite is not what defines a life; what defines it is how we extract the venom.
~ from The Remnants by Robert Hill

Don’t ever loan me a book. Especially if it’s a good one. I will break the spine and earmark pages and underline passages on every other page to get at the story within.

Remnants-Front-Cover-web-sized-200x300Like many good novels I’ve held, my copy of Robert Hill’s The Remnants (to be released by Forest Avenue Press on March 15th), has been studied in such a way, the corners of the pages no longer crisp. But The Remnants is not your typical read. Brandi Dawn Henderson on Poslit compares Hill’s story to dark chocolate, saying it’s “single-source…dusted with gold flake and basil sugar…not for people who like milk chocolate.” And she’s exactly right.

The Remnants is a story about the tiny town called New Eden and its odd inhabitants, whose devotion to each other both sustains and destroys them. Hill addresses themes found throughout literary fiction–love, incest, reclamation of self…heavy hitters, but he paints the story with language that rolls across the tongue and through the mind so easily, you float along unaware at first. Then you pause to take it in. But never do you close the cover. Because the story, told through the eyes of True Bliss and Kennesaw Belvedere who are both on the cusp of their hundred-year birthdays, gives us a clear understanding of how a man’s sins may mark the course of another’s living, but they don’t have to claim the ending.

I’m honored to host Robert Hill for a Q&A and excited to offer a book giveaway. It’s simple to enter: just drop your name in the comments. The deadline is Tuesday, March 15th. Now, welcome Robert Hill.

CC: The Remnants is written in a unique style of prose that’s delightful, whimsical, almost musical at times. Yet, the story itself touches on very serious themes of love, lust, heartache and guilt. These two elements of style of theme work so well together in the book, and I’m impressed with the art and craft you put into the story. What prompted you to approach it in such a way?

Robert-Hill-author-web-sized-300x199RH: My writing idiosyncrasy is that I write out loud, and more often than not, what I write is written to be read out loud. When I used to write advertising copy, I had to hear “the sell” land; when I wrote grants, I had to hear the compelling argument build to a crescendo, out loud. For some reason, I need to hear the syllables hit certain highs and lows, each word build on that, each sentence climb a fence, each paragraph leap over and land. If it isn’t right from the first syllable/word, if the textures don’t jingle and thump and coo and roar or whatever, I have to start over. Because I heard stories before I read them (as a child), the auditory must have imprinted on me more strongly than when I learned to take in the written words quietly with my eyes. It’s probably a kind of literary ADHD. It can be maddening at times, and certainly makes for slow going in the writing process, having to hear everything, and hear it again, and again, and again until something in the rhythm of it all clicks for me. A psychiatrist could no doubt write a prescription that would cure me of this, but I already have too many co-pays.

Because of writing like this, everything I write takes on a musical quality – sometimes more so, sometimes less. That’s my style. When I began The Remnants, I had a single character in mind, a couple of shadows of two other characters, and a kernel of an idea of what their world was, but when I sat down to write the first thing that happened was the music took off immediately. In fact, in an early draft, I described the mating rituals of the town; the sounds coming from clandestine get-togethers, as a cacophony of old time instruments, harmoniums and wheezing pump organs, things like that. After the sound established itself, the next surprise was the darkness at the heart of the town. That opened up everything for me, and helped to ground what could have been a trifle of a story into something much deeper for me, truer, and speaking to a bigger humanity.

CC: In the early pages of your book, Kennesaw Belvedere sets off for his birthday tea at True Bliss’ house, embarking on an odyssey of remembering and letting go. I recently read an introduction to another book in which Neil Gaiman says, “Fiction is a lie that tells us true things, over and over,” and this got me thinking about Kennesaw, True…all the characters in New Eden who–with their strange genetic oddities–reflect the sins of common man. What’s one true thing from The Remnants that you hope stands out for readers?

RH: That nobody starts out bad. That everybody needs some kind of connection with another. Be it through love or friendship, through sex, heartbreak, memory, thought, by birth or community. No one wants to be lonely when they hear the screech in the night.  For the characters in The Remnants, there is the unspoken hope that those connections will last through eternity.

CC: In this interview about your first novel, When All Is Said And Done, you mention how your friends staged a “creative intervention” that set you on your path to becoming a novelist. We all need friends like that; I had a similar experience. While I have yet to publish a novel, I wouldn’t be where I am today without one friend’s not-so-gentle nudge to quit complaining and get writing! Community is crucial when it comes to writing. How has your tribe of writers grown or changed since publishing your second novel?

RH: My first novel happened because friends directed me to Tom Spanbauer’s “Dangerous Writers” workshop, and I owe everything to that experience. Since then, I’ve been part of small writing group, all of us disciples of Tom’s, and all of us still seeing each other’s work through Tom’s eyes and heart. Having feedback and encouragement from a group of writers whom I respect and trust has made, and continues to make, a huge impact on me as a writer and as a person. I love these people dearly, and I continue to write because they are in my life.

CC: What are you reading these days?

RH: Currently reading Sunil Yapa’s Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist. For my book group, just read Elizabeth Strout’s My Name is Lucy Barton, which followed on the heels of Phil Klay’s Redeployment. Also, just read two books by Lori Ostlund, her new novel, After the Parade, and her re-issued short story collection, The Bigness of the World, which won the Flannery O’Connor Award. Both beautiful, with a hugeness of heart at their core. On my “to be read” stack are W.G. Sebald’s On the Natural History of Destruction, and that leviathan of the moment, Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life. And, then, there’s my little guilty pleasure: small collection of verse “written by” and dedicated to cats, called I Could Pee on This. Having had many cats in my life, I can speak to the raw honesty of the verse. Truer words were never meowed.

CC: What’s one bit of writing wisdom you hold on to as you dive into a new story?

RH: Every single moment of life, every person you’ve ever known, every odd look cast your way, every mistake you’ve ever made, every surprise, every faked orgasm, every selfless act, every single thing from the moment your memory started – it’s all going to go into your writing if you are writing about something honest and true. Writing is like Method Acting: you have to put your own experience behind a moment to realize the truth of it and make that truth evident to the reader. Doesn’t matter if you’re writing about a soccer mom or a Viking warrior. You know what love feels like, what hate feels like, jealousy, greed, rage, sorrow. You have to be able to tap into all that inside of yourself. And you have to respect that those experiences you’re tapping into matter enough that they will bring something worthy to your writing and to the reader.

But even more important: you have to write for you. And you have to love the process, as aggravating and lonely and long as it can be. You can’t think about getting published or making money from it or any commercial end result. If you’re not enjoying the process of writing while you’re writing, if you’re not making yourself laugh and cry and ponder while creating, and surprising and delighting and sometimes astounding yourself with what is coming out of you, then no one else is going to feel anything from your work, let alone want to publish it, or buy it, or read it.

Robert Hill is a New Englander by birth, a west coaster by choice, and an Oregonian by osmosis. As a writer, he has worked in advertising, entertainment, educational software and not-for-profit fundraising. He is a recipient of an Oregon Literary Arts Walt Morey Fellowship and a Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Fellowship. The Remnants follows When All Is Said And Done (Graywolf, 2006), Robert’s debut novel, which was shortlisted for the Oregon Book Awards’ Ken Kesey Award for Fiction. Learn more at his website.

Don’t forget: Drop your name in the comments for a chance to win a copy of The Remnants. Deadline to enter is Tuesday, March 15th!