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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The (unpublished) novel I completed before Froelich’s Ladder involved a lot of totems: scarecrows, bicycles, etc.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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#AmReading: Megan Stielstra’s Once I Was Cool

The healing of the body begins with words.
~ Megan Stielstra in Once I Was Cool

I first heard about Megan Stielstra through another author I admire and loved her first book, Everyone Remain Calm, from the minute I opened the cover. We spoke a while back on the blog (read her Q&A part 1 and part 2) about Everyone Remain Calm, where she said, “all of these things that I see or read or live…get stuck in my head, and what do you do with all of it?—You give it to characters. You find the story.” 

Once I Was Cool front panel copyStielstra has written a new collection of stories, essays in Once I Was Cool about what it means to be a grown up and a mother and a teacher and the truth we find in looking back on those moments that get us from there to here.

I love this quote from “My Daughter Can Read Just Fine:”

I write stories because I love reading, and I love reading because my mother put books in my hands, read them with me, asked me what I thought about them, listened as I told her….

But it’s in this excerpt from “Stop Reading and Listen” where Stielstra hits on the importance of stories: how they affect us and why we share them:

9.

Yelling and fighting at 2 a.m., immediately followed by gunshots. My husband called 9-1-1, and we watched out the window ‘til the sirens came; first police, then fire trucks, then an ambulance. Our bedroom was filled with red and blue light. A small crowd collected on the sidewalk next to the Aragon, and later, we’d find out a teenage boy had died. I wish I could say it was the first time it had happened. I wish I could say it was the last.

An hour later—quiet now, and dark—I got back into bed and began the tricky, foggy work of talking myself back into sleep. I don’t know how long I was out before the crying started. No, not crying, that word’s too weak; this was a wail.  A male voice, wailing. Low and desperate and destroyed, deep at the base of his throat. Maybe at first, I dreamt it, but soon I was sitting up, fully awake, and back to the window.

Three stories below, the boy’s father stood where his son had been shot. He stood there all morning—3 a.m., 4 a.m., 5 a.m.—and the whole time, he wailed. A single, raw sob; a few of beats of silence; then another. It made me think of contractions—the pause between the pain. My husband and I sat on the bed, wide awake and listening. We sat there in all of our privilege: our newborn son alive and healthy and asleep in his tiny turret bedroom; our safe, warm home; our middle class upbringings and middle class lives, our education and jobs and insurance; our families; our skin color; our faith; all of it so enormous and so puny in the face of all that pain. I considered reaching into the nightstand to grab the little foam earplugs I used sometimes when the Aragon opens its windows because sometimes the noise is too much, the music and the traffic and the violence and the loss. It’s easier to drown it out, to change the channel, to read something else, to believe the same old story, to stick my fingers in my ears and say Lalalalala instead of listening to a grief I couldn’t fathom and the truths in the world that I don’t want to see.

I sat there, listening.

I imagined people awake, listening, up and down the block. Awake, listening, all across Uptown. Awake, listening, across the city, maybe the country.

Are you awake? Can you hear it?

Stop reading and listen.

photo of my faceYou can listen to Megan Stielstra read the beginning of this essay online at Poets&Writers HERE (and everyone should hear her read).

Then, check out her website or find out how to purchase a copy of Once I Was Cool.

[Reading] starts the dialogue. It opens my eyes to things I haven’t seen before. ~ from “My Daughter Can Read Just Fine”

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Book Review: The Salt God’s Daughter

“Perhaps the blueprint of a life remained the same even if the place and people were different.” ~ from The Salt God’s Daughter

I have to be honest, I’m not the best reviewer of books. There are many other bloggers out there who do this on a regular basis, who are faster readers than I am, who can whip out a review in one days’ time or less. I wish I were of their making.

I am a slow reader. Even slower to process my experiences after reading a book. I’m a writer, after all. I like to sit with the words awhile, go back into the story, search for the parts I missed or misunderstood. I worry I won’t do a book justice if I write about it in short order.

But, I immediately said yes to reviewing The Salt God’s Daughter when Booksparks contacted me. I read Ruby’s debut novel, The Language of Trees (my Q&A with her can be found here); I loved the story, the bits of poetic prose, the part that setting plays in the novel, and the mystery behind the characters.

My Review

The Salt God’s Daughter carries on the legacy of Ilie Ruby’s prose and amazing use of setting as character, telling the story of three generations of women – Diana, Ruthie, and Naida – who are caught in the magic of the moon and the ocean and in the complexities of mother-daughter relations. For Diana, the Farmer’s Almanac becomes her guide for living, looking to each full moon for direction. Later, the almanacs become her journals, as she records bits and pieces of their nomadic lives in the margins. For Ruthie and Naida, the ocean acts as enemy and savior, drawing them into danger and then giving them sanctity, and life. In all three women, unpredictability, abandonment, and a need for home tear them apart and bring them back together again.

As in her debut novel, certain characters in The Salt God’s Daughter pulled at me, like Graham, who appears in Ruthie’s life unexpectedly and leaves just as quickly. Again and again he comes to her under the light of a full moon. And, at each sudden departure, I wanted him to return to the page as much as Ruthie longed for him to return her. The mysticism and folklore running throughout The Salt God’s Daughter kept me wondering about the nature of the main characters, and the actions of characters on the periphery reminded me how quickly the world judges or oppresses those who are different from the norm.

My recommendation.

Do not read this book in bits and pieces. Certain stories can be read in small doses, but Ilie Ruby’s novel is written with a poetic style and deserves a concentrated attention. Because of a hectic schedule, I read the book in short spurts, and there were times when I became lost. When I finished the book, I turned back to the first page and skimmed through it again, discovering subtleties that I missed the first time.

Do read this book with a friend, or those lovely ladies in your book club. There are parts in the story you will want to discuss, like Graham, his comings and goings and his ties to the ocean. Some places, you will want to go back and re-read, such as the night when a storm erupts and Naida disappears. Hints and clues – to the mystery of these women (and men) and the power the ocean and the full moon wield over them – may reveal more if uncovered in a group.

My favorite quotes.

“Many times abandoned, I now spent my life trying to hold onto people.”

“Some places were so magnetic and full of energies that they drew the same people back, again and again.”

“You needed to keep one hand behind you touching the wall of your past, and one hand in front of you, open to the future.”

And, this passage:

“Once, in the gallows of our green stationwagon, my mother had spun an orange ribbon into my hair…to weave it in a braid. She rarely touched my hair. Hardly able to contain my excitement, I’d mad the mistake of a simple, “Ow,” which made her let go. She’d let the ribbon fall on my shoulder. I knew it had all been lost just then, by what I’d done. . . . I’d wept loudly at the edge of the forest near the campsite, standing in my blue Dr. Scholl sandals, the morning air billowing my purple sundress. I’d howled into the trees. I’d almost caught her, my mother.”

If you decide to read this book, Ilie Ruby provides discussion questions on her website. While perusing her website, click her events page to see if she’s coming to a bookstore near you. Also, read this great review and Q&A on The Huffington Post between Ilie Ruby and Leora Tanenbaum.

And, much thanks to BookSparks for the opportunity to read The Salt God’s Daughter.