Lit Hub Asks: 5 Authors, 7 Questions, No Wrong Answers

The Lit Hub Author Questionnaire is a monthly interview featuring seven questions for five authors with new books. This month we talk to:

Catherine Dang (What Hunger)
Peter Orner (The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter)
Morgan Richter (The Understudy)
Kate Riley (Ruth)
Victor Suthammanont (Hollow Spaces)

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Without summarizing it in any way, what would you say your book is about?

Victor Suthammanont: Parents and children. Past and present. Inheritances, identity, and isolation. Law, justice, and morality. Love and its failures and occasional triumphs. Oh, and food.

Kate Riley: Cage exploration.

Catherine Dang: Munchies, grief, bloodshed, Y2K era, growing pains, Catholicism, “Vietnamese-ness,” the refugees’ child.

Morgan Richter: The cutthroat NYC opera world. Mercurial divas. Hard-earned skill versus innate star power. Fear of mediocrity. The lingering effects of childhood trauma. All-consuming envy as a powerful motivator. Professional rivalries that turn homicidal. The importance of staying alert on a crowded subway platform as your train arrives (because your homicidal rival could be sneaking up behind you).

Peter Orner: Generational revenge.

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Without explaining why and without naming other authors or books, can you discuss the various influences on your book?

Peter Orner: Generational loneliness.

Morgan Richter: All About Eve (as well as its cheerfully idiotic spawn, Showgirls). Jane Fonda’s mind-blowing beauty and charisma in Barbarella. A life-changingly great long velvet coat I bought at a thrift store in Queens. The stash of 1980s Playboy magazines my parents kept hidden in the laundry room of my childhood home. Hot yet sketchy New York guys. My early and formative love of the Fame television series.

Catherine Dang: I love confessional storytelling, bildungsromans, genre-bending, radio hits, and big feelings.

Victor Suthammanont: Boozy nights in New York City. Dark, smoky bars. Dark bedrooms. Empty apartments. Run-down courtrooms. Imperfect, shared memory. Muffled snowfall.

Kate Riley: I wish there was a way to weight these lists—the first entry represents 85% of my answer, the remaining 15% is everything else. Grief. The literary treasure hunt devised by my high school English teacher, music by Bill Callahan, Dave Berman, and Sufjan Stevens, early Vice magazine Do’s and Don’ts, Benadryl as sleep aid, the clarifying inconvenience of writing paragraphs on an iPod screen, a Tumblr cryptid named Tetradugenica, desire to impress my best friend, desire to record something of which I could find no record.

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Without using complete sentences, can you describe what was going on in your life as you wrote this book?

Catherine Dang: COVID. Writerly blues. A discovery that Mom has been gatekeeping some gnarly tales.

Victor Suthammanont: Very little sleep. Work. Lots of soul searching. And work. Managing stress. Work. Went on vacation? So much work.

Peter Orner: Took fifteen years. Two kids.

Morgan Richter: Wild career optimism shifting into despair and panic. Drinking champagne for all the wrong reasons. Developing deep and lasting friendships with crows. Giallo films. Nightwing comics. Nero Wolfe. Seattle burnout. Fear of the future and an ever-growing suspicion that we–by which I mean humanity–aren’t going to make it. Hot flashes, and the accompanying glum realization that I’m officially old.

Kate Riley: Despondently stalking up and down avenues of Manhattan, scheming of ways to acquire food without paying for it, alienating and terrifying everyone who cared about me, trying to invent toys.

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What are some words you despise that have been used to describe your writing by readers and/or reviewers?

Kate Riley: Poignant, profound.

Victor Suthammanont: “Pulse-pounding.” This one just doesn’t resonate with me. “Muddy.” Completely unclear.

Peter Orner: I loathe everything about the term short-short and have ranted about it before, so I won’t bore your readers and do it again here. But my speech usually descends into a litany of: Was Adam and Eve a short-short? How about Abraham and Isaac? A fucking short-short? Etc., etc.

Morgan Richter: Depending on the context, “fun” has the potential to break my heart. Back when I was querying agents for my novel The Divide, I received one response that started out, “This was a really fun read!” I didn’t need to finish the email; I knew it was a rejection. “Fun” is a polite way of saying that a book is fine, but nothing to get excited about.

Catherine Dang: Edgy. Intense.

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If you could choose a career besides writing (irrespective of schooling requirements and/or talent), what would it be?

Morgan Richter: Opera singer or comic book artist.

Peter Orner: Always wanted to be a theater actor, specifically I want to play Uncle Vanya. Never had the guts. Is there still time?

Kate Riley: Zoo employee, dental laboratory technician.

Catherine Dang: Acting. I have a flair for the dramatic.

Victor Suthammanont: I’m already a lawyer, so I’ll choose something different from that. And I went to acting school, so I’ll pick something different than that, too. So… furniture maker. Actually, dive instructor. No, video-game tester. Better yet, singer-songwriter. That’s my final answer.

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What craft elements do you think are your strong suit, and what would you like to be better at?

Catherine Dang: I love crafting dialogue between my characters, and I love, love, love a juicy monologue. I know I could be better at writing neater, more logical storylines, but to me, that defeats the freedom of fiction.

Victor Suthammanont: I think I do a good job with mood. I write some nice sentences. My transitions are also good. I want to be better at all of those things, though, not to mention plotting.

Kate Riley: Brevity; plot, diversity of punctuation.

Peter Orner: These questions are getting harder. Honestly, I wake every day thinking I have no clue what I’m doing. I can write a decent line of dialogue by getting the hell out of the way and not trying to overexplain? Some of my scenes could be longer?

Morgan Richter: Perhaps because I self-published for years, I have a knack for editing; my agent once told me that my drafts read like copyedited manuscripts ready for production. On the flip side, I have difficulty conveying the inner lives of my protagonists. While I always know what my characters are thinking and feeling, sometimes those thoughts and feelings don’t make it onto the page without a struggle.

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How do you contend with the hubris of thinking anyone has or should have any interest in what you have to say about anything?

Morgan Richter: I boldly proceed under the assumption that no one needs to have any interest in anything I have to say. But if something seems important enough for me to go to the trouble of writing about it, I figure there’s a decent chance it’s important enough for someone to want to read about it.

Kate Riley: Remember how many morons thrive by not contending with it.

Catherine Dang: There are people with big platforms who have nothing to say. But does that stop them? No. They refuse to shut the f*** up. If they can do it, then so can I.

Victor Suthammanont: What do you mean “contend” with my hubris? It is literally the only thing that keeps the crushing self-doubt at bay.

Peter Orner: I need a drink.