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:

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Siân Hughes (Pearl)

Kristopher Jansma (Our Narrow Hiding Places)

Rosie Schaap (The Slow Road North: How I Found Peace in an Improbable Country)

Danzy Senna (Colored Television)

Hansen Shi (The Expat)

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

Kristopher Jansma: What do we inherit from trauma? Complicated stories, frayed genetics, and many, many hidden secrets. And yet also…surprising resilience, deep love, and something akin to magic.

Siân Hughes: Grieving, searching for consolation, obsessing with reading, belonging in one corner of a particular landscape and feeling that it is full of everyone you miss.

Rosie Schaap: Love and death and grief and community. The village of Glenarm, on the coast of County Antrim. Nature and wildlife. And per my copyeditor’s style sheet: COVID-19; door-knockers; fairies; Northern Ireland, the North, Northern (meaning Northern Irish); piss-takers; Shorthorn cattle; widow-women.

Danzy Senna: American Girl Dolls. The Hannah Andersson catalogue. The Great Mulatto American novel that never was. Hollywood race grifters. Black-on-Black snark. Autism. Scarcity models. The Left Coast. Location, location, location.

Hansen Shi: Solipsism and self-sabotage. A/S/L? The rise of China. Intellectual property and social capital. Aspiration as a Zero Interest Rate Phenomenon.

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

Hansen Shi: Chinese spy balloon. 798 Art Zone. Listless in San Francisco. The legend of Lou Pai (Enron executive). Operation Varsity Blues.

Siân Hughes: No books allowed? A poem is allowed, though. A medieval poem about the loss of a child, an old house I cycled past as a child, the death of a friend by drowning, the stories my mother told me and the songs she sang me, ancient beliefs about transmigration of the soul into the natural world, living in my home village, Joni Mitchell’s Song for Sharon, intricate patchwork quilts, old versions of the Cinderella Story, expereince of post-partum psychosis, motherhood, grief.

Kristopher Jansma: Making this novel work was mainly about finding the right balance between the past and the present and figuring out how to move between them fluidly. I knew I didn’t want the contemporary sections to feel like a “frame story” but at the same time I wanted the war sections to get the spotlight they deserved. So I looked very closely at some books that I felt like had done this and literally counted the pages to figure out exactly what the ideal balance should be.

Rosie Schaap: My mother’s life and death. My first husband’s life and death. The people, landscapes, folklore, history, and literature of Ireland, especially the North. How we talk, and don’t talk, about grief.

Danzy Senna: Maria Wyeth. Tod Hacket. Barton Fink. Chameleon Street. Tom Ripley. Selling Sunset. Joanna Gaines. Sparkling geniuses of the Harlem Renaissance. Comedy of the 80s: Mooney, Tomlin, Brooks. Springtime for Hitler.

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

Danzy Senna: Sobriety vs. Delusion. Real Life vs. Imitation of Life. Humans vs. Paper Dolls. Dreaming vs. Helping with Homework. Money vs art. The Page vs. the Screen.

Kristopher Jansma: COVID, fatherhood, looking to the past for signs that we could all survive the present.

Siân Hughes: Living in my home village, missing my mother, singing and stitching and planting things in the wrong places in my garden.

Hansen Shi: Stopped wearing glasses.

Rosie Schaap: Adjusting to a place very different from where I came from. Being a student again. The pandemic. A sometimes spirit-crushing immigration process. A deeper engagement with nature. Many moments of joy, occasional waves of despair.

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

Siân Hughes: None. I take it as a compliment when people assume it is all true, and feel pleased they read so carefully when they point out I moved the river a few miles to the other side of the parish for the sake of the story.

Danzy Senna: “Not relatable.” “Obsessed with race.”  “Hyper-specific.”

Hansen Shi: “Light on spycraft / not a real spy novel”—it was never meant to be.

Rosie Schaap: I can’t think of any word I despise in this context, but “boozy” comes close.

Kristopher Jansma: Sentimental. Tearjerker. Clever.

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

Kristopher Jansma: There was a version of this novel where Will was a chef, because I love to bake and to cook… it’s the perfect antidote to writing, because it produces immediate results and there’s a set of exact instructions to follow. I usually get really good results, and I love making people happy with food…but I’m way too slow to ever work in a real restaurant. I’d serve three customers a day, but lovingly.

Hansen Shi: Tang dynasty scholar-official.

Danzy Senna: A lawyer.

Rosie Schaap: Psychotherapist.

Siân Hughes: None of the other ones I have done, please!  Seamstress, or house painter.  I like being able to see what I did in the day.

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

Rosie Schaap: Writing dialogue and description both give me pleasure, which I think makes them my strengths. Pacing is tricky for me. 

Kristopher Jansma: In school I sometimes heard that I had “an ear for dialogue” which I somewhat quibble with because it makes it sound like something inborn and not earned. But I do love speech, and I love how people show themselves in their ways of speaking. There is music to a conversation that I enjoy composing on the page. In terms of getting better, I always wish I had an easier time with plotting—it was something we almost never really talked about in workshop, and so I wrote a lot of those standard “nothing happens” sorts of stories when I was starting out because I hated the whole Freitag’s triangle model they occasionally dragged out. Now I find I spend half my time as a reader, and as a writer, trying to chart plots and figure out structures… the closer I look the more I see how many ways there are to tell a great story that go beyond the “rising action/falling action” stuff that bored me to tears.

Hansen Shi: I’m good at maintaining a high rate of revelation. I’d like to get better at writing slow.

Siân Hughes: Setting and character are fine for me.  I can live in the places I create and move through them, touching and smelling everything.  I can talk to my characters for years.  But plot?  That is the tricky one.  I am totally reliant on the characters talking to me and telling me what happened to them.  I often have no idea what they might say.  And I struggle with what order to put down the things they tell me.  I have to collect them all like little scenes or pieces of a quilt and keep laying them out until they look like they belong together.

Danzy Senna: Good at: last lines; parodic realism; my shadow selves. Bad habits: Over-editing, second-guessing, perfectionism.

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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?

Danzy Senna: Choose your company wisely. Surround yourself with people who find you delightful and amusing. Write your first draft swiftly, before self-doubt kicks in. Don’t stop until you have a bad full draft.

Rosie Schaap: I think my appreciation for those who have interest in what I say outweighs any hubris. I’m a little amazed by, and truly thankful for, people who take the time to read what I write. In this, my father, who was also a writer, was a good model—he never took his readers for granted, and always made time for them. 

Siân Hughes: I am always amazed anyone does. The first thing I say if someone says they have read anything I wrote is to say thank you for their time. After all, they could have been making dinner or going swimming or playing with their children, and they chose to read something I wrote. So, thank you. For your time and consideration.  I have spent very many happy hours of my life reading. I feel honoured to be a part of that world.

Kristopher Jansma: My wife’s grandfather had been a writer at Iowa back in the ‘50s, and was one of the most self-assured people I’ve ever known. One day he told me that he thought the reason he’d never made it as an author was that he didn’t have a big enough ego. I immediately thought—I love you, man, but that is not something you lack. So, I guess I reject the idea that it takes hubris or ego to write. I don’t go around thinking that anybody should hear what I have to say. I start by thinking about what I’m able to say about what already interests them. Or what I might be interested in that they don’t know about yet. I don’t see myself as this adult in the room, telling other people what to think. I always write more like the child in the room, wondering if anybody else is thinking about what I am thinking about.

Hansen Shi: I’m an only child.