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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Catherine Airey (Confessions)

Karissa Chen (Homeseeking)

Pico Iyer (Aflame: Learning from Silence)

Rebecca Kauffman (I’ll Come to You)

Betty Shamieh (Too Soon)

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

Rebecca Kauffman: The reverberations of new life and new love, aging, grudges, laughing, lying, reckoning, reaching, the vast unknowable around and within.

Karissa Chen: One of the most turbulent periods of modern Chinese history. Immigration. Grief and survival, regret and longing. Language. Mothers. Hope. Food as home. And love that endures across time, distance and circumstance.

Pico Iyer: Silence, radiance—and what to do when you face a mountain lion. Medicine for a world that’s ever more divided, and respite for those who’ve lost all sense of hope. Plus, a reminder of why Emily Dickinson is the most unfathomable and irreplaceable writer we’re ever likely to read.

Catherine Airey: Girls having a tough time on both edges of the Atlantic Ocean.

Betty Shamieh: The human determination to find joy. Told through the lens of three generation of ambitious Palestinian American women. A universal story about daring to thrive in a world that is not designed to allow you to do so.

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

Catherine Airey: 9/11, and a group known as “the Screamers” who moved into a house in a small fishing village in Ireland in the 1970s.

Betty Shamieh: I’m influenced by every artist I encountered whose work goes too far, oftentimes those who swear too much, whose need to be seen is too naked or whose desire for love runs too deep.

Rebecca Kauffman: Joy, overwhelm, TV, sausage, looking backward and forward, home.

Pico Iyer: A group of white-hooded monks observing a 1,000-year old discipline and the 96-year-old woman who lives with them, facing death without flinching. Anyone who can hear what lies on the other side of chatter, and an old movie called Days of Heaven.

Karissa Chen: Chinese dramas. Classical music. Interviews and oral histories of Chinese soldiers living in Taiwan. Jason Robert Brown’s musical The Last Five Years. Wong Kar-wai films. Girl crushes. Poetry. Any book that I have ever read that has taken my breath away.

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

Karissa Chen: Moving to Taiwan. Ending a five-year relationship. Freezing my eggs. Juggling two relationships on opposite sides of the world. Covid (ha!) and worrying I would never see my family again. Wrestling with an all-consuming desire to have a baby. And then actually getting pregnant with that baby!

Catherine Airey: A lot of drinking followed by many months of AA meetings, swimming in the Atlantic Ocean through the winter and working on a 100-year-old 50-foot wooden boat.

Pico Iyer: Family home burning down. Every last thing I own reduced to ash, including handwritten notes for next three books. New fires roaring through the hills, as parents die and 13-year-old daughter is diagnosed with cancer. Calm, kind souls reminding me that joy is always at hand if only I can wake up to it.

Betty Shamieh: Change, change, and more change. Choosing to move back to a place I fled, knowing it would never be exactly on my own terms. Wanting a baby as desperately as I wanted to write. Having a baby and trying to write. Being overjoyed by the baby and the writing, but rarely at the same moment.

Rebecca Kauffman: Chasing a toddler, nursing a newborn, holding on tight.

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

Betty Shamieh: I get angry when reviewers call my work angry. I would seriously love for Palestinians to have human rights, so I could happily go about my days without having to feel the normal human reaction to overwhelming injustice and unrelenting violence that seeps into every aspect of my life, including my writing. I am joyful by nature and personally am happiest when creating comedies. I’d write pure comedies all day, every day, if I could, if my proximity to suffering and survivor guilt didn’t shape who I am as a writer and a person.

Rebecca Kauffman: The shrugging emoji.

Catherine Airey: Joyless!

Karissa Chen: “Despise” is a strong word, but I don’t love when people say my work is “sentimental” when I can tell what they mean is they felt it was too melodramatic for their tastes. But I’ve been lucky enough to have dodged any reviews that have gotten under my skin thus far—I’m sure that will (sadly) change!

Pico Iyer: “Travel-writing” (given that travel is just a disposable means to writing). “Engaging” (when I’m trying so hard not to play to the crowd, or to charm). “Insightful” (when I’m working—clearly in vain!—to see what lies on the far side of our “insights”).

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

Pico Iyer: Acting, though perhaps that’s writing under a different name. Stealing into the hearts and lives of others and finding they’re just the parts of you that you can’t easily recognize—or acknowledge.

Rebecca Kauffman: Anything outdoors and aggressively alone, for instance, maintenance person on wind turbines.

Catherine Airey: I’ve always fancied working for the Postal Service, somewhere remote. Writing is so interior and has to be done while stationary. So much time spent indoors can become quite depressing. I would probably be happier if forced to be out and about with more tangible goals on the horizon.

Betty Shamieh: Hands down, I would be a stand-up comedian. The reason I probably turned to writing comic novels instead is that I like being safe at home if my jokes flop.

Karissa Chen: Ooh, I have two! My first is neuroscientist—I’m endlessly fascinated by the brain and the fact that we still know so little about it. The other is to be a musical theater star. I love musical theater and I love singing. I have terrible stage fright, but in my fantasy world, I do not.

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

Betty Shamieh: I think my superpower as a writer is that I somehow didn’t get the memo that you aren’t supposed to reveal yourself entirely in your work. It always surprises me when people, including other beloved writers and friends, describe my work as honest. Is it just me or aren’t we all being honest in our work? It makes me feel as if I’m playing a game of Truth or Dare and I’m the only one telling the truth. Also, calling someone honest can have less than positive connotations. Am I honest in a way a child is honest when they tell you that you’re getting fat? I wish I was better at writing quickly.

Catherine Airey: Interiority and character development comes quite naturally to me, but I’m trying to get better at dialogue. At the moment I’m spending quite a lot of time thinking about how dialogue can be used to reveal aspects of character or advance the plot, rather than as embellishment.

Rebecca Kauffman: I’m not sure if readers would agree that they’re strong suits but what I enjoy writing most are dialogue and endings. I would like to be better at beginnings. I would also like to be better at writing essays although in order to become better I suppose I would first have to become willing!

Pico Iyer: I can sometimes describe scenes but I can’t for the life of me do character. There’s only one person I can bring to life on the page and it ain’t me. Which means that voice is a big problem, since my principal interest is in trying to catch other voices—and in trying out different voices with each new book.

Karissa Chen: I think I’m pretty good at describing things cinematically and in precise, evocative detail, which is ironic because I used to always skip descriptions when I’d read. Also, thanks to my love of poetry, I’d like to think my voice is both emotive and lyrical. I’d like to be better at crafting intricate plots, and I also wish my prose could be more surprising on a sentence level. I’m endlessly envious of those writers who can churn out unique turns of phrases or totally inhabit different characters’ voices effortlessly.

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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?

Rebecca Kauffman: I write for the sheer joy of creating. I’d do it if I only had two readers. I’ll do it if AI puts us all out of business. I’m tremendously grateful for readers but the notion that anyone will—or should—pay much attention is, for me, stress-inducing and beside the point.

Catherine Airey: Writing novels is certainly hubristic. But hubris, I think, is at the heart of what makes us human—having ideas and wanting to share them with others. In my writing (and my reading) I try to remain curious about different perspectives and experiences, not just my own. We all need to be seen.

Karissa Chen: I struggle with imposter syndrome a lot, but when I write I just try to put that aside and write for myself, for my family, for people like me. I write to bear witness to and make sense of the things I care about, and whether or not that ends up finding an audience in the end is almost beside the point. Or at least, I tell myself that.

Betty Shamieh: I don’t contend with fears about hubris because my anxiety has always been directed elsewhere. I’m too busy fretting that no one will see my work, or have the chance to assess whether it has value, because there is such resistance to hearing a Palestinian perspective and allowing our voices to be included in the cultural conversation. You can’t fight two battles at once. I’m sure when there is a just peace in the Middle East (as I still fervently believe we must hope and work to achieve for the sake of all the people there) that I’ll have a different answer to that question.

Pico Iyer: Writing is a harmless diversion, much like the Ping-Pong I play (sometimes even with a writer called Teddy Wayne). If my antics are of amusement or interest to others, that’s great, but their main purpose is to make me happier and healthier than I’d be otherwise and a better friend to those who have to endure me.