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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Lawrence Burney (No Sense in Wishing)
Claire Jia (Wanting)
Maris Kreizman (I Want to Burn This Place Down)
Joe Pan (Florida Palms)
Marian Thurm (I Don’t Know How to Tell You This)

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

Claire Jia: My book is about: that really entangled friendship you had in high school or maybe now that your life revolved around, your days made or broken by it. The cliché but also the joy of brunch and karaoke. The tug between wanting and settling. It’s about your friends’ boring boyfriends. And it’s about the fear of choosing.

Joe Pan: Deep character, deep sense of place. Gray moral areas. Definitions of masculinity. Adolescence now. Blood oaths and social justice. Philosophizing bikers. A hitman’s moral code. Panthers and predators. Drugs and detox. Reckonings of generational bigotry and violence. Long cross-country drives with the windows down. Our capacity for love and derangement. The fluidity and strength of our inner lives. #FloridaMan existentialism.

Lawrence Burney: I’d say this book, at its root, is about self-discovery. It tracks various touch points throughout my life when I came in contact with creative forces that were powerful enough to alter how I experienced reality. I think that’s something everyone should be able to connect with, even if the specific expressions of creativity I encountered are different from what left a lasting impression on them.

Marian Thurm: A family court judge and her life both inside and outside the courtroom; an intimate look at a woman navigating a profession most often dominated by men; a beloved husband slowly being diminished by memory loss; the past trauma of a prickly Holocaust survivor; tattoos and grief.

Maris Kreizman: It’s about what it feels like to wake up and realize that everything you ever valued was a lie; it’s also a deep dive into the Police Academy series.

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

Joe Pan: The mythologizing of Americana, what we tend to celebrate. Epic family sagas of sex and violence. Books on poverty. Brooding, tense works that balance slow-burn character exploration/interrogation with sudden bursts of action and high drama. Feminist writers who focus on masculinity and violence.

Marian Thurm: My endless fascination with the complexities of family relationships led to the many days I was privileged to spend in family court, seated beside the judge who happened to be my friend. And then there are the complexities of love, and what one critic referred to in my work as “the ironies and absurdities of the ordinary world,” unquestionably a lifetime obsession of mine.

Claire Jia: The beginning and end of my twenties bracketed the writing of my book, so just being an anxious twenty-something in the big city among other anxious twenty-somethings in the big city definitely shaped the book. My friendships absolutely influenced the novel, and books and shows about friendships. Various Chinese dramas, specifically Nothing But Thirty. Also, the vibe of paying nineteen dollars for a cocktail. That was influential, too.

Maris Kreizman: You’re Wrong About, white chocolate macadamia nut no-sugar-added TCBY, GoFundMes for insulin, a 1998 issue of Cosmopolitan, Kiss of the Spider Woman (the Broadway musical), speeches about “having to pay your dues.”

Lawrence Burney: While writing No Sense In Wishing, I was greatly inspired by my home region — historical and contemporary references alike. Nothing replenishes me more than being able to sit with the cultural production that comes out of Maryland, Virginia, and DC. My travels as a writer were also key to the work here—New Orleans, New York City, Johannesburg, Lagos, Kingston.

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

Maris Kreizman: My dog’s sweet sixteen birthday party, Mad Men rewatch, Zoom therapy, HarperCollins strike, WGA strike, a Dan Flashes party, Barbenheimer.

Marian Thurm: 26 years of writing and rewriting the same novel while having 7 other books of my fiction published; parenthood; teaching; grieving the loss of my own parents, who died within 6 weeks of each other; and finally, savoring the joys of grandparenthood.

Joe Pan: I worked on this book for over two decades, so half my life. I guess I built a spirit in that time, and this is partly what I fashioned in that fashioning.

Lawrence Burney: Having a kid enter her teens. Financial hardships. An abundance of risks. A final attempt at living in NYC. Pushing myself to the psychological brink.

Claire Jia: Being young with my whole life ahead of me; oops now I’m thirty; multiple relationships where I’d feel the contentment and doom and rub of that question—what if this lasts?; being messy with my friends; my friends falling in love and getting their shit together so now feeling like I’m doing something wrong; waitressing; being unemployed; assisting on TV shows; writing on TV shows; being unemployed again; the world is melting down and everyone I see on Instagram is so successful.

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

Lawrence Burney: There aren’t any specific words that I hate. If anything, I’m always pleasantly surprised by what people take from the book based on their own experiences. Some only view it as a Baltimore book, which does annoy me sometimes because I think it’s so much more.

Joe Pan: I’ve been told poor people don’t think or talk like this.

Claire Jia: One reviewer described my characters as “petty” (derogatory), which I actually love because to me, that is the whole point. I think our most interesting emotions are our most embarrassing ones.

Marian Thurm: Honestly, I try my best not to be tortured by the occasional stinging word from critics, but, instead, to appreciate whatever generous praise happens to come my way.

Maris Kreizman: Kirkus said my essays were “unexpectedly charming,” and it’s like, expect it, pal!

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

Maris Kreizman: There are plenty of bookstore/bars, but I want to be the proprietor of the very first bookstore/karaoke bar.

Claire Jia: As a kid, I always wanted to be a fashion designer. I love clothes. Also, I’m really tall and would have been an incredible basketball player, if I could tolerate even one minute of cardio.

Marian Thurm: A practicing psychologist, of that I’m certain. I love listening to people talk about their lives, and can’t help but try to figure out a way to be of comfort to them. To quote Mark Twain: “There never was yet an uninteresting life.…”

Joe Pan: I was a small press publisher for a while, and if I couldn’t write, I could see myself returning to that to try and become the next Grove Press. Or Knopf, if I could find the funding. Otherwise, baseball catcher in the minor leagues with the career home run record.

Lawrence Burney: Without hesitation, I would work in wildlife conservation. Nothing makes me more jealous than seeing people help raise prides of lions, hyena clans, gorilla families, and so on. That would’ve been a great life for me; it just didn’t feel accessible from where I stood as a young person entering adulthood.

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

Claire Jia: What is the craft element where you’re good at hyperanalyzing a social interaction in a two-hundred word paragraph? Anxiety? Okay, that. My Achilles heel is structure. I love writing a scene, but which scene should go where? What if nothing happens, as is often the case in life? What IS Freytag’s triangle???

Lawrence Burney: I think I have a solid handle of taking complex ideas and simplifying them for a wide range of audiences. I’m not a fan of overly dense language and I believe intellect can be exhibited while still achieving accessibility. I want to continue sharpening my grasp of the English language.

Joe Pan: People say I’m good at action, building atmosphere, and shaping sentences lyrically. I make too many characters smile, at times. Or walk from one place to the next.

Marian Thurm: Dialogue is probably what I’m best at; I only wish I were better at describing the natural world.

Maris Kreizman: I absolutely know how to deploy a well-placed semicolon; it’s the exclamation point overuse that I have to worry about!

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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?

Joe Pan: Bookstores are the best places to be inspired or deflated, and if I’m ever feeling either, there’s always a good bookstore around to put me in my place.

Maris Kreizman: I’ve been making good use of the “this is fine” meme with the dog sitting down and drinking a beverage while the world is burning, but this time his dialog bubble says, “So I have a book coming out.”

Marian Thurm: I’m just a storyteller who can’t stop myself from telling those stories. Worrying too much about whether anyone might or might not have interest in them isn’t something I do; if I did, I’m quite certain I wouldn’t be able to move from one sentence to the next. If anyone reads my books and enjoys them, well, that’s something to be grateful for.

Lawrence Burney: I don’t believe that’s a struggle for me. I actually don’t think anyone should be interested in anything I have to say. I’m not that important. But for people of a similar background—Black, from an inner city, or possessing a deep love for artistic expression—I think I have the ability of activating folks into honoring what they love a bit deeper.

Claire Jia: I love hubris. I eat it for breakfast lunch and dinner! Without hubris I’d be in law school. Except that I probably couldn’t get into law school. So I’d need hubris for that too.