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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Char Adams (Black-Owned: The Revolutionary Life of the Black Bookstore)
Michelle Carr (Nightmare Obscura: A Dream Engineer’s Guide Through the Sleeping Mind)
Gerald Howard (The Insider: Malcolm Cowley and the Triumph of American Literature)
Sam Munson (The Sofa)
Viola van de Sandt (The Dinner Party) 

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

Michelle Carr: The unusual intimacy of saying “goodnight” to strangers tucked in bed in the sleep lab, or of waking them gently to share half-asleep dreams. The unexpected insights born of many nights spent awake with fellow sleep deprived colleagues in the lab.

Char Adams: Black-Owned is about the essence and story of Black-owned bookstores in the country. It explores their commitment to community and highlights what makes them special—what makes them different from general independent bookstores.

Sam Munson: It advances, investigates, and defends the correct proposition that there is no such thing as an inanimate object.

Gerald Howard: How one savvy and determined man altered the trajectory of American literature for the better through the application of his excellent taste and an inability to give up when he thought he was right. The mutability and almost accidental nature of literary reputations. How American literature became great.

Viola van de Sandt: It’s about the past and present colliding, a vegetarian stuffing a chicken, way too much alcohol, a heatwave, and female rage reaching the boiling point. My editor once described it as a demented Mrs. Dalloway.

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

Gerald Howard: Forty-two years as a book editor in the trenches of the Literary-Industrial Complex. A course in American literature at Cornell in 1971 that had an unexpectedly profound effect. The unaccountable taste I developed as a teenager for literary criticism.

Viola van de Sandt: Literary canons, dinner parties that descend into complete chaos, NASA’s Golden Record, female writers’ biographies, poems about consent.

Michelle Carr: My own dreams of aliens, demons, of Waking Life. The International Association for the Study of Dreams. A desire to share with people the wonder I found in the science of the sleeping mind.

Char Adams: The stories from the Black booksellers I spoke with were influence enough. I knew early on that I wanted to paint a vivid picture of their stories, and the influence for the writing and form truly came from the booksellers.

Sam Munson: The expressions, the truly sad expressions, that furniture wears. Smell of damp gabardine. And—a memory from my childhood—the weak, caprine face of a redheaded boy in my Hebrew school class.

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

Viola van de Sandt: Both a renaissance and a reckoning.

Michelle Carr: Beginning a new job, starting a lab; venturing to cafes and retreating to chalets to write. A lake named Beausoleil. A wedding in the Dacks. A chrysalis.

Char Adams: Covering race and justice news. Enduring heartbreak. Venturing into my early 30s.

Gerald Howard: Getting my list of books ready and in good order as I prepared to retire. Retirement during the time of Covid, a strange double whammy. Anxiety and too many stratagems like Wordle and spelling bees online to avoid actually writing.

Sam Munson: Absolutely nothing out of the ordinary.

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

Char Adams: “Word vomit.” Lol. (I’ve only heard that once, but once was enough.)

Viola van de Sandt: “Despise” is too strong a word, as I understand where this is coming from, but I am bothered by the sentence “Should have had a trigger warning.”

Sam Munson: I deeply appreciate every word ever written about me by anybody, including the “negative” ones.

Michelle Carr: Academic. Dense. In fairness I wanted to impress upon the reader just how vastly much science has learned about the dreaming mind, but I may have overshot.

Gerald Howard: As this is my first published book I have not had the pleasure of any such words being applied as yet. One of the many joys that await me, no doubt.

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

Sam Munson: Slavicist.

Michelle Carr: Window washer for high-rise buildings.

Gerald Howard: I would have liked to work as a prosecutor putting people like the principals in Goodfellas in jail for a long time. Ed McDonald, the guy who nailed Henry Hill, went to my Catholic high school in Brooklyn, so the ambition is perfectly reasonable, and I would have been good at it.

Viola van de Sandt: Art conservator. I love the attention to the tiniest details, the idea of physically interacting with history.

Char Adams: I’d be a professional dancer. I grew up dancing, and studied it before becoming a journalist. It really was my first love.

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

Michelle Carr: I think I can break down complex ideas and describe them in a way that’s easy to understand, yet accurate. I’d like to get better at distilling down to the essential bits, leave the rest, and deliver with more playfulness and story.

Char Adams: I am creative and imaginative, and I lean into emotion when I’m writing. I’d like to be better at showing vs. telling; sometimes I struggle with my writing being on the nose.

Gerald Howard: I think I describe the workings of the literary systems of rewards and setbacks and, especially, the inner mechanisms of publishing houses well. I am nowhere near as good at describing the physical world that the events occur in as I wish I was.

Viola van de Sandt: English is not my first language, so it surprised me when writing dialogue kept coming up as one of my strong suits. I’d like to be better at world-building, and at writing more sparsely.

Sam Munson: I reject the idea that writing, above all the writing of fiction, consists in the more- or less-skilful deployment of discrete, somehow severable elements. All or nothing.

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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?

Gerald Howard: By denying that there is any hubris whatsoever. My conviction that the person and the milieu I am writing about is both damned interesting and terrifically important is unshakeable.

Char Adams: I’m often confronted with the opposite—wondering why anyone should have any interest in my writing. I believe my experiences with rejection, rewrites, and criticism have given me a healthy humility that keeps the hubris away.

Viola van de Sandt: I’d gladly take some level of hubris over my impostor syndrome: I’m still not sure if my words are of interest to anybody else. More importantly, I write about the lived experience of many women, and I’d rather hope that my novel will help them feel seen and heard.

Michelle Carr: I love to read books that are similar to what I’ve written, so I just think about writing for a younger version of myself, or for any audience that has similar interests to my own. If a few people enjoy it, maybe learn something, it’s worth it.

Sam Munson: If you ever doubt that what you think or feel deserves the interest and attention of others, you should not even say it aloud—let alone publish it.