Ask the Author: Julia Glass
Answered Questions (23)
Julia Glass
I'm going to plead the Fifth on this one! I don't like to give too much away. . . . But I'm glad you're excited. It's wonderful to know that I have readers waiting for the next book.
Julia Glass
Hi, Cynthia: Thank you so much for your kind words about my writing. As you know, writing fiction can feel absurdly isolated, so knowing that our words actually reach people (especially when we're "between books") is so valuable to fueling the work. In answer to your question, I am just this week wrapping up a final draft of my next novel, to be published in June 2017. The title is not quite finalized, but it will be in the next week or so!
Julia Glass
Thank you, Kirsten! This is just the message I need as I struggle through the middle of my new novel-in-progress. The middle is the hardest part! I hope to finish it by a year from now, and then the rest is up to my publisher. Do you know about Kindle Singles? I do have a long story available there called "Chairs in the Rafters." I think it may even be available as audio. Very best wishes to you, and read on!
Julia Glass
I don't believe in writer's block. (I probably shouldn't say this; as another author told me, "If you don't believe in writer's block, it might just show up one day believing in YOU." But I don't.)
There is nothing mystical or privileged about writing; it's work, with its own particular joys and its inevitable tedium. Some days you write well, others not. Some days you'll do anything to avoid it. Some days you will think it is utterly stupid and pointless--or you will think you are the luckiest soul on the planet, maybe a genius. Sometimes you have to just make yourself sit at the damn desk and push words out of your head for the sake of reminding yourself that you DO write--or to meet a deadline.
I mean, have you ever heard of plumber's block? Accountant's block? Scuba diving instructor's block? Did you ever show up at school for a math test and see on the blackboard, to your heart's delight, a message like "No test today due to teacher's block"?
Writing is just another job. Really.
There is nothing mystical or privileged about writing; it's work, with its own particular joys and its inevitable tedium. Some days you write well, others not. Some days you'll do anything to avoid it. Some days you will think it is utterly stupid and pointless--or you will think you are the luckiest soul on the planet, maybe a genius. Sometimes you have to just make yourself sit at the damn desk and push words out of your head for the sake of reminding yourself that you DO write--or to meet a deadline.
I mean, have you ever heard of plumber's block? Accountant's block? Scuba diving instructor's block? Did you ever show up at school for a math test and see on the blackboard, to your heart's delight, a message like "No test today due to teacher's block"?
Writing is just another job. Really.
Julia Glass
Before I was published, I used to say that the three best things about being a FICTION writer (which is different from being, say, an investigative journalist) are getting to set your own schedule, stay in your pajamas till noon, and answer to no boss other than your imagination.
Now, having been published, I add to that list the pleasure of meeting so many smart readers and, among them, dedicated booksellers too.
Now, having been published, I add to that list the pleasure of meeting so many smart readers and, among them, dedicated booksellers too.
Julia Glass
Read a lot and read widely. Stay curious. Eavesdrop compulsively. Write about what you WANT to know. Persevere. Be skeptical about any "rules" you read telling you what you "must" do to be a serious writer (but, if you like, try them out).
Most important, know how to spend significant time in no one's company but your own (turn off and unplug EVERYTHING). Sadly, not many people know how to do that these days.
Most important, know how to spend significant time in no one's company but your own (turn off and unplug EVERYTHING). Sadly, not many people know how to do that these days.
Julia Glass
Certainly the answer to that question would have to be yes. In my fiction, I'd say that what many of the characters are struggling for is true connection, whether it's with a spouse or a parent, a grandchild or friend--or even a place to call home. Most of my characters, even if they find what they are looking for--or are surprised to find gratification where they weren't even looking--are nonetheless left with pockets of sorrow and regret in their lives. That doesn't mean they're not living fully. One of the most important subjects to me is how we endure, and even thrive, beyond heartbreak we know we will never "get over." And as we get older, we face only more such heartbreak. Yet I like to believe that all my stories end on a hopeful, rising note. I'm writing about how we go on.
The relationship between people and their work does fascinate me. Some people are lucky enough to do for a living what they love most; others dutifully follow paths set out by their parents; still others (many) must do whatever work they can, like it or not, to survive or to support a family. (And of course, some people are free from money woes and have, perhaps, too many options.) But no matter what we "do" with our lives or how much we like it, that work will, over time, influence our habits, personality, and character--even our health. That, too, is a worthy and profound subject to tackle.
The relationship between people and their work does fascinate me. Some people are lucky enough to do for a living what they love most; others dutifully follow paths set out by their parents; still others (many) must do whatever work they can, like it or not, to survive or to support a family. (And of course, some people are free from money woes and have, perhaps, too many options.) But no matter what we "do" with our lives or how much we like it, that work will, over time, influence our habits, personality, and character--even our health. That, too, is a worthy and profound subject to tackle.
Julia Glass
Greetings to the most important library in my life! (Though I miss the version of the library I knew as a child, before the fancy additions and alterations of the 1980s.) In answer to your question, it was challenging, but because I had been longing to revisit a certain character--Lucinda Burns--from my first novel, it was more exciting than difficult. I did have to reread "Three Junes," and I did so with some trepidation, because I was afraid I might be disappointed by my own writing or feel the impossible urge to rewrite parts of it--but happily, that wasn't the case. Sometimes I did find myself surprised by "facts" I had misremembered (for instance, Malachy Burns's birth order), and teasing out a plot line involving a "secret child" meant extending the story further back in the past than I had originally intended, but I love taking characters i've known for years and introducing them to new characters--seeing where the chemistry takes them.
Julia Glass
Wow, Lisa, what a coincidence! I fabricated this name using a first name from my father's southern family and a surname of historic importance in my New England town--a total mashup. Some readers thought that "Darling" was an allusion to "Peter Pan," and I have to wonder if something was going on subconsciously there . . . but alas, I have no information about your great-uncle. Good luck!
Julia Glass
Oh Beth, where do I start?! I worry that my house will collapse under the weight of all the children's books I've saved--forget the rest. I have loved books for as long as I can remember. From fifth grade through college, I worked in my town's public library, mostly in the children's room, where I knew just about every volume intimately by the time I was 18. But I grew up in the 1960s and '70s--and so many of the books that I and my peers treasured back then hold no interest for today's children (often understandably so). And many more are out of print. But I'll toss out some titles of early favorites that I know are still around: certainly the Narnia books and the still-beloved "D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths" (I read every collection of myths and fairy tales I could get my hands on), but also a fairly cerebral time-travel trilogy by Jane Langton, the first and best of which is "The Diamond in the Window." (Jane Langton was also the first real-live author I ever met; it was like meeting a goddess straight from the D'Aulaires' Mount Olympus.) I loved E. Nesbit's novels, the Lloyd Alexander series beginning with "The Book of Three," the Random House Alfred Hitchcock anthologies. What amazes me is to recall how I thought nothing of reading all these books three or four times or more. (The D'Aulaires' book I snacked on as constantly as Oreos or Pringles.) As I get older--and feel the pressure of "so many books, so little time," I can only be nostalgic about the notion of REreading. (And I'm a very slow reader.) Throughout my teens, I also read volumes of poetry, from "Le Morte d'Arthur" to e.e. cummings, and plays, from Shakespeare to Ionesco. In that respect, I was odd (and embraced the oddness).
My older son, in his early teens, was also an ardent reader of myth and fantasy, but he didn't care for any of the above (with the exception of the Narnia books). He inhaled Phillip Pullman, the Harry Potters, Artemis Fowl, M. T. Anderson, newer anthologies of dragon and ghost stories--and I realized that while we all grow up to love many of the same adult classics, maybe the books we cut our teeth on, once we learn to read to ourselves--to "possess" our reading--are necessarily more idiosyncratic to the sensibilities of our times, even if they're set in the Middle Ages or centuries in the future.
I want to say something about picture books, too--which, as a genre, have blossomed and soared dramatically. (And how heartening to see that the best of the classics--Dr. Seuss, Virginia Lee Burton, Robert McCloskey, William Steig et al.--are still cherished. Parents who love to read aloud, be sure to seek out the exquisitely witty verse of John Ciardi.) But I don't see how children's literature can continue to thrive--and be accessible in an essentially tactile way--if we don't continue to patronize REAL bookstores. When my kids were small and just learning to read, we lived near a children's bookstore where they were welcome to peruse and pillage the lower shelves, sitting contentedly amid piles of splayed books. I spent way too much money there and will never regret it. Browsing (not with a mouse) is a crucial element in creating an adventuresome reader. I continue to visit the children's section of my own local bookshop and to marvel, in particular, at picture books that have no words. As a word person, it took me a while to warm to these books. I started with David Wiesner's books, "reading" them to my sons, who loved them. Recently, I encountered a brand-new one, "The Farmer and the Clown," by Marla Franzee: brilliant, amusing, and touching.
I still own the very first book I asked my parents to buy me (after watching Captain Kangaroo read it on TV). It was the first book published by the late, great Karla Kuskin, "Roar and More." A few years ago, I was delighted to contribute to an anthology called "Bound to Last: Thirty Writers on Their Most Cherished Book." My essay is on "Roar and More" and its important place throughout my entire readerly life. After it was published, close to 50 years after my parents bought me that book, I received a note from Karla Kuskin. How amazing is that?
My older son, in his early teens, was also an ardent reader of myth and fantasy, but he didn't care for any of the above (with the exception of the Narnia books). He inhaled Phillip Pullman, the Harry Potters, Artemis Fowl, M. T. Anderson, newer anthologies of dragon and ghost stories--and I realized that while we all grow up to love many of the same adult classics, maybe the books we cut our teeth on, once we learn to read to ourselves--to "possess" our reading--are necessarily more idiosyncratic to the sensibilities of our times, even if they're set in the Middle Ages or centuries in the future.
I want to say something about picture books, too--which, as a genre, have blossomed and soared dramatically. (And how heartening to see that the best of the classics--Dr. Seuss, Virginia Lee Burton, Robert McCloskey, William Steig et al.--are still cherished. Parents who love to read aloud, be sure to seek out the exquisitely witty verse of John Ciardi.) But I don't see how children's literature can continue to thrive--and be accessible in an essentially tactile way--if we don't continue to patronize REAL bookstores. When my kids were small and just learning to read, we lived near a children's bookstore where they were welcome to peruse and pillage the lower shelves, sitting contentedly amid piles of splayed books. I spent way too much money there and will never regret it. Browsing (not with a mouse) is a crucial element in creating an adventuresome reader. I continue to visit the children's section of my own local bookshop and to marvel, in particular, at picture books that have no words. As a word person, it took me a while to warm to these books. I started with David Wiesner's books, "reading" them to my sons, who loved them. Recently, I encountered a brand-new one, "The Farmer and the Clown," by Marla Franzee: brilliant, amusing, and touching.
I still own the very first book I asked my parents to buy me (after watching Captain Kangaroo read it on TV). It was the first book published by the late, great Karla Kuskin, "Roar and More." A few years ago, I was delighted to contribute to an anthology called "Bound to Last: Thirty Writers on Their Most Cherished Book." My essay is on "Roar and More" and its important place throughout my entire readerly life. After it was published, close to 50 years after my parents bought me that book, I received a note from Karla Kuskin. How amazing is that?
Julia Glass
The only way I can answer this question is to say that I am endlessly fascinated (and moved) by people's true family stories. The evolving relationships among parents and children, siblings, spouses, cousins, in-laws: it's all so compelling--and so important to how we become the people we are. If one subject unifies all my work, it's family.
Julia Glass
Another novel . . . but at this tender stage, I'm keeping my cards close to my vest. I will say that it's set in Vigil Harbor, the fictional town at the end of "The Widower's Tale"--but it is not a sequel. I am also very busy working on the second season of a very special arts festival in Provincetown, Mass., called Twenty Summers, where I am the literary director. You can check it out--you can even see me and other authors in videos of last year's literary events--at 20summers.org.
Julia Glass
As I wrote in an answer to another question today, the characters are everything to me. Every story I write begins with a character in a very specific predicament or crisis (or, perhaps, faced with a risky opportunity). I build a life and relationships around that character, and only then does the true direction of the narrative take shape. When a new character comes to me--which can occur suddenly or gradually, over time--I don't really want to know where he or she comes from. I've often said that I like being a little "dumb" about my motivations and themes while I'm working on a book. (Once it's published, readers are usually the ones who tell me what it's "about"!) That said, I have noticed that certain characters grow out of aspects of myself: usually aspects I'm not too comfortable or happy about. The best example, perhaps, is Percy Darling, the protagonist of "The Widower's Tale." He is very much a reflection of my premature curmudgeonliness and habitual resistance to change of so many kinds. Fenno McLeod--and I only saw this long after bringing him to life--personifies, in part, my instinctive tendency toward caution and a certain guardedness. I make an effort to overrule that tendency as often as I can.
Julia Glass
In a word, haphazard. Of which I am not proud! My life as a writer defies a lot of the hackneyed dictates fed to fledgling writers. To begin with, I do not by any means write every day--though in a way that depends on what one means by "write." It took me many years not to feel guilty about failing to "add words" to my stories (that is, spend time at the keyboard) on a daily basis. I thank a profile of the novelist Peter Cameron (one of my favorite contemporary writers), which I read while writing "Three Junes," for releasing me from that guilt. I'm going to paraphrase him, but he said something like this: "The lion's share of writing is just thinking." What he meant is that a lot of the essential work of writing fiction takes place when you're living the rest of your life but daydreaming about your characters. I realized that many of the most important decisions I make as a storyteller take place while I'm showering, stuck in traffic, meandering along the produce aisle at the grocery store, walking the dogs. For that reason, I do not carry my cell phone much except when traveling away from home. It drives some people crazy--but having time to be truly alone, incommunicado, is crucial to my writing.
The downside of this nonroutine is that I'm too easily distracted, and at times I have to discipline myself to sit at the keyboard whether I feel inspired or not. I tend to write in sprints--no pages added for three weeks or more and then, wham, I sit down every day for a week and turn out fifty pages. The beauty of fiction writing is that there are no rules. Or maybe there's one: Stay involved with your imagination as you live your everyday life. Do that and your stories will find their way into words.
The downside of this nonroutine is that I'm too easily distracted, and at times I have to discipline myself to sit at the keyboard whether I feel inspired or not. I tend to write in sprints--no pages added for three weeks or more and then, wham, I sit down every day for a week and turn out fifty pages. The beauty of fiction writing is that there are no rules. Or maybe there's one: Stay involved with your imagination as you live your everyday life. Do that and your stories will find their way into words.
Julia Glass
You have asked a number of questions here! All interesting, however. First, "Three Junes" is decidedly a novel, though it did grow from a short story to a novella ("Collies," which won the Faulkner novella award, thus qualifying me to be a judge in a later year) and finally became a novel, of which "Collies" is the first part. You could still read that first part on its own, but I wouldn't say the same of the novel's second and third parts, which are fully interdependent with each other and with the first part. I couldn't conceive of their being published individually (and btw, I have never published anything in "The New Yorker," much as I would love to).
As for novellas being the "kiss of death," that's a harsh statement! If you mean they're hard to publish, that may be so--although an increasing number of online venues, including byliner.com and Kindle Singles, now offer opportunities for writers to e-publish (and be well paid for) pieces that are longer than stories and shorter than full-blown books. And I have seen debut books that are collections of novellas or a novella grouped with stories. Among my favorite authors are two masters of the novella: JIm Harrison and Rachel Ingalls. Their best books are trios of novellas, and that is how I discovered them both. I just read another magnificent trio of novellas, "The Liar's Wife," Mary Gordon's latest. I find that there is a very particular pleasure to reading a novella. It's like taking a three-day weekend trip instead of a two-week vacation. So if the novella is your favorite form as a writer, don't despair.
The closest I've come to writing a novella since "Collies" is my very long story "Chairs in the Rafters," which was originally published on dailylit.com and is now a Kindle Single. I thought I was writing a short story--rare for me now--but it became a bit ungainly at 40 or so pages. It's an inconvenient length I call a "novellini." I'd like to try for a few more, but in general I'm a card-carrying novelist.
Good luck with your own writing, Trina!
As for novellas being the "kiss of death," that's a harsh statement! If you mean they're hard to publish, that may be so--although an increasing number of online venues, including byliner.com and Kindle Singles, now offer opportunities for writers to e-publish (and be well paid for) pieces that are longer than stories and shorter than full-blown books. And I have seen debut books that are collections of novellas or a novella grouped with stories. Among my favorite authors are two masters of the novella: JIm Harrison and Rachel Ingalls. Their best books are trios of novellas, and that is how I discovered them both. I just read another magnificent trio of novellas, "The Liar's Wife," Mary Gordon's latest. I find that there is a very particular pleasure to reading a novella. It's like taking a three-day weekend trip instead of a two-week vacation. So if the novella is your favorite form as a writer, don't despair.
The closest I've come to writing a novella since "Collies" is my very long story "Chairs in the Rafters," which was originally published on dailylit.com and is now a Kindle Single. I thought I was writing a short story--rare for me now--but it became a bit ungainly at 40 or so pages. It's an inconvenient length I call a "novellini." I'd like to try for a few more, but in general I'm a card-carrying novelist.
Good luck with your own writing, Trina!
Julia Glass
Thank you, Ann! I'm glad you enjoy immersing yourself in my fictional worlds--which, as you can see, have a tendency to overlap. Sometimes I'm surprised by the return of a character--as I was when Fenno, the hero of "Three Junes," decided to barge back in while I was writing "The Whole World Over"--and at other times it's unavoidable or deliberate. The impetus for writing "And the Dark Sacred Night" was a recurring desire I'd had to revisit the character Lucinda Burns from "Three Junes." I knew that would entail bringing back her husband, Zeke, and her two surviving children. I also knew that her memories of her lost child would be important--but I had no idea, at first, that I would go back in time to portray him as a teenager. It's an interesting challenge to create the younger version of an adult character one brought to life ten years before. An uber-flashback of sorts!
Julia Glass
Several readers have made this very same comment to me, Judie. It's such a beautiful song, and played so often, that I think we tend to absorb it emotionally rather than actually listen to it. That's the case with so many great songs, isn't it? Like you, I had heard it countless times yet never noticed that snippet of lyrics until one day, eight or ten years ago, as I stood in New Orleans' Saint Louis Square, doing nothing more than looking around me and feeling lucky to be there, a street musician started to sing this quintessential Armstrong classic. What a moment! So I just stood still and really listened—LISTENED--to that song for the very first time. And when I heard “the bright blessed day and the dark sacred night,” I felt a surprised delight at how new those words felt, though they were nestled in a song I thought I knew well. As a word lover, I began to think about the difference between "blessed" and "sacred"—the things we cherish openly versus those we honor more privately. And it also occurred to me that “The Dark Sacred Night” would be a great book title. I tend to struggle with titles, and two of my books went through numerous title changes very close to their being set in type.
When I started this new novel, with its juxtapositions of love and fear, trust and secrecy, fate and fortune, I knew this would be the right title. And as I wrote the scene in which Fenno and Walter meet their couples counselor, the image of day and night as present and past struck me viscerally. That's when I decided to make the title “And the Dark Sacred Night.” Because it's about coming to terms with the past as an inextricable “partner” to the present.
When I started this new novel, with its juxtapositions of love and fear, trust and secrecy, fate and fortune, I knew this would be the right title. And as I wrote the scene in which Fenno and Walter meet their couples counselor, the image of day and night as present and past struck me viscerally. That's when I decided to make the title “And the Dark Sacred Night.” Because it's about coming to terms with the past as an inextricable “partner” to the present.
Julia Glass
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Julia Glass
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Julia Glass
I've always been fascinated by the issue of character "likability." I don't think it's something an author should try to engineer too closely, but certainly no character will be compelling to a serious reader without a significant counterplay of virtues and flaws (one sometimes outweighing the other). Long before I started writing novels, I realized that the characters who "stay with me" longest in the stories I read are those who've had to win me over. My favorite protagonist of all time is Gwendolen Harleth in George Eliot's "Daniel Deronda." She is, at the outset, a vain, spoiled, self-centered, calculating, materially driven young woman, a virtual villainess; the reader almost cheers for her downfall. But as she makes choices that we know will not end well, we also come to know her inner complexities--and the outer factors, both familial and societal, that have influenced her follies. By the end of the novel, when she must face the dire consequences of the way she's lived her life so far, any decent reader's heart will break. Reading that novel, though it's not as "good" as, say, "Middlemarch," was a turning point for me in the way I thought about fiction and why we read it. The best fiction always reminds us how to be compassionate--toward ourselves as well as others. (By the way, Gwendolen Harleth is said to have been the inspiration for Margaret Mitchell's Scarlett O'Hara.)
As for my own writing, characters are everything to me--where the story begins, how it unfolds: the plot is determined by the choices they make--and so I dig very deep into their psyches. Like my best friends, the characters of my own that I come to love (and sometimes it surprises me which ones I do . . . and don't!) are those who have had to struggle with heartbreak, the frictions of family relationships, and true regret. I'm not fond of people who walk away from or glibly ignore the effects of these virtually unavoidable hurdles. If I create a character like that--and I have--it will generally be to challenge the flawed but struggling people I want to write about. Accepting responsibility for our own foolishness is, to me, one of the greatest human virtues and the genesis of wisdom.
What I love about hearing readers discuss my characters is that different readers prefer different characters. Fenno McLeod--the protagonist of my first novel, "Three Junes"--inspired ire and contempt in a couple of book critics (those reviews were among my worst ever)--yet so many readers adore him. (And I guess I must, too, since he keeps coming back.) Some people love his strong-willed mother, Maureen, while others see her as a cold, unnurturing narcissist. Similarly mixed responses have been invoked by Greenie Duquette, the heroine of "The Whole World Over," and Kit Noonan, whose quest for a father is at the heart of my latest, "And the Dark Sacred Night." What this tells me is that all these characters are indeed "real" people, so fully dimensional that they repel some readers while endearing themselves to others. I certainly hope that readers will like some of my characters, but I can never predict which ones, so it's something I don't worry about.
As for my own writing, characters are everything to me--where the story begins, how it unfolds: the plot is determined by the choices they make--and so I dig very deep into their psyches. Like my best friends, the characters of my own that I come to love (and sometimes it surprises me which ones I do . . . and don't!) are those who have had to struggle with heartbreak, the frictions of family relationships, and true regret. I'm not fond of people who walk away from or glibly ignore the effects of these virtually unavoidable hurdles. If I create a character like that--and I have--it will generally be to challenge the flawed but struggling people I want to write about. Accepting responsibility for our own foolishness is, to me, one of the greatest human virtues and the genesis of wisdom.
What I love about hearing readers discuss my characters is that different readers prefer different characters. Fenno McLeod--the protagonist of my first novel, "Three Junes"--inspired ire and contempt in a couple of book critics (those reviews were among my worst ever)--yet so many readers adore him. (And I guess I must, too, since he keeps coming back.) Some people love his strong-willed mother, Maureen, while others see her as a cold, unnurturing narcissist. Similarly mixed responses have been invoked by Greenie Duquette, the heroine of "The Whole World Over," and Kit Noonan, whose quest for a father is at the heart of my latest, "And the Dark Sacred Night." What this tells me is that all these characters are indeed "real" people, so fully dimensional that they repel some readers while endearing themselves to others. I certainly hope that readers will like some of my characters, but I can never predict which ones, so it's something I don't worry about.
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