PowellsBooks.Blog

Amy Stewart is the author of the novel Girl Waits with Gun and six other books, including The Drunken Botanist and Wicked Plants. Some of her earliest research for the novel happened right here in Portland, and Tin House editor Masie Cochran was there to witness it all. We've brought them back together to reminisce about those early days. Stewart will be at Powell's City of Books on September 22 to talk about her novel.

Amy: Let's start with how we met. Portland State University invited me to teach in their MFA program as a writer in residence, in partnership with Tin House. That meant that I was lucky enough to get to spend almost three months living in the little apartment between your magazine office and book publishing office. It was like being in a little Tin House sandwich! I loved it.

One night, you and I were having dinner with Janet Parker, who was Tin House's art director at the time. Somebody asked me what I was working on. Usually I don't like to say anything about a book idea until I've ...

Describe your latest book.
Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights is a fairy-tale of New York (well, mostly New York). New York with added genies (jinn).

It's about a jinnia princess, Dunia, who acquires a large number of human offspring, and uses them to help her battle an invasion of our world by the "dark jinn," who really are awful. And it's about a gardener, Mr. Geronimo, who during the "time of the strangenesses" comes detached from the earth; and his love affair with Dunia, even though she is his great-great-great-great-etc.-grandmother; and his part in the war of the worlds. And it's about quite a bit of other stuff too.

If someone were to write your biography, what would be the title and subtitle?
Joseph Anton. I'm afraid I already wrote it myself.

What was your favorite book as a child?
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

Have you ever made a literary pilgrimage?
I went to see Flannery O'Connor's home in Milledgeville and was saddened by its condition. On another day I visited Faulkner's home, Rowan Oak, and Elvis Presley's home, Graceland, on the same day. But my favorite was climbing the Martello tower where Stephen Dedalus lived in Ulysses. When you come out onto the terrace at the top, you are actually walking into the opening scene of the novel, alongside stately, plump Buck Mulligan.

Offer a favorite sentence or passage from another writer.
"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice." (The opening sentence of One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez.)

What's your biggest grammatical pet peeve?
Split infinitives. (Except for "to boldly go where no man has gone before," which I excuse.)

Describe your latest book.
Secondhand Souls is the sequel to my bestselling novel A Dirty Job, which was about a single dad in San Francisco who gets the job of being Death and runs it out of a secondhand store in the Italian neighborhood in North Beach. In Secondhand Souls, the forces of light and dark are once again at odds, and Charlie Asher is trapped in the body of a 14-inch-tall meat puppet. Oh, and all the ghosts of the Golden Gate Bridge are in revolt. Well, things get weird.

If someone were to write your biography, what would be the title and subtitle?
Christopher Moore, Inventor of Science!

If you were trapped in an elevator, what fictional character would you want with you?
Marcy, the elevator-repairing nymphomaniac.

How did the last good book you read end up in your hands, and why did you read it?
It was sent to me by The Bloggess, Jenny Lawson, who wrote it, and I read it because she's very funny and she seemed nice and she said nice things about my books. Oh, and it turned out to be pretty ...

Describe your latest book.
The Marriage of Opposites is a novel about the mother of impressionist painter Camille Pissarro, set on the island of St. Thomas and in Paris.

What's the strangest or most interesting job you've ever had?
A secretary at a university sex clinic.

What was your favorite book as a child?
Magic or Not? by Edward Eager.

Have you ever made a literary pilgrimage?
Ernest Hemingway's house in Key West.

What scares you the most as a writer?
Not having enough time to tell all the stories I want to write.

Describe your latest book.
I woke up one day from a sort of daydream with an idea for a book's structure, and for the thread of that book, one predicated upon the protagonist's loss of memory. In many cases, such memory losses are accidental or undesired, but in this case, it is an asked-for amnesia. And what if there existed a department of government whose sole purpose was to offer this service?

If society is a ship, it appears to many to be firmly at anchor in moral waters. Perhaps this isn't so. If we take certain extraordinary situations, we can better see basic truths about the ordinary. The events of A Cure for Suicide take place in a near future. The lives that the characters live are ordinary lives, but because of some extraordinary developments, their lives become emblematic of certain troublesome human directions.

If someone were to write your biography, what would be the title and subtitle?
Chased Out with a Broom, Chased Out with a Newspaper: Life of Jesse Ball, Vol. 2, 1983-1985.

If you were trapped in an elevator, what fictional character would you want with you?
In ...

Describe your latest book.
I Saw a Man is a contemporary novel set between London, New York, Nevada, and Wales. The book opens with Michael Turner, a young widower, entering the house of his neighbors, the Nelsons, by the back door. Michael believes there is no one at home, but he is wrong. What happens in the next few minutes changes his, and the lives of the Nelsons, forever.

Michael's journey through the Nelsons' house forms the spine for the first half of I Saw a Man, from which the narrative looks back to his brief marriage to TV reporter Caroline, his grief in the wake of her death, and his moving from their cottage in Wales to a flat in London. Following his move, despite (or perhaps because?) the Nelsons appearing to represent everything Michael has lost, he quickly forms a close bond with Josh and Samantha and their two daughters. This bond promises to be the mainstay of his emotional healing, until, one day, thinking their house is empty, he enters their back door.

From the moment of the event inside the Nelsons' house, the novel gains ...

Describe your latest book.
Judge This is a book that evolved out of discussions with the TED Books team, chiefly my editor Michelle Quint. It is a meditation on first impressions in design and life, and when design should be clear and when it should be mysterious. And then what can happen when the two get mixed up. All using visual examples of things I encounter in my daily life and how I apply them to my work. Confused yet? You won't be after you see my new accompanying TED Talk, set to go live later this summer.

If someone were to write your biography, what would be the title and subtitle?
"How to Satisfy Your Lover Every Time: The Abraham Lincoln Way"

What's the strangest or most interesting job you've ever had?
Selling hoagies door to door in Lincoln Park, Pennsylvania.

If you were trapped in an elevator, what fictional character would you want with you?
The Escapist.

How did the last good book you read end up in your hands, and why did you read it?
My job puts great books into my hands regularly, definitely a perk.

What scares you the most as a writer?
My lack of skill.

Offer a favorite sentence or passage from another writer.
"Talent? You wouldn't know talent if it sat in your lap and painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling on the roof of your mouth." — David Sedaris

Describe your latest book.

On Christmas Eve itself, the bachelor Harley Jackson stepped into his barn and beheld there illuminated in the straw a smallish newborn bull calf upon whose flank was borne the very image of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

"Well," said Harley, "that's trouble."

Turns out he was right.

What's the strangest or most interesting job you've ever had?
Writing. It's taken me to the top of Mt. Rainier with veterans of the Iraq War, across America with truckers, on tour with country music stars, and generally on new adventures, in which I — a flat-footed farm kid from rural Wisconsin armed with a nursing degree — have been allowed to do things I'm not qualified to do, go places I couldn't reach on my own, and hang out with people who normally wouldn't hang out with me. Once, for the sake of a story, I stood in the same room as the frozen head of Ted Williams.

Offer a favorite sentence or passage from another writer.
In 2003 I attended a reading at which the poet Honorée Fanonne Jeffers read her poem "On Listening to the Two-Headed ...

Describe your latest book.
The Making of Zombie Wars is a roller-coaster ride of violence and sex. The main character, Joshua Levin, is a modestly talented wanna-be screenwriter whose day job is teaching English to immigrants and refugees. As the U.S. joyously invades Iraq, Joshua falls for a married Bosnian woman and his sadly stable life disintegrates. On the upside, his script entitled "Zombie Wars" seems to be going well, even if nowhere in particular. Entertaining mishaps ensue. Anyone who has ever casually ruined their life could easily identify with Josh.

Describe a recurring dream or nightmare.
I have dreams which differ in details but all have the same structure: I share a space with a large number of friends from my previous (Sarajevo) and my present (Chicago) lives. We always do something together — often we play soccer — and there is never any drama or danger or sorrow. We just exist together.

What scares you the most as a writer?
Indulging my vanity and the false feeling that I'm effortlessly, indelibly good at writing, so that whatever I crank out is great, however inane or undercooked. Also known as the ...

Describe your latest book.
My novel, The Daylight Marriage, is about a wife and mother who goes missing one day. The narrative alternates between her husband and children's story, as they try to figure out what's happened to her and the story of what is, in fact, happening to her. The husband is a climate scientist who studies the connection between global warming and hurricanes. The wife is a part-time florist. And their teenage daughter is unwittingly enamored with the gay couple next door. The book is about marriage and family and how our small, daily decisions can snowball in a way that we may not intend.

What's the strangest or most interesting job you've ever had?
In my early 20s, I was a counselor at a shelter for homeless and runaway teenagers. Many of the kids had violent pasts involving weapons; a few of them had attempted homicide. Most of the kids had been court-ordered to live at the shelter.

I sometimes worked the overnight shift. I was always on edge there, even while they were asleep. I was worried they might try to escape, and I was ...