I got pulled over by a cop for taking a left turn at a light where
you're not supposed to, between 4 and 6 p.m. (I'd jogged a block out of
my usual route to mail some stuff, and didn't see the sign).
I of course had left my license in my top bureau drawer, BUT had a copy
of the book on the passenger seat, so he believed it was me once I showed
him my name on the front and my picture on the back, and agreed to radio
in to have them look up my license number. Still gave me the damn ticket,
but I told him it had been such a good day that I didn't mind so much.
Total lie, but what the hell.
Maybe he'll buy a copy. Least he could do, considering…
When Cornelia told this story recently on her blog, I knew chatting with
her about the ups and downs of getting to this point in her career was
going to be a lot of fun.
And I couldn’t help teasing her about it, just a little.
Sandra
A FIELD OF DARKNESS is out now, you’re touring… How does it
feel?
Cornelia
None of it feels quite real to me.
Sandra
You have your book out, and it doesn’t feel real?
Cornelia
No. Not at all. Only the harsh stuff. That’s real. The good stuff
is obviously totally pretend.
Sandra
Harsh stuff, like getting pulled over by a cop?
Cornelia
He was really nice at the end, but he was so cop-like. So officious.
Sandra
And the book signings?
Cornelia
I got to go to Mysterious Galaxy in San Diego on Saturday and do a signing
and it was the bookstore’s 13th anniversary party. I walked in and
said I was so proud I’d done three signings so far “and I
haven’t thrown up once.” Elizabeth Baldwin, the lady who was
my keeper for the day, she told me it was no problem, they were going
to be recording me, and that if I puked they could edit that out.
And then she said that if I need it, they have their special author’s
buckets, and at the end they’d ask me to sign it and then they’d
hang it up on the wall with the other buckets.
Sandra
It must be pretty nerve-wracking to go out and do these signings.
Cornelia
The recording part freaked me out a little because they were saying it
might be included in some radio show, so I was thinking I’d better
not swear or make too many stoner jokes.
Sandra
Have you been to Bouchercon before?
Cornelia
I went to Chicago and Toronto and they were both great.
It’s very cool. People are so nice. In Chicago I had a couple people
come up to me and say they’d heard nice things about me and I was
thinking, “You have?”
It still feels like the first day of high school. You walk in and there’s
the wall of people. Toronto was my first one, and the tremendously gracious
Elaine Flinn took me under her wing. First thing when I came in, Elaine
was holding my hand and I was thinking I wouldn’t know anybody and
there were so many people.
I saw Lee (Child) across the crowd and he had all these people around
him--he’s so tall you can see him. I thought he wouldn’t remember
who I was and he looked busy, so I thought I’d wait until he had
a free moment to thank him for offering to blurb A FIELD OF DARKNESS,
and he saw me and called me over and introduced me to everybody. He was
so kind.
Sandra
In this particular genre, it seems people are really supportive.
Cornelia
Absolutely. It’s astonishing. It’s the coolest thing. I feel
really lucky. I didn’t go into this genre because of that, I went
into it because I love the books, but to have it turn out to be filled
with cool people who are so gracious. On top of the splendor of reading
the stuff, the people are so great.
Sandra
How have the interviews been?
Cornelia
I’m so lucky that I did the first one with you. It was fun and it
was relaxed. Ones I’ve done since, I went into it feeling like, “This
will be all right,” since I had yours under my belt. That was just
fantastic good luck.
Sandra
It’s probably because I’m so unprofessional.
Cornelia
Well so am I! I don’t think you’re unprofessional at all,
but I have no idea what I’m doing.
Sandra
When you’re trained in journalism, you’re trained to go for
the scoop. To ask the tough question, to get that raw reaction. I like
doing this because I’m profiling somebody. This is not “make
them look stupid hour” or me trying to expose their sins. God, I’m
probably more nervous than the authors are half the time!
Cornelia
That gives it a really reassuring feel for people, though. You care about
it, you don’t sound nervous. Your being concerned about it shows
through and I think that puts other people at ease.
I did two interviews last week that cracked me up. Monday morning I did
one with a guy that I worked with at The Syracuse New Times, Walt Shepperd.
He’s the sweetest
man, but his first question was, “As a resident of Syracuse I have
to ask you what the hell happened to you up here? Why all this Syracuse
bashing?”
I just felt terrible. I was saying, “You have to exaggerate the
tension for purposes of fiction.…” I felt guilty all day afterwards,
because I didn’t want him to think that I hated Syracuse.
The next day I did an interview with Rege Behe at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
and the first thing he said was, “I spent a
day in Syracuse once, and you totally nailed it.”
Sandra
It’s funny that you mention that because on page 100, you refer
to dripping snot on someone’s arm as probably some kind of Eskimo
foreplay. You have a number of little jibes at Canada throughout the book
and I wonder how you think Canadians will react to it, or if you’ve
had any reaction to that.
Cornelia
I haven’t, although this thing about driving in a pack of home bound
Canadians if you want to go fast… Someone said that was dead on.
Canada is so cool, who can blame home bound Canadians for driving fast?
I think it’s a great country and it was really interesting to me
to go to Toronto and see what a lively city that is.
There was a film board of Canada thing on the Inuit, the Netsilik people.
It was a series of films about making sleigh runners out of frozen tundra,
and going seal hunting, and building igloos. It was just the coolest thing.
I think a lot of schools down here had it as their sixthgrade social studies
curriculum, and it turned out that my husband in Syracuse had watched
the same films in sixth grade. He’s a year older than me and he
was surprised I’d seen it. He said, “My favorite line was, ‘Every
woman has an ulu.’” He ‘s the only person I’ve
met who knew about the ladies chopping the blubber off and taking a bite
and then chopping the end off with the ulu and then passing it down the
line. Totally cool.
Sandra
When we flew to Tuktoyuktuk, which is right on the Arctic Ocean, we happened
to be there the day they got their first beluga catch of the season. It’s
a whole different world. You can’t be judgmental about that because
this is survival for these people. We got to watch them carve up the beluga
and then smoke it to preserve it.
Cornelia
I can’t believe you watched that. That’s so cool.
Sandra
I can’t believe you watched the Film Board of Canada. A lot of Canadians
don’t.
It’s interesting, because in North America, more so than some other
places, we tend to overlook our own history. It seems boring by comparison
to actually going to Rome and seeing the Coliseum. We tend to forget the
history that ties into places. The shipping industry was a huge industry.
You’re probably going to say it still is, but it was different then.
Cornelia
Not the same way. I agree, shipping was amazing, back in the day.
Upstate New York, the economy has been so hard up there since the 70s
and then you cross the border and its thriving and positive. A very interesting
contrast to me.
With Syracuse and all the cities along the Erie Canal… The Erie
Canal is why New York City is a big deal. Before it was built, New York
was a smaller city than Boston and Philadelphia. It wasn’t a cultural
center or an economic center. Then with the canal, the raw natural wealth
of the Midwest was tapped for the first time, other than via the Mississippi,
because the canal connected with the Hudson River, so New York became
such a huge port.
My thing of having 15 pages on the Erie Canal in the first draft… even
the architecture… was because you can feel the pride of that era.
It was the time of the Greek Revival in architecture, so almost all of
the cities along the Erie Canal going east-west have Greco-Roman names,
because they thought they were going to be the new Rome, the new Athens—Syracuse,
Rome, Troy, Utica….
Buffalo was one of the first places in North American to have electric
light throughout the city… Presidents would visit there, there were
operas. Then with the energy crisis in the ‘70s, so many of the
industries fled south. I get a little obsessive about it, that history,
so feel free to edit this with a big machete.
It was such a different time. Even to think of how people traveled in
those days, when it took weeks to get to Europe and it was celebrated
in the design of the ships themselves. People would savor crossing the
distance. Compare that to being in an Airbus… It’s not the
same.
Sandra
Your enthusiasm for the history… You wouldn’t want to live
in New York?
Cornelia
Having grown up mostly in California, my internal weather meter is set
for having a little more sun. I would get so depressed in the northeast.
Sandra
Well, how does that factor in for your protagonist? She has a lot of similarities
to you. Do things like the weather really factor in to how Madeline felt
about being in Syracuse?
Cornelia
Absolutely. For me, it colored my experience there and it certainly colors
my memories. I play it up more for her, but I think partly that’s
why Madeline is such a snarky bitch.
I remember talking to my mom about it once and she said for women, where
they live is a huge part of whether or not they’re happy. For men,
she thought it was much more what they’re doing for work. They’re
not as invested in geography. For women, it’s the culture of a place… if
you can meet people and get a network of friends going and feel at home
and feel as though you’re doing okay as a person there.
In Syracuse, it’s a different sense of humor. Tremendously kind
people. Very solid, very trustworthy, and a lot of really bright, interesting
people up there as well, but it was just a slightly different wavelength
from mine.
Sandra
And traditionally, women are nesters.
Cornelia
Absolutely.
Sandra
Yet it’s funny, because you and I have this in common, and you certainly
have this in common with Madeline Dare – we’re never happy
anywhere. So how do you deal with a character who’s probably never
going to be happy?
Cornelia
I don’t know yet. My main thing is that I hope Madeline doesn’t
come off as whiney. That’s one reason I wanted to start the book
off with those lines, ”There are people who can be happy anywhere.
I am not one of them.” To say that this is the truth for her, that
she’s not happy anywhere, but that she’s self-aware. And she
understands that that’s her and not the place.
I tried to show that with some characters, especially characters in Syracuse,
in FIELD, who were thoughtful, bright, funny and very warm people. Like
Kenny the bartender or Izzy Fleischman, the auctioneer. Not that it’s
wonderland and everybody is great, but that there was a great deal for
her there as a character--as there was for me-- that was a haven and tremendously
nourishing. Madeline’s inability to find happiness in that milieu
is her own shortcoming.
That’s not to say she isn’t a snarky, whiny bitch much of
the time, but I do know, and I hope it was expressed with her, that she
knows that’s her. And I think a lot of writers are that way, that
there’s a little feeling of “in but out”, fish out of
water, that’s part of the observer personality required.
Sandra
In order to really assess things and understand them, you step back from
them. If she had been a completely content person to be where she was,
happy little homemaker, everything was fine, she wouldn’t have been
the same.
Cornelia
There’d be no book.
Sandra
And she wouldn’t have been the type of person to pursue the truth.
Or she would have gone straight to the police from the very beginning,
handed it over and absolved herself because she would have been the type
of person who trusted in conventions.
Cornelia
Yeah, and also it’s the difference between saying you’re unhappy
in a place and you hate the place. Of all the places that I’ve lived,
there were great things about each location.
I think Madeline will be moving around in the series, and I’ll try
to make this true for her as well, but part of not being able to be happy
is missing other places: the people, the culture.
There are things that I still miss desperately about Honolulu and I haven’t
lived there since I was eight years old. But I loved hearing people talk
the local Pidgin. And there’s this really bizarre Chinese candy
that’s all preserved dried fruit that’s flavored with saccharine
and salt and lemon juice, and there are these dried plums that look like
disgusting little bloodclots, called Li Hing Mui. You can get them in
Chinatown anywhere, but they don’t’\ taste the same as the
Hawaiian brand, which is called Yick Lung, which has got to be the most
disgusting name for a candy. If anybody ever goes to Hawaii, I ask them
to buy me a big bag of Yick Lung Li Hing Mui.
And I loved going to school there. We didn’t have to wear shoes.
If there was a field trip they’d send a note home asking parents
to please make sure their child wore shoes.
New York, little things that I miss… a soda called Manhattan Special.
It’s really syrupy espresso that’s carbonated. You can only
get it around New York City, they don’t ship it out. Sesame Noodles
from Empire Szechwan Garden. When I spent a year in Dublin I tried to
make sesame noodles with peanut butter and spaghetti. The poor Irish people,
none of them wanted to eat it.
Sandra
That’s an interesting spin, because a lot of the series that are
out there, the setting is almost a character within the series. That’s
certainly said of Ian Rankin’s Rebus series and would be true of
Laura Lippman’s Tess Monaghan series as well.
Cornelia
And Denise Mina. I’ve never been to Glasgow but I read FIELD OF
BLOOD and felt like I’d lived there. That’s one of those books… You
said in your intro to the last interview that you got out your book to
write stuff down. I read Denise Mina and I wanted to break out my notebook
and literally copy the entire book.
Sandra
But you’re taking that and twisting the use of setting by having
a character that has bits of different places in her. Where does she really
belong? She’s a person with no zip code.
Cornelia
I think that’s true of a lot of people. We are such a mobile society.
When I went to Ireland that was the first time I’d been out of the
country for any extended length of time and there’s something about
the feel of a society where people have been in the same place for centuries.
The Irish people I know in the US are the ones that left, the ones who
struck out, people who were willing to get into crappy, leaky boats and
eat salt pork for months to go strike out and find something different.
So many people have to move around for work and it makes us lonely as
well. People don’t have a base. But we find each other. You and
I have talked about this a little, how you find your tribe even online.
How people are drawn together. How weird is that, that in some senses
the internet feels most like my hometown?
You find those like minds. This woman that I worked with at the boarding
school that’s the location the second book is based on, I asked
her one day how we found each other. I was so pleased that we were drawn
together out of this group of people, but I wondered how we knew that
we would be the ones that would get along.
She told me a story about a university in England where all the first
year students who were going to study psychology, the first thing the
faculty did was take them into this big meeting room. They would tell
them they weren’t allowed to speak, were told to take all the time
they wanted to complete this task but were told to group themselves with
the people they felt comfortable with. It would take a couple of hours
but by the end of it, when everyone felt happy with the little clump of
students they were standing with, the faculty would say, “Let’s
all introduce ourselves” and all the kids of alcoholics would be
standing together. They could sense their mental tribes.
You seek people out. The internet, again, is like having a great conversation
with a stranger on an airplane. Sometimes you can open up in a way that
you might not if you were face to face at a cocktail party. It can be
the foundation of tremendous intimacy in a very cool way and I think people
want that. It transcends geography and background.
I had a great conversation once with a very funny psychiatrist and I asked
if when he had clients who were writers if they tended to be depressed.
He looked at me and said, “Oh my God. My writers are all depressed.
My musicians are depressed with ADD but my painters, my painters are psychotic.”
I laughed, and he cracked up too. There’s something that touches
outsiderness that characterizes a lot of people who become writers, when
they’re children, whether it’s real or imagined, but they
do take that step back as observers. And chroniclers. They’ll look
at the circumstances they find themselves in and somehow feel that it’s
important to remember it.
It’s a human impulse, not to tell stories, but to listen and share
in the narrative.
When I was studying in Ireland, I spend the year studying under the faculty
of religion at Trinity College, Dublin and I remember this great guy,
Professor Mays, who spoke in a class on ancient Israel and he talked about
the oral tradition feeding into the Bible. Some places there are anachronisms
in the rendition of specific events and if you’re enough of a linguist
you can see something was narrated in different eras and they could separate
out different threads and attribute them to different writers.
He said in the modern era we tend not to trust oral tradition as much
as written because we’re so dependent on written records for interpreting
history and weighing documents.
Sandra
In Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death he talked about how
the oral tradition was not regarded as seriously by scholars as the written
tradition because what was uttered was not regarded with the same level
of seriousness as what somebody took the time to write because when they’d
written it, they had to stand behind it with their name. The internet
has changed the way that we communicate with each other and the way that
we’re able to connect with each other. We’ve gone from oral
traditions to written traditions. Now we’re moving into these technological
phases. Who knows what the future holds in terms of how far the internet
can go and what’s next?
But in your book, you’ve chosen to go pre-internet. What prompted
that?
Cornelia
For some reason, Syracuse had a huge pull to me. The first meeting of
my writing group was in a Starbucks and I volunteered to write something
for the next meeting. I was driving home from Starbucks that night thinking, “What
should I write about?” and I thought, “Wow, Syracuse.” That’s
when I was there. I moved there not long after college. I spent about
six months in Williamstown with my friend Candace and I met my husband,
Jim, at a party in New York City. That June I moved to Syracuse and was
there for three years, so my memories of it are 1986-1989.
It turned out to be a really happy accidental choice because no cell phones,
no internet. Answering machines were new.
Sandra
There’s a lot in your book that couldn’t work the same way
if there’d been internet.
Cornelia
Exactly. When the character of Dean, Madeline’s husband, is on the
railroad in Canada she has no way to get in touch with him. There’s
not even necessarily a radio in the rail grinder that he could even get
her with and they’re really out in the boonies on that because they’re
going across Canada on the railroad so there are times when they’re
75 miles from the nearest town, so she never knows when she’s going
to hear from him.
That was a tremendous boon as a fictional device, for her not to be able
to get in touch with people.
If I get to continue doing the series and bring it closer to modern times,
as it progresses I’m going to have to get way trickier at plotting.
It’s fascinating to me to look at mystery writers setting thing
in contemporary times and “Oh the heroine left her cell phone in
the car” or walks down into the dark basement in her high heels
with a flashlight. You have to make sure people are cut off from technology
or set everything in the boonies of the Rockies where there’s no
cell phone service.
I don’t have a cell phone at the moment.
Sandra
Not to touch on anything controversial, but when I was reading through
the book there’s actually a fair bit of commentary on the Vietnam
War that’s in the book. Did it concern you at all to be discussing
an unpopular war within the novel when people have varying views on the
current war?
Cornelia
We weren’t in this one when I started writing FIELD. I started it
the week before 9/11. The Vietnam War was such a seminal thing for me
as a kid that it was really something that I wanted to touch on because
it still is on my mind, a lot. Politically, during that war, it’s
nothing to me like it is now.
We’ve talked a little bit about Barry Eisler’s blog. It’s
so fascinating to see somebody bringing up politics because it’s
really scary to discuss politics now with people. The divisiveness. I’m
married to somebody who is a staunch Republican so sometimes I feel that
the only bipartisan dialogue in the country is happening in our kitchen.
As fraught with peril as that can be for our marital cohesiveness, I think
it’s really good to have that dialogue. It makes us really examine
our own positions.
The walls are so high between the different perspectives now that there’s
very little of that happening. For me, especially, having worked as a
fact checker, I want people to verify sources and examine their beliefs.
I think that doesn’t happen and people just shut down, and the arguments
are so vitriolic, so unbelievable. That’s a terrible thing, so I
commend Eisler for trying to start a political dialogue.
Sandra
The interesting thing to me is that you didn’t plan it this way
but it’s almost like it was meant to be, that by going back into
recent history, the pre-internet era, also looking at things like the
Vietnam War, in some ways it’s a safe position from which you examine
general philosophies that perhaps can be applied to today. Maybe people
feel more comfortable with it.
Cornelia
I don’t know. I hope so. And this ties into my whole “at a
loss for personal geographical fit” thing. My political outlook
is such a mixture, I don’t fit on either side. There are things
that I can think matter that are being said on both. I have whatever problems
I think with what the Bush camp is doing, but I think the Sierra Club
is a little Maoist as well and there’s an unwillingness to take
reality into consideration on both sides. Also, what is this thing with
both sides? How can there only be two sides? In this country, not having
parliamentary government in the same way as you guys do, there are a lot
of voices that get lost. I also look at the present political situation
in this country as being an outgrowth of focus groups. Whatever gets said
by the spokespeople is just because, “we’ll pick up three
points of backing if we say that we’ll adopt this plank in our platform” and
there doesn’t seem to be room anymore for an individual person to
stand up and be a leader and say, “Here’s the tough thing
that we need to do” or “Here’s what we need to stand
up for.”
I still have things that I think are outgrowths of the Vietnam War that
are really hard to stomach. I talked about Iran Contra a little bit in
the book, which was going on while I was in Syracuse. My husband’s
stance at the time was Ollie North had to follow orders, but anybody going
into the Marine Corps takes an oath to uphold the constitution. If you
don’t do that, if just following orders becomes an excuse, then
you end up needing the Nuremburg trials. There has to be individual conscience
and individual responsibility.
Sandra
That’s one of the things that really anchors the book, for me, how
much it brought back to my mind what it was like in ’89, as opposed
to what it’s like now. What people were thinking about, what was
important, what was going on right then in current world events.
Cornelia
That’s, to me, why crime fiction is so good these days. I think
people are taking on deep, visceral issues within it, and I think that’s
something that binds us as a community of writers and readers. There’s
a deep personal investment in justice and responsibility. What is right?
How do you navigate society and your own life? How can you be the best
person you can be? That’s tough to do. When you see injustice and
non-ethical behavior carried out to its furthest ramifications, you end
up with violence, cruelty, bloodshed and atrocity. That’s a really
big deal to me.
I’ve heard Lee Child talk about that, when asked why he thinks his
Jack Reacher series has such a wide female audience. It seems surprising--that
the series would be kind of a Rambo thing, and would really appeal to
guys--and Lee said he thinks women are more deeply invested in justice,
in fairness--we want to see justice done even if it’s against the
rules--and that Reacher fulfills that need for us.
Sandra
How else do you make sense of some of the craziness in society? Right
now people are being ostracized, alienated, the victims of race crimes
just because of their last name or the fact that they go to a mosque instead
of going to a church or synagogue. This has somehow become almost acceptable
since 9/11. It’s become understandable, in a way, but with some
it’s almost expected. How do you make sense of what it’s like
for those people and what it’s like for law enforcement to deal
with some of these new issues?
Cornelia
It’s so cyclical. You see it over and over again, mostly in war
time. To look back at internment camps in this country, in World War II… here’s
another Canadian tidbit … in sixth grade we had our first big paper
to write, and the whole thing was focused on Canada. We had to pick five
topics and write five pages on each topic--anything about Canada.
I was wandering through the library in my middle school and there were
these army green boxes of pamphlets that had been published by the National
Geographic in 1943 and each box was about a different country. There were
about 20 of them up on this high shelf.
One of the boxes was about Canada so I took it down, and one of these
leaflets – they were each about 30 pages long on really bad paper.
I guess it was when paper was being rationed-- One of the pamphlets was
war time in Canada. Being in California I’d certainly heard about
internment of Japanese people and in this Canadian thing was an internment
camp for Germans. It was probably prisoners of war. There was a photograph
of people in a cabbage field and it said, “Germans forced to pick
their own kraut.”
Just to think about what fear can make us do. Shirley Jackson’s “The
Lottery” story – the whole idea that you can find something
to vilify, as a scapegoat, to expiate your own terror…
We all like to believe that we are better people than that, and we would
be immune to it. We’re not. Any of us.
A quote that I’ve talked about a lot in interviews is something
that I read years ago from Alexander Solhenitzyn’s THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO:
“
If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere
insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate
them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good
and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing
to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
One of my daughter Lila’s teachers is a Turkish-American woman who
is a devout Muslim. She has a beautiful tattoo of the crescent and star
on the back of her hand.
The week after 9/11, I said, “What is it like for you to be a Muslim,
right now?”
She said for her to see “on the news at night that old women are
being forced to stand against the wall in American airports so they can
be searched is just so sad for me, but what you have to understand is
that somebody like Bin Laden hates me more than he hates you. That man
cannot stand the idea that there are liberal Muslims in the world who
want to coexist, and who have appreciation for other cultures as much
as their own.”
Have you ever read HELTER SKELTER? It’s about the Manson family.
Charles Manson’s was trying to instigate race war, because he thought
that the only way the world could be saved was basically if all the black
people were killed. According to the author of that book, Vincent Bugliosi,
Manson was hoping that these murders would be blamed on black people so
that it would precipitate race war.
To me, the heart of the purest form of evil is about division. About not
being able to see community.
Sandra
The whole idea of isolating people gives a false sense of security.
Cornelia
Absolutely.
Sandra
You’ve been shattering all the old jokes that Americans know nothing
about Canada.
Cornelia
I don’t know as much as I should.
Sandra
Do I know as much about American history as I should? You know an awful
lot, but I think you’ll find this interesting. I grew up in Gravenhurst,
Ontario, and I lived in the same house for twenty years, other than when
I was overseas. Something I never knew until I went to college was that
one of the Japanese internment camps was in Gravenhurst.
When I was told about this, I knew exactly where it was, but do you think
the local people talk about that, remember that? This is why these things
happen again and again and history repeats itself. We let ourselves forget
about our sins in the past, we bury that and hide it away and we’ll
turn around and do the exact same thing next time.
Cornelia
That’s the lesson of the Holocaust. Sophistication and mechanization
and thinking of ourselves as modern is no protection against giving in
to our most base and horrifying instincts. What we can allow to happen
out of fear is just really scary to me.
Again, I think that feeling of being that I was “other” as
a child made me very sensitive to that, and worried about it, I always
was super-quick to be leery of group-think, which is something I get into
in the second book a lot. Teaching at a school that was sort of a cult,
where people wanted to say, “If I tell you it’s black, even
if you see it as white, you have to go along with it.” To see people
go along with things like that for comfort is appalling.
My husband Jim often talks about one of The Night of the Living Dead movies.
The zombies all go to a mall and somebody says, “Why are they all
coming to the mall?” and the other person says, “They come
to belong.” There’s an awful lot of coming to bad things to
belong, whether it’s politics or religion or the Klan… anything
that’s built on exclusion is terrifying.
Sandra
This goes throughout the first book. When I think about Madeline and how
she deals with her family. There’s that sense of her being part
of this extended family, she has certain family obligations, she knows
these people and yet she’s not one of them. And without giving anything
away, for her, she was making choices all the way through and the choices
were between the truth and loyalty.
Cornelia
That was sort of the heart of the story to me because it’s so much
a part of my life. I’ve had access to tremendous privilege if not
actually any money as a result of that background. I got a scholarship
to go to boarding school and I was the only non-minority kid in the whole
school who had a full scholarship. It was because I was an alumnae daughter,
and we didn’t have enough money for me to go. They invented an alumnae
daughter scholarship that year for me. Without having that personal connection,
would that have happened? No way.
And that place saved my life. It was such a haven. If I hadn’t gotten
out of Carmel, I don’t know what would have happened to me. As beautiful
and luxurious as it can be in many ways, it was a tough place to be, wearing
Goodwill clothes to school. We were so broke when I was a kid that we
had to bring home our aluminum foil in our lunchboxes so Mom could use
it again, and meanwhile my dad was living in his car. Not exactly the
king of child support payments, that guy.
Then I would go back east to Buffalo, where my cousins had their own polo
field.
The scene that happens between Madeline and Kenny in the book, when Kenny
says to her she just wants to get her cousin off because he’s “her
people” and “you don’t care about anybody else” and
she says that’s not home, that’s not my people, “I was
hoping my people was you, Kenny.”
Sandra
You’ve had huge transitions in the past few years, but particularly
this past month you’ve had a lot going on. How are you coping?
Cornelia
It’s scary. It’s so wonderful and yet there’s an undercurrent
of fear about it, for me. I was talking to a great friend from college
and I said, “What is wrong with me? I should just be so happy, there’s
nothing bad right now that’s happening to me. It’s my wildest
dreams coming true. And I’m freaking out, I occasionally wake up
in the middle of the night, worrying about it.”
She told me I had to realize I was “expanding my capacity for joy,” and
that that can be a really difficult and scary thing to do. And that’s
very true.
Sandra
You’ve had a lot of positive reviews, you’ve had a lot of
great blurbs, great endorsements by people who are well respected in the
crime writing community. How does that affect you in terms of pressure?
Cornelia
A lot. I’m very nervous that the second book won’t live up
to the first one, and that the first one was a fluke. It can be paralyzing.
A lot of it depends on how much sleep I’ve gotten. I feel a tremendous
pressure to perform, and to be able to pay that kindness back and forward
to people.
I have been so blessed with support, --beyond my most outrageous fantasies.
I want to be worthy of that. Even going to Bouchercon in Chicago last
year, to have a few people come up to me and say, “We’ve heard
of you,” and to be recognized. My God, that’s so wonderful.
I don’t want to “not recognize” anybody else. It’s
a terror for me to think that I would ever make somebody feel unappreciated,
who has done something kind for me.
Sandra
Well, even just the other day you said in an email to me that you were
writing thank-you cards to people, and I can’t remember the last
time I even went to a wedding or gave a baby gift and got a thank-you
card. It’s such a lost art, and yet you’re taking the time
to write thank-you cards to people that are helping you with your career.
Cornelia
That matters to me. People go out of their way to be kind, and I want
them to know how much it means to me.
Sandra
I know how conscientious you are about wanting to pay it forward and be
supportive of people because you’ve given me a lot of encouragement
but you’re more pressed for time now than ever. It’s got to
be hard, because you really want to do all of these things – blurb
books, write back to everybody – and yet you’re struggling
with the deadline to book #2 and you’ve got to go out and do all
these signings and you’re on the phone with Canada and you’re
putting me on hold while somebody else is phoning up wanting to interview
you for a magazine. You’re in demand. How are you finding the scheduling?
Cornelia
Hard. Very hard. And I’m not getting everything done that I should
get done. I’m not getting as much writing done as I should. I have
about five Q&A interviews that people have asked me to do for different
blogs that I haven’t done and I don’t want to say no. I mean,
what an honor to be asked. And from a business sense, of course I want
to do an interview. I hope that it’s helpful and it might turn somebody
on to the book and be a good career thing. If I’m lucky enough that
the interest continues, I’m going to have to learn how to say no.
It’s really hard for me, but I think it’s worse to say yes
and commit yourself to something that you can’t physically do and
let people down that way.
Sandra
It must be very surreal, that people care what you’re doing, what
you think.
Cornelia
How is it for you? You’re getting great feedback. Does it feel surreal
for you or can you take it in?
Sandra
I always think that it must be a practical joke. It’s very weird.
Cornelia
I totally expect the same thing to happen to you. Your good feedback is
going to build and build.
Sandra
I don’t know about that. You and I have had different journeys getting
to where we are and we’re not even in the same place and I think
for me now that it’s almost too soon. I’m afraid of letting
people down.
It’s funny because the last time we talked, I remember you saying
to me, “Wow, the ezine and the short stories. You’re doing
all this other stuff.” The problem for me is that I’m hiding
behind all of that because it keeps me from stopping long enough to think.
If I ever stop running for too long right now, I’ll scare myself
senseless. I won’t know how to cope with it.
Cornelia
Exactly.
Sandra
The people I’ve been able to connect with online have been saving
me from myself or my ignorance. To be able to get advice is incredible.
And one of the things that I appreciate is that people are willing to
share from their experience in the hopes that it will benefit somebody
else.
That’s one of the great things about being able to do these interviews,
because I always get to ask what authors recommend to people who are starting
out in the business. So Cornelia, what suggestions do you have right now
for people that are trying to get a book deal?
Cornelia
Stick with it. Keep writing, keep polishing. Don’t be discouraged.
There’s not a secret handshake. It really is about the work. It’s
not about who you know. If you can invest yourself in the writing and
do the very best job that you can, the support will be there. I get discouraged
when I see people giving up and deciding publishing wants to keep out
outsiders. I don’t think that that’s the case. There’s
always going to be a hand into the lifeboat if you try as hard as you
can to do your best work and to be kind. That’s how it’s happened
for me.
And to have the courage to take the risk to do the queries. They can’t
eat you. If somebody says no, it’s not the end of the world.
I read an interesting piece of advice on an agent’s website. They
said if anybody can talk you out of writing, let them. You have to want
it so badly that the writing itself has to be what matters. That has to
be the drive. We all have our moments when we think “Wouldn’t
it be great if I got on Oprah” but the actual rewards are finishing
a good page. That’s what’s real. Being open to critique. Sharing
your work. Putting it out there and having the courage to try and to know
it’s okay to fall on your ass.
I struggle with that every day, the fear. What if the next book isn’t
as good or if I say something wrong in a comment on this blog or what
if I sound pompous in an interview or what if I make a fool of myself.
You can’t let that fear stop you. You will make a fool of yourself
at some point but it’s okay.
Sandra
Well, you and I have also talked about this as well, being very open with
our pasts. It’s like you’ve diffused a weapon. Nobody can
hold it against you. It is the same thing, when you put yourself out there
publicly, you have to be real. Sooner or later people are going to find
out who you really are. Why not make it sooner? If somebody is going to
judge me because I’m a hot-headed Canadian, they may as well just
get over it now.
You’re not going to please everybody all the time, but it’s
hard because I believe it’s within your personality, you really
want everybody to like what you’re doing and if you think that people
aren’t satisfied with what you’ve done, you’ve let them
down.
Cornelia
Yes. That’s my first response. Not, “this book wasn’t
their cup of tea” but “I’m an asshole who disappointed
them.”
I’m getting my first Amazon reviews coming in. One woman said for
the first 50 pages, Madeline was so whiny and there was no story and “it
was just her opinions on everything and I couldn’t stand it and
I almost dropped the book.” She said the second half made up for
it, though, and she was glad she stuck with it.
But for me, because there’s a lot of autobiographical stuff, Madeline
is very similar to me and a lot of the smaller details of things she experiences
are culled from my own, so if somebody hates it or thinks Madeline’s
an idiot, that’s a lot of me they’re hating. I read my sister
the review from Library Journal and she said, “Isn’t this
weird? Because it’s kind of like they’re critiquing our life.”
Sandra
I think you have a problem right from the outset of identifying too closely
with your protagonist.
Cornelia
Oh, probably.
Sandra
Whereas other people over time have eventually grown into being like their
protagonist. Perhaps you’re going to have that gulf widen over time.
Cornelia
For it to work as a book, I had to make Madeline less like me, which was
a really interesting process, too, because when, you know, you were talking
earlier about doing interviews as a journalist and asking the tough questions,?
I could never do that, which is why I was writing about bath soap and
chicken wings.
I don’t have a confrontation gene at all. There were points in the
book where Madeline really had to rattle people to get information and
not just have it fall into her lap. Even fictionally, because in the early
draft she was so much more like me, I was writing myself and how I’d
react in that situation, and I literally didn’t know how to do it.
I couldn’t even write her questioning somebody….
In the scene where she’s talking to the silhouette artist at the
fair, and she’s got to push him, I didn’t know how to do that.
Both my agent and editor were saying, “Look, you know, she’s
investigating. She’s got to go for the jugular. She’s got
to make this man talk to her and she can’t pussy-foot around and
just have the mystery solve itself. She’s too passive.”
That is the main difference between Madeline Dare and me. She’s
tougher, she’s a better shot, and she’s less messy. We still
have the same tattoos, though.
David Corbett gave me a hard time about that. He said I couldn’t
say it was all me, because people want to think it’s your imagination.
It’s still my imagination, but for me, often the creativity lies
in what to leave out, and not to get carried off into digression about
salad forks or whatever.
Sandra
All of our characters have something about ourselves in them, even if
it’s all the things we reject.
Cornelia
Absolutely.
Sandra
Doesn’t it start with thinking, as a kid, if only you’d had
the guts to say that in that situation or to do this, but you couldn’t?
And then you take those ideas and you give them to somebody else.
Cornelia
Definitely. The fiction I wrote as a kid was pure wish fulfillment. It’s
excruciating to revisit--I made all these people who hated me in fourth
grade be my best friends, and I always got a pony at the end.
I have this little child-spy story that I wrote in sixth grade --the title
is Call Me Stringbean because the character is skinny and her mother thinks
she should be a child model and she gets to have this wonderful adventure
with her dad, who’s a spy. Everybody’s happy and she saves
the day in the end.
I wanted to be skinny and hang out with my dad. It’s kind of sad.
But I guess it was my first stand-alone thriller.
Sandra
I have to ask you about one thing in the book. Do women’s breasts
on the racquet side really get bigger?
Cornelia
I have no idea but that was a real guy who sent me packets of coupons.
An article I wrote for the Syracuse newspaper was about people who’d
met through the personal ads in the paper and it was their Valentine’s
Day issue. For the next year I would get these manila envelopes filled
with toilet paper coupons and clippings from the National Enquirer and
he would jot notes on them. It was a recipe and he wrote on the bottom, “Have
you ever noticed that when you play tennis with a woman that at then end
of about an hour her breast on the racquet side will be larger?”
I have to say that the few times I’ve played tennis since, I’ve
made a point of NOT checking….
For more information about Cornelia Read and her debut novel, A Field of Darkness, visit her website at www.CorneliaRead.com or check out her blog posts, Wednesdays, at www.NakedAuthors.com.
The Spring Issue of SPINETINGLER Magazine featured part one of Sandra's
interview with Cornelia, discussing her background and early experiences
and her family. This issue also contains Sandra's Review of "A
Field of Darkness". |
