Ep 227 Themes and Retellings with Jeanne Blasberg
Pencils&Lipstick podcast ·
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Transcript
SPEAKER_00
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Hello
SPEAKER_00
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everyone, welcome back to Pencils and Lipstick. This is episode 227 and I'm Kat Caldwell, your hostess, and today I have an interview with Jean Blasberg. We are going to talk about her latest book, Daughter of Promise. And I really enjoyed this conversation. I know I say that about every conversation that I have with people, but Jean Blasberg writes literary fiction. And so anybody who is thinking you want to go more the literary fiction route, I think that Jean has a lot of information for you, a lot of advice for you. Her way of going about writing is different from what I've heard other people say. She took some classes that she talks about. I have all those links in the show notes below because she was sweet enough to send them to me. And at the end, she mentions Grub Street. I later say Grub Hub. It's not the same thing.
SPEAKER_00
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So I put the links in the show notes below as well. I recommend that you get her books, you know, when you, when you're a writer. Okay, I'll say this. Whatever you're writing, whether it's genre fiction, whether it's literary fiction, you should have themes to your books. And you should not shy away from themes that interest you because I think that the reader sees if you're bored or not. And when if you want really rich characters, even if they're fighting aliens or if they are fighting the big bad wolf of Wall Street, they need substance to them. They need your interest and your beliefs and other belief systems that you have investigated in order for them to be really relatable. And relatable not meaning that the reader agrees with everything that your character does, but relatable as a human being and as somebody that they've probably met at some point in their life, right? So I would take a listen to this episode and understand that even if you aren't writing literary fiction, that a lot of what Jean has to say it translates genre fiction. Remember that before the Kindle, while we still had genres, writers were still writing about the world and society and themes that interested them, right? So before we we decided to have a million different, you know, branched off genres and everything was kind of under just general fiction, right? Even if it was a mystery, if it was a thriller, if it was horror, if it was sci -fi, a lot of the sci -fi writers were writing commentary on society at large and so they were taking their
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beliefs and what they're seeing and taking those themes of the past and what they saw the future might be and putting them into the context of their story so don't shy away from the word theme when she says it is that's all I want to say okay so it is coming to the end of April. Now it's finally warming up here in Virginia so I'm excited about that. May is going to be a jam -packed month. I am actually leaving in just two weeks for Cuba for a humanitarian trip with a Christian group. We're gonna be working at a clinic and I am super excited about that. So the episodes going out will be kind of pre -recorded and set up. You know I kind to pre -record anyway in advance but those will definitely be sort of timed out out there but if you guys want to follow a little bit of what I'm doing I probably won't post pictures about Cuba until after we are home that is just for safety of the people that we are going to go work with but I will post a couple things especially to my newsletter so again the links are in the show notes below sign up for my newsletter if you're a writer sign up for the writers newsletter if you're a reader sign up for that one if you're both sign up for both I probably share a little bit more a lot more on the newsletters than I will be sharing in social media again just for safety of the people who we are helping out right lots of things are happening in this world and there are sort of rules around that and keep that in mind if ever you want to go on a humanitarian effort to keep your social media like confined anyway that has
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nothing to do with writing. So let's get into the episode and listen to Jean Blasberg talk about her latest book, Daughter of a Promise. All right. Today I have with me Jean Blasberg. Thank you for coming and joining us on the show, Jean.
SPEAKER_01
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Thanks Kat. I'm excited to be here.
SPEAKER_00
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I'm excited to talk to you because I was looking at this the latest book that you have, Daughter of Promise. It sounds really intriguing. But before we get into that book and the other books that you have, would you tell us just a little bit about yourself? Sure.
SPEAKER_01
00:05:25
I am a 58 -year -old mother of three grown children. I am an athlete and And I have lived in the Northeast for a good chunk of my life, but recently moved to Park City, Utah for part of the year and spend a lot of time on a farm we recently purchased. Yeah, in Madison, Wisconsin.
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So
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I kind of had one of those blow up moments during COVID and decided to make some major changes. But luckily writing is transportable.
SPEAKER_00
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Yes, this is true. What did your children think about this? Are they anywhere close to those two places?
SPEAKER_01
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My three children are in Brooklyn, New York, and they are a wonderful unit of three and do a lot of things together. And our family has a tradition of going to Rhode Island in the summer. So that tradition stays intact. act. And I just kind of come in as an as a house guest as well to that tradition as opposed to hosting it. But yeah, we still spend a lot of time together as a family, the three of them, and
SPEAKER_01
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then they'd love to come to Park City. So that was for them not a bad place for their parents.
SPEAKER_00
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When they think about Madison, Wisconsin, that seems like a bit of a random place.
SPEAKER_01
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Yeah, well, I think they're really proud of the mission. We are getting into this regenerative food movement and converting a traditional conventional chemical, well, a farm that did not use regenerative practices or organic practices to grow vegetables for human consumption. And, you know, we're getting the food out there to people who need it. It's not just the 1 % who can afford farm to table say. Yeah, so I think our kids are pretty proud that mom and dad are venturing into a new business. You know, when a lot of our friends are playing golf and hanging out on the beach. Yeah,
SPEAKER_00
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yeah, this conversation, I swear, we'll get back to books. But I was talking to a friend of mine, we both grew up in the country, I actually grew up outside of Madison, Wisconsin, about 3030 miles. Oh, you must know Verona. That's where you're in Verona. So I'm on the other side. I was from DeForest. And we were talking about how real food used to be cheap, like inaccessible. And now we're both in outside of DC and it is not cheap and it is not accessible and not even, it's not even good food. That's also expensive. Like it just, it seems so backwards to how we grew up or like, you know, going to the co -op was like what poor people did. That's what we, you know, we drove up and like women in long skirts and handkerchiefs and their hair would stick food in our cars. And now it's like the posh thing to do, and now people can't afford it. It just, it seems so backwards. Well,
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we have a lot in common then. That's kind of why we got into this. That's I think people who grow up in the city
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have this romantic idea of farm or rural life. And I'm quickly learning it is hard work. And makes me feel like I have a purpose every morning, but my muscles hurt and my back hurts and it's hot. So anyway, I feel like it's an exciting new change though and
SPEAKER_00
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challenge. Yeah, is very exciting. Okay. So how then do you fit that into, how do you fit your writing into caring for this farm?
SPEAKER_01
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Yeah. So the farm came into our lives. We found this piece of property we'd been looking for a little bit, but 2022 is when we bought the farm. So we're just going into our second growing season. And you know, this really shines a light on how long the
SPEAKER_01
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publishing queue is for novels. But the book Daughter of a Promise, which comes out, which is out, you know, is brand new is was finished and in the can and kind of off being marketed when we bought the farm. So in a way, once things got hot and heavy with the farm, I was following up with a lot of revisions and things like that. But I wasn't in that space where I was trying to create something new and the balance has worked well. Even though there's a lot going on on the farm, I find that like, I don't really have a social life there when I'm there and I have a lot of free time to do like deep thinking. That's
SPEAKER_00
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true, yeah.
SPEAKER_01
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Now, like it doesn't really matter, I don't know, where I am, it's kind of where I am in the cycle of the writing. So the cycle of the writing hit well with the farm, you know, I still write a little, I write every day and I am working on a new piece, but I, I do think it's getting a little short shrift because of the farm stuff, but you know, there'll be a time when the farm is a little bit more like on its own. I'm or not on its own, but you know, I'm not in such a supervisory role. and so hands -on that I can step back. But I do see my future works really incorporating some of what I'm learning and also just the journey on the farm. Maybe my next piece or my next longer piece might be a bit of a memoir about my relationship with food, transparency in our food system, and why we decided to do this and the challenges.
SPEAKER_00
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That would be really interesting.
SPEAKER_01
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Yeah. So anyway, I think I typically incorporate what's going on in my life somehow in my writing. And when your life is interesting and full of new characters, it gives you good things to write about.
SPEAKER_00
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That's so true. We have to leave our houses, don't we, in order to really expand.
SPEAKER_01
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That's why I also think, you know, I look at people who have these ambitions of publishing at an early age. And my first novel was published when I was like in my early 50s. And feel like, well, I mean, even though I'd started writing it a long time, 10 years before that, I like life experience and just like emotional intelligence and all that goes with having lived a few decades is pretty helpful, especially when it comes to writing novels and rich characters.
SPEAKER_00
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Yeah, I think especially with the characters, right, I think you can tell just how developed characters are and the emotional responses that they might have.
SPEAKER_01
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Yeah, my book club one time hosted a young author whose book was fabulous, but two characters were in like a 30 -year marriage. And some of the things that they have, their strategies for resolving things and their relationship, my friends and I all looked at this young woman and we were like, we're not buying this at all.
SPEAKER_01
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But you what did she know about a 30 -year marriage, you know, at that stage?
SPEAKER_00
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Yeah, that's true. But you know, that's a good reminder to authors and writers to get out there and talk to people. Like if you have a character that's much older than you, you should probably go talk to people who have lived that long and make sure they're going to react that way, you know? Cause we do, we change, don't we? We, like a mom who's 20 is definitely different than a mom who's 40. Like that's just. Absolutely. Maturity, hopefully, you know, like, yeah. And just the way that we're going to react and have patience or no patience, too. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So when you
SPEAKER_00
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you started writing, you said you started writing years before your first one got published. But what made you write? Have you always been a writer? Have you always wanted to write a novel?
SPEAKER_01
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Yeah, well, I can go back to like my earliest days. I've always had a very active imagination. And I think that comes from being, well, I'm an only child and I did play by myself a lot. And I had imaginary friends up until a very embarrassing age. But I wrote stories and wrote, you know, made little books when I was a little girl. I've always loved to write. I was in kind of on a creative writing track in college, but then decided that I really wanted to live New York City and be able to support myself and not have to ask my parents for any support, so I went into investment banking. And that was completely not something I had been, like, I went to a liberal arts college, a small liberal arts college and majored in art history and American or American studies and art history. So anyway, that was kind of an unexpected leap for everybody who knew me. But it was like this moment of being really practical and really worried about being able to support myself. That job turned into a job in a big department store company in Cincinnati, which then when I moved to Boston, turned into a job working for a professor of retailing at Harvard Business School. The Harvard Business School method is the case studies. So I was writing the case studies for his class. And I had like this knowledge of retailing from my role at the department store company
SPEAKER_01
00:15:21
and it really worked well. And it was this job where I was being paid to write cases that were, they had to be entertaining because the students had to read five a night or, you know, between five a night. Yeah, so they had to be a certain length, they had to be entertaining. There was a protagonist in terms of like the corporate, what the corporate problem was. There was usually a person involved, there was a problem, a conflict, and then you kind of left it open ended so that that was what led into the class discussion. I really loved doing it, and I also really loved the lifestyle, because by that time I had three little kids, and they were three kids in four years, and I was able to kind of balance this writing and, you know, somewhat be present with them during the day. I think I was always tired. The professor I worked for retired, and I kind of transitioned to just focusing on my kids full time. My husband's job was one that required a lot of travel, so we made a deal that both of us couldn't have a lot of pressure in our work.
SPEAKER_01
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And I was like, I think this writing thing is the way I want to go. And we were raising our kids in downtown Boston, and I was able to continue, once I started having some babysitters, I'd go to classes at night, Harvard Extension School, Cambridge School for Adult Education, so much great around both, you know, journalism or short story writing or personal essays, and I got really hooked on this class called Writing From Your Own Experience. It was at the Cambridge School for adult education. And was taught by a woman named Mopsy Strange Kennedy, who was kind of a local celebrity having written for like the improper Bostonian, the Globe, she, she's worked at a lot of magazines. And it was this kind of class that you take, and you feel lucky to get in. And every 10 weeks when registration opened again, everyone in the class would sign up really fast. So no one else. I feel like I was with these
SPEAKER_01
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people for three or four years and every essay prompt Mopsy gave us it could be like walk down your sidewalk and see what's on your neighbor's front porch and then write a story about what you see or write a story about the trees on your walk and every time I'd come back and my essay would wind its way back to me and my mother and something about my mother so it became very obvious. I it was great. I taking this class, but I had things to work out. And, and I also started seeing themes and what I was really interested in, in terms of the relationships between the generations between children and parents and children and grandparents and a lot to do with what you subconsciously inherit and patterns and secrets and misunderstandings and how resentments might get built up. And I had this idea for a novel. So this would have been in like my early to mid forties. And I thought nobody wants to read about me and my family but I think I could create a fictional family that if I have everybody be the right age and born in the right year, I could kind of create just this cacophony of these issues. And I could maybe display these themes
SPEAKER_01
00:19:10
that I'm so interested in, in the story of a family that's kind of undergoing like a real crisis moment in the year 2000 with everything coming to a head. And so I worked on that for a long time. And that's the novel called Eden, which was published in 2017. But while I was working on it, you know, and people were helping and I was taking classes along the way, I'd get a lot of feedback that this is really ambitious. Like your writing is great, but and like all these generations of women in this long timeframe, it's really ambitious.
SPEAKER_01
00:19:48
You should, you should, I don't know, it's, it's a lot for your first novel and the plot's not there. There's not a lot of action, just a lot of interiority with these women and these mothers and these daughters. And anyway, I felt like that was valid feedback and I put it on a shelf and I had this other story burning inside of me that was really action -packed. And at that point, my kids were at this age where I was sending them off in the world and our eldest son had gone to boarding school and the younger two decided they wanted to go to boarding school and they all went to different schools. So here I am hearing these stories about all these different schools and at the same time there was news coming out in the Boston Globe about sexual impropriety and and awful things that had been covered up in different boarding schools in New England over decades. And it was awful. And here I am this mom thinking she was giving her kids this amazing opportunity to go to these great elite schools. And I, I still think they got
SPEAKER_01
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great educations. But you know, I had this story burning inside me. So it's the story of a mother and a son, but the son gets wrapped up in a secret society. And there's a crime going on at a school. And he's kind of made the scapegoat. So Yeah, but anyway, so that's my second novel called The Nine. And when I was writing that, the same teachers were like, this is great. This is an amazing fast paced. So you should get this published first, you know, forget about those four generations of women.
SPEAKER_01
00:21:30
But in my head, I was like, if I'm going to get anything published, it is I've got to go back to that first novel and work on it some more. now that I kind of know how to write a little more action and get a plot put together. So anyway, that's a really long drawn out story. But I do think that I draw on what's going on in my life to really the emote, like, the nine has a lot of action. But in the end, I think it's really the story of a mother and son and their evolving relationship as she's kind of he's her whole world and she's his whole world and then he leaves and they both have to like figure out their own stuff
SPEAKER_00
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yeah yeah and then you have to figure out is he the person you thought he was and I mean that sounds really
SPEAKER_00
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intriguing but but I think it's interesting to how I think many writers draw off of their own lives right but it's interesting what you're saying how you're going to these classes and you have this idea but it actually takes sometimes a long time for that idea to germinate and like become something that can be a book, right? Like this idea is sometimes not enough. You may have
SPEAKER_01
00:22:42
heard this, this adage that memoirists write what was real and then kind of make meaning of it and draw the themes out. And I think novelists come into it, into a project with themes they're really interested in and have to create like a real story in order to explore those themes. And so I always had like these ideas of great themes and great characters, but it needed that scaffolding of story and to understand how to keep the pacing and the interest level up around stuff happening. And I always felt like I was really good at, or I am, I think, good at dialogue and subtext and the interplay between two people on the page. But that's not, you can't just hang a novel on that. People expect to be turning the page to see what happens. And And then all of the richness that you bring to your characters is what makes it, you finish the book and you're like, Oh my gosh, I feel like I kind of know these people. I inside their head. But you don't, you can't just last for 300 pages on the interpersonal relationships. So what
SPEAKER_00
00:24:11
I kind of what you were what you were working on before with the professor, probably really like brought out that natural talent in you and where you're bringing to the page that the interpersonal relationships because then you need the class to talk about what is ethical, right? And what is happening in the business world. And
SPEAKER_01
00:24:31
have to say like those cases maybe were four pages. We didn't get too deep into people's like motivation and everything, but we did try to make them as dense and rich as possible. And professor I worked for, His name was Walter Salmon, and what he really taught me was great editing skills, how to say things clearly and concisely and not repeat yourself. And so I'm pretty good at getting down to a word count.
SPEAKER_00
00:25:00
Yeah, having a pretty clean manuscript, which is like a lot of, these are all things that we have to learn, right? In some way or another, when you decide that you have a story to tell and you wanna write it, I mean, we either get the feedback from the editor or we get the feedback from the agent or the reader. You like that would be the last place you want to get it from, really.
SPEAKER_00
00:25:22
Like we want them to like the book, but we definitely don't want them to be like, this could be 40 ,000 words shorter, like that, you know, we don't want that. But these are all things we need to learn the story, the plot, the scaffolding, as you call it, the interpersonal relationships, the dialogue, it's so much, right? Like the whole novel is a lot.
SPEAKER_01
00:25:42
That's, it's a long process. And a teacher I had a few years ago said, writing a novel is the most inefficient thing you'll ever do. It's like time isn't linear in terms of when things come to you. And every, every edit and pass through the novel, you are changing things, hopefully for the better. you will write a new ending, which then says, I need a new beginning. And then you redo that. And have a story, but you have all sorts of choices around how it's going to be revealed. And at what point you're going to start the action, how much is in flashback, how much is in the present. It's a multitude of choices and it's kind of fun. And yeah, but it is, for me, it takes a really long time.
SPEAKER_00
00:26:37
Yeah. Yeah, I think you also said in the very beginning, like you now get that time to think. And I think that's really important. And I've been talking about that for probably a year and a half now,
SPEAKER_00
00:26:48
like even with all the things going on constantly in the world and probably with your second book, The Nine, with all that was probably pretty stressful. They'd be hearing stories and to have your kids out of the house and all that you have to give yourself time to think and process as a writer otherwise it's not it's not going to come together how it could you know unless if you don't give yourself that time yeah i
SPEAKER_01
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do yeah i think i do benefit from enjoying being alone
SPEAKER_00
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yes i think all of us are slightly introvert we just need to like use that time but the so i i'm assuming then daughter of promise is based a little bit off of your life because she goes to wall street and you worked in finance as well so is that is that true there's a base a little bit on your your first college i wanted
SPEAKER_01
00:27:41
to be yes and i i always pictured writing something about those years because boy were they filled with jaw -dropping uh moments and and that feeling of being in over your head that I don't think was unique to me. It's probably that first big job feeling. But I have to go back to another, I just want to back up to something that I find really interesting and what has become a theme in my books. And it's not necessary for the readers to be kind of on the same page at all, but my first book is called Eden, which you can guess from the title is kind of a reflection on paradise. And it has to do with this summer home that this family has kind of made sacred for them. And nine is actually based, it's launched off of, and this is in the epigraph, so you kind of are set up for it when you start to the book. But in the book of Samuel, there was a woman named Hannah, and she was infertile and prayed to the Lord for a child. And if she were to bear a son, she would turn him over to the temple when he was weaned. And a way, my... And I named my characters Hannah and Sam. And that feeling of trust in an institution and that feeling of wanting a child so much and being judged on whether you are fertile or barren. And it kind of goes back to some ancient constructs around women and their fertility. But I was interested on playing off
SPEAKER_01
00:29:22
of that as kind of turning her into this modern helicopter mom. And now with Daughter of a Promise, I've also borrowed. This is the this time I've borrowed way more closely to the plot of a biblical story. It the love story of David and Bathsheba, and you can call it a love story. You can call it non consensual relationship or consensual, but they do eventually marry and have a child named Solomon who becomes the next king of Israel after David. And so my protagonist is named Betsabe. The book is set in 2019 and 2020. She is writing this book from, the book is told in the form of a letter she is writing at some point in the future to her unborn son named Sol, which is Spanish for sun or, you know, of the most or the most fiery star in the sky
SPEAKER_01
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is what she says. But she's now looking back at this year in her life where everything changed for her. She started this job, she fell in love a couple of times, she COVID hit, don't wanna give it away what else happens but big stuff happens to her and then she suffers great loss and tragedy. And so the theme of the book is really, you think you're gonna learn everything there is to know in New York City, big skyscrapers, sexy job,
SPEAKER_01
00:31:00
all this important power and money flying around. But in the end, what the wisdom she realizes she wants to pass down in this letter is everything she learned from her mother and grandmother in Miami. So it's a coming of age story. It's kind of a unorthodox love story, I like to say. And it's the story of a young woman and her empowerment and realizing that the people who raised her really did know everything,
SPEAKER_01
00:31:34
even though she felt like she had to go beyond her family and her roots in order to learn how to be an adult. So I really love the book. I worked on it during COVID, therefore COVID and the domestic drama that happened during COVID, like those early months.
SPEAKER_00
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We
SPEAKER_01
00:31:54
all will recognize kind of the rituals we all went through with the food and the mail and going outside and everything. But I don't know, this is a young woman who is from Little Havana and of Cuban American descent. So not my background and my culture, but definitely I infused her with the feeling of, I've got to work really hard to do this job. And so she feels a little behind the eight ball when she starts, but she works so hard, you know, she ends up being kind of the star of her training class. And then, yeah, a lot of stuff happens. And it's, it just does bring you back at any age, to those times when you're feeling a little vulnerable and ill prepared, and
SPEAKER_01
00:32:51
looking for a mentor. In her case, she's also been raised without a father. So she's subconsciously always looking for that father figure in her life. And so I would say that if you knew the story of David and Bathsheba and you read this novel, you'd have a lot of fun Easter eggs. You'd be like, oh, wow, that's a great way to do this or that's a great way to do that. So I could fall back on that as my plot, which I really find to be useful. I think retellings are an amazing opportunity to just show the timeless nature of the human condition and our emotions around love and desire and needing to belong. They've been that way since the Old Testament was written and we're, you know, anyhow. Now, so I will say yes, Betsabe has some of my, what I remember feeling, and of the characters may have been easy to write because I remember seeing people just like that. But in terms of the plot, no, I didn't do some of the things she did.
SPEAKER_00
00:34:11
We always have to like caveat for anyone who knows us, like sometimes people who aren't writers assume everything we write is exactly what happens in our life. And no, when we say, you know, you draw from experience, it mean that you, why did you choose Cuban descent? Was that just something that sort of came
SPEAKER_01
00:34:31
about? Yeah, question.
SPEAKER_01
00:34:35
So I wanted Betsabe to be from a culture that has like a really strong family, have tight families from a really tight community with a sense of ambition and upward mobility and have the support of that family. I also wanted her grandmother who is named Yaya, her Yaya, which is not that unusual, but to have kind of a mystical Santorini, ish religion, kind of like a certain religious belief that was really connected to nature and connected to the ocean and the sky and the earth. And because this comes from a story based in kind of the Jewish Bible and her boss is Jewish, there are a lot of things that I've always learned about and read about as being similar between Cubans and Jews in in of exile, hard work, and arriving in communities and kind of creating ghettos of their own people.
SPEAKER_01
00:35:51
So there was that commonality that I wanted my two main characters to have. I also pictured my Betsabe as incredibly beautiful and entering this world, not as a, you know, because we're in a place and time in 2019 where DEI is valued, but she was showing up feeling ill -prepared for the job, feeling like she had darker skin than others, feeling like she had a first name people couldn't pronounce that well. So I find I really love this outsider's point of view, and I also wanted her to be, yeah, I just wanted her to feel somewhat foreign in this world. Foreign, but not foreign. She's a second generation Cuban. Her mother was born in America. It was her grandparents who came from Havana right after the revolution. So, I don't know. From the very beginning, I had this idea. And you know, it was probably based, now that I'm going back to the very first drafts of it, But there was a woman I worked with who was Cuban -American, and she told me a lot of, we talked a lot about her family. And you know, I think that really influenced these
SPEAKER_00
00:37:07
ideas as well. Yeah, there's, it's curious, because in America, you have certain communities that have really held on to past traditions, it doesn't really matter how many generations, you know, away they are from the people who have like, you know, the Irish American, I think in the Midwest, you think it's been probably 200 years since you've arrived here, but they keep their traditions. And that's really fun. And then there's kind of like, I always tell everyone I'm a mutt, I have no idea where I'm from, or what I, you know, I didn't have like that community. So it's always interesting to, to investigate people who come from those communities, or who can switch like from city to city, like?
SPEAKER_01
00:37:52
Well, I think we're a country that does have a, and I have to say, Kat, I'm just like you,
SPEAKER_01
00:37:57
I've moved all over the place and I don't have that a strong connection to place in terms of my lineage, but we are a country that does have all these pockets and we're a country made of immigrants and we're out here in Utah and we go to dinner and we drive through a little town that's like little Switzerland, and you're like, well, you can see how Swiss people would come to this valley with the mountains all around and settle here. But I think we are also in a place and time where people are always straddling multiple worlds. So like you said, you're in one place, but you can easily switch to another. I did want my main character to have her feet in two worlds with a Spanish, even with language, Spanish and English. Or she's from a very politically conservative family showing up in New York with best friends who's very liberal. And so there's political trying to figure out where do I fit. And she's also trying to, she sees all these different versions of feminism. And she's like, I understand that word, but I don't know how it applies to my life and how I am a feminist is just being here being a feminist. And so she's struggling kind of, I remember in my 20s, all of these kind of identities that people could take for granted, you kind of have this opportunity to decide, is this the flag I'm going to wave? Is this the flag I'm going to wave? Like, who am I going to
SPEAKER_01
00:39:37
be? Am I? What am I going to stand for? And I wanted her to be at that point in life where she had both the foreign and the familiar and the unfamiliar and the and she didn't quite have the confidence to know that being both is like super powerful and you can be both. And she was at that point where she feel was feeling like she had to be one or the other. And in the end, she realizes she's a lot of things and as a growing woman and an adult, you realize you hold a lot of things. You don't just say you're just not settling for one thing.
SPEAKER_00
00:40:19
Yeah. I think it's interesting too that you're telling the story from her point of view as an older woman, right? So if you wrote it from the point of view of her in that moment, it would be a bit different because you feel so lost, right? And think the time, the year that you chose too, is interesting because that the generation, they have, they, labels have never been like so embraced. Right. Except for by this, this younger generation, which is very strange because like our generations were like, we don't want labels, right,
SPEAKER_01
00:40:59
we fought for all this liberation and equality and agency around our sex, our sexual lives, only to be in a generation that defines people and and it's a sexual encounter is either consensual or unconsensual or appropriate or inappropriate. And right, you there's so much gray. So there's a, yeah. So a couple of things I wanted to say first, she is writing this letter from the future, but not as a much older woman, maybe closer to 30, because she says right in the beginning, I need to get this down while it's still fresh in my memory. And people have written their own version of the story, but mine's never been out there. So in the Bible, it's all written, as it pertains to David. Although she's writing it,
SPEAKER_01
00:41:54
I do that balance where you're writing, but you're also going back into scene. So you can experience what was in Betsabe's head as that 22, 23 year old young woman. So do feel like you're in the present and it's not all being told. So I, that was a little bit of, you know, tricky writing that you have to make sure that works. And then, yeah, I forgot what the last thing is I was gonna say, but, yeah, sorry.
SPEAKER_00
00:42:30
I was trying to
SPEAKER_01
00:42:31
answer a lot of questions at once and that's what happens when you're 58, you can't hold it all anymore.
SPEAKER_00
00:42:36
I think still, like, we change so much between 22 and 30 that there's a lot that's going on, right? And if you're thrown into a world where you think you're an adult, you feel like you're an adult, everyone tells you you're an adult, but then you go into an adult's world, like everything, you're going to go through a lot of change in a very short amount of time,
SPEAKER_00
00:42:59
right? So to be able to have captured that is impressive. So, I'm excited to read this book. How has it been, because you say that it is a coming -of -age tale, and it's based a lot on Dave and Bathsheba. Has there been any, have you received any pushback, I guess, from, because like, I mean, Dave and Bathsheba is a well -known tale, but it's like a couple paragraphs, right? And there's a lot of opinion about it. and it's really only told as like one of David's greatest sins, right? Because he, I mean, in the Bible, he kills off Bathsheba's husband, right? So he makes a decision that makes him make worse decisions. He has to atone for it. So there been any sort of like?
SPEAKER_01
00:43:49
Yeah. So my first thing I want to say is exactly, I'm really impressed that you know the storyline, but, and it's only a couple of paragraphs and we never know anything about what's going on. She just said, yeah, her husband gets killed. She loses her baby. She's forced, you know, she marries this King. So yeah, but none of her thoughts are on the page. And so that was part of my inspiration. And also you read that story and it's all about consent. And I was like, that is such a modern topic. And they, you know, we've been and we have been grappling with what is consent for thousands of years. So that was part of my inspiration, too. When I started marketing and pitching this book, I did get the feedback. Don't mention the word Bible, don't mention Bible at all, because people will think this a religious book, and it has to do with a religious dogma. And even friends recently at a dinner, someone said, that's so interesting, you bring your faith and work it into the plot. And I'm like, it's not my faith. Yes, I'm Jewish, but I read the Old Testament as a foundational text, as an early piece of our civilization's narrative and how we told stories. And the retelling is... I'm trying to make a point about the timelessness of these issues, about how we haven't made a whole lot of progress, of how we relate to each other in 2000 years, whether it's progress or... You don't have to call it that, but that's really... I'm retelling for all sorts of reasons, because I want to show what the woman's point of view might have been. But yeah, the pushback is really not to talk about the Bible. Kirkus gave it a wonderful review, and part of their pull quote was like a sagacious retelling of a biblical love story. And now I use that pull quote, so I'm actually saying screw it, I'm just going to use the word biblical. But I haven't gotten any pushback that I know of, there could be some, you know, bias out there against biblical stories, against Jewish stories against anything like that. I suspect there might be, but nobody's actually said anything
SPEAKER_01
00:46:24
to my face. And to tell you the truth, I got into this whole enterprise because I love it. I my imaginary world and I love expressing myself in words. And the commercial side is important to me only to the extent I find readers who enjoy my books and interact with them, whether it's for readers or like 400 ,000. I mean, I've never experienced the 400 ,000 side, so I'm not saying like that wouldn't be cool, but I definitely see my success as having finished the books, having gotten them out there, and having attracted a decent readership that are intelligent, well -read people who find pleasure in talking about these kind of themes about the relationships.
SPEAKER_00
00:47:14
Yeah, I love that. And I think whether you pull it from any historical context or myths, like you said before, stories are timeless. And the idea of men and women and love and consent, I think we'll be talking about that for years because like, as we just said, this generation's grappling with it again, you know, when we thought that it was already put together, you know, so every generation is grappling with what is, and then looking at the past and being like, what was and what could be and what were their circumstances?
SPEAKER_00
00:47:50
So I think it's, I would encourage people to not shy away from looking at historical context stories to find their plot lines and to sort of take them as a basis. Yeah, I'm
SPEAKER_01
00:48:04
actually going to teach a session at the Muse in the Marketplace in Boston this May called Making Ancient Stories Your Own and drawing on just the rich history of retellings. I love that. Even if it's a retelling of Mark Twain, of Jane Austen, retellings of Shakespeare, there's so many great retellings of mythology. And those are done for a reason, right? We're poking at the perspective that may have been written then, bringing in a new perspective. We are maybe, I don't know, we're giving the main character a different gender or age or nationality and playing with that. It's being done in the theatre all the time as well. I think we are recognizing there's just so many plots in this world.
SPEAKER_00
00:48:57
Right.
SPEAKER_01
00:48:58
and to retell and give a twist to things. Like even the retellings of Little Red Riding Hood, I have some components of Little Red Riding Hood in this novel as well. I feel like that's another one of our culture's great myths. The Little Red Riding Hood in the end of the fairy tale gets eaten by the big bad wolf, and then a huntsman comes by and cuts open the wolf's stomach and sets free Little Red and her grandmother. And in mine, like, yeah, we don't need the huntsman. And my Little Red is pretty wary of seeing this wolf that's, this wolf that she's living with, or, you know, who can be a wolf. Right,
SPEAKER_00
00:49:50
right. Yeah, yeah, I love that. And I think that will also make our stories richer to not sort of deny our past because like even if you come possibly like grew up like me or like you where you don't have the full community or maybe the Folklore the community folklore it behind it The country that you're like America has a lot of folklore Europe has a lot of folklore Asia Africa you can look beyond those and and and it's good to enrich your imagination, right? Because you're not gonna copy it, you're going to make it your own.
SPEAKER_01
00:50:29
Well, you're a writer, Kat. It's so intellectually fulfilling, I think, to think of your work in conversation with other work. I mean, we sometimes are asked for comps, right?
SPEAKER_01
00:50:43
And that's more of a process of like what's out there in the market that our book is most like, that's recent. But I have this whole bookshelf of friends here, of writers and books I admire so much. And if I could think that my sensibilities are somewhat an interplay or in conversation or have been affected by my reading of something else or have biblical illusions, like so many of the greatest works, like you just go to John Steinbeck in East of Eden and go, boom, the very magnus opus of biblical retellings. To think that if you're going to leave some work and books behind after you die, that they're rich with symbolism and connecting to past works and a of your own life and you know, Bette's kind of giving her pearls of wisdom to her son and leaving I don't know, I feel like I really try to incorporate a lot of things that make this whole endeavor not of writing worthwhile but of publishing it and feeling like it's worth putting out into the world and my time promoting it and just the paper that it's written on to tell you the truth. I just want to make it as really complex as possible. So
SPEAKER_00
00:52:14
I love that. I rich books. I have that entire shelf. There's my all my favorite books. And honestly, one of my favorite books is The Red Tent, which is a biblical research. Yeah, from the woman's point of view. And the
SPEAKER_01
00:52:28
one thing I would say, that makes it distinctly different is that she set Dina in the time in The Red Tent, but But Gabe told the story from her point of view, as I'm meeting Beth Sheba, and now she's like a young college grad in 2019, living in the Lower East Side and working on having
SPEAKER_01
00:52:51
avocado toast and avocados,
SPEAKER_00
00:52:53
you know, it's a little flat white, right? But there's that's so many ways to retell it, right? And you don't even have to follow. You know, if you take the Greek myths or the Roman myths or the ancient, you know, I know one writer that's doing the, he's English and he's retelling the English myths set in that time. But you can take them and make a modern that like you were saying, any twist that you want, you can take them and twist them up into something else and, but it's the themes that are so intriguing to us, right? Like what are the themes of love and consent and loss and despair and, you know, winning one over the other. Like these are all human condition themes that are free for all of us to use in any way that we want. So book is already out. I'm going to put the links in the show notes. But as this episode goes out, it has been published and people can order a copy of it. Is it going to come out in audio as well? or is it?
SPEAKER_01
00:53:56
It will be paperback, ebook, and audio on April 2nd. It'll be available wherever books are sold.
SPEAKER_00
00:54:03
Awesome, so before we finish, I have one more question for you. With all of the different classes that you took as you started to dive into writing, what would you suggest to somebody who wants to sort of start taking their ideas and putting them on paper? or what was your favorite class that you would say, go find something like this? Yeah,
SPEAKER_01
00:54:28
well, I guess the most important thing is what motivates you to write. So some classes have weekly deadlines of an essay and that's helpful. If you like to write nonfiction personal essay, I can make a plug for an organization that's meant a lot to me and where I gained a lot of valuable teaching is Grub Street in Boston. And I went to the in -person classes, but since COVID, they've been offering
SPEAKER_01
00:55:00
so many wonderful online classes. And they have classes that are a few weeks up to a year long. So you can kind of figure out what time frame and what genre of writing works well for you. But what I would say is if you don't have access to a class or can't afford that kind of time or money, it is still important to find a community of writers because getting feedback along the way saves you a lot of time. It's good to get feedback as you're outlining and on page 75 as opposed to have spent 10 years and you've written like a million words. Trust me, I know from my first novel. So, finding a writing group is, I'm actually heading to my writing group right now at the Park City Library as soon as this podcast is over.
SPEAKER_01
00:55:47
And I met, you know, I've been out in this world a little, so it was easy for me to kind of tap into that group. But I've also made wonderful writing group friends through the classes I've taken. So I would have to say taking a class can often be the portal to a community. And I think that's really, really important, getting feedback. And then once you have a finished manuscript or you've been really polishing it for a while, one thing I did that was amazing was a year -long program. It was a fellowship through Stony Brook called Bookends. But it doesn't have to be that, but it could be like a smaller cohortish,
SPEAKER_01
00:56:30
longer -term thing where you both get the community and you get like a really like 12 months of holding your foot to the fire. I found that to be great. But I guess I don't want to intimidate anyone to think if I can't find a writing group or a class, I can't be a writer. However, there's so many things online, both live and webinars that are recorded, that there's really no excuse to not get some tutelage. And I think what people often, and why they resist the tutelage is fear of criticism. So rejection and fear of criticism, it's like the first thing you have to shed.
SPEAKER_00
00:57:13
Yes, that's so true.
SPEAKER_01
00:57:14
I have this way of answering these questions really a long way, but to be specific, I would look at the Grub Street website
SPEAKER_01
00:57:22
and to be really general, I would just be like find friends in a coffee shop or library.
SPEAKER_00
00:57:27
Well, because in your own story, getting feedback for Eden was very important into making it into what it was that then gave you confidence to write the nine. Like everything sort of comes, right? Once you sort of take, you know, go get your first feedback. I remember being very nervous over getting my first feedback and yeah, it's gonna happen. But for the most part, writers wanna see each other succeed. And so they're trying to portray their, convey their wisdom to the next. If you're
SPEAKER_01
00:57:59
lucky enough to be in a writing group where you have the opportunity to give feedback, that is a really growth, a great growth experience, you can see things in other people's writing that you deny exists in your own. It's a very humbling experience to, to, to give someone else feedback, and then realize you're doing the exact same thing. So I think that giving feedback is a privilege when somebody's willing to share their work with you and take your feedback. It's it's very you know, there's like this reciprocal generosity that's going on and definitely giving feedback is has helped me grow as a person and as a writer.
SPEAKER_00
00:58:41
Yeah. Yeah, I think it helps us shed a bit of like, OK, we're not the only one who might do that or do this, you know. So I love that. I love that feedback and that advice for people. So thank you, Jane, for coming on and talking to us. have all the links in the show notes below. So for anyone who wants to order your book and read it and follow you and look at all the Grubhub, I'll get them from you in a second.
SPEAKER_01
00:59:08
Well, wonderful. Thank you, Kat. This was so much fun. I really appreciate it.