Five Questions

Five Questions with Carrie Brown and John Gregory Brown

Married novelists Carrie Brown and John Gregory Brown have spent their working lives writing and teaching side by side in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains at Sweet Briar College, where John is the Julia Jackson Nichols Professor of English and directs the College’s Creative Writing program. Carrie now serves as Distinguished Visiting Professor at nearby Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia. Carrie and John have published ten books between them and raised three children on the campus at Sweet Briar.

James River Writers recently spoke with Carrie Brown and John Gregory Brown, who discussed “using what you know and where you’re from in fiction” at JRW’s Writing Show on Thursday, April 24. The couple also taught Learning to See: A Master Class for Writers in the Art and Practice of Looking on Friday, April 25.

Five Questions with Carrie Brown and John Gregory Brown

Question One:

K: John, you wrote in the voice of a young girl (Meredith Eagen), a woman (Meredith’s stepmother Catherine), and a black man (Murphy Warrington) in your first novel, Decorations in a Ruined Cemetery, and you earned praise for creating authentic voices for these three characters. Writing in the voice of a person of another race can be risky, and you did not attempt to write Murphy’s dialogue the way a black New Orleans man of his time and class would have spoken. More

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Beth Phelan, Literary Agent

Getting to know the agents you pitch gives you an advantage, whether you’re adding a query to the slush pile with fingers crossed or pitching face to face at a conference like JRWC. We’re excited to announce that literary agent Beth Phelan from the Bent Agency will be joining us at this year’s James River Writer’s Conference. For those who want to know more about this agent eagerly looking for new writers, read on to see her interview with JRW Board member Kris Spisak.More

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Pip Ballantine and Tee Morris

Kathleen Sams Flippen, Writer/Owner of Spaces by KSF, interviews Pip Ballantine and Tee Morris, Steampunk proponents and authors of Phoenix Rising, The Janus Affair, and Dawn’s Early Light. Featured speakers at the James River Writers 2013 Annual Conference, the husband and wife team talk goggles and airships, social media and networking, how to juggle creation and marketing, and how to rise and stay afloat in the ever-changing world of the written word.

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Lydia Netzer

An astronaut lost in space, his pregnant wife who has been bald since birth, their autistic son and a street of seemingly perfect neighbors.

Author Lydia Netzer has peopled her debut novel — Shine Shine Shine — with a cast of offbeat characters whose differences illuminate the universal need to connect with others while remaining true to one’s self. Netzer uses math creatively to explain relationships and she sets part of her story in space, but Shine Shine Shine is not science fiction. It is a tale of love, motherhood and what it means to be human.

Shine Shine Shine was a New York Times Notable Book for 2012 and an Amazon Spotlight Book of the Month. It was shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Fiction. Netzer will participate in JRW Annual Conference in October 2013 and was interviewed in April 2013 by Kathleen Sams Flippen, a design blogger who can be found at A Flippen Life.

QUESTION 1: You have stated in other interviews that you conceived the idea for Shine Shine Shine when you were pregnant with your first child and worried that you were too “weird” to be a mother. You wanted to explore the idea of transitioning from woman to wife and wife to mother and the need many people feel to hide their oddities and present themselves as “normal.” Was there any specific incident that made you realize none of us is perfect and it’s okay to stop pretending and “rip your wig off”, as your character Sunny does?

I definitely survived many moments of trying to cram the wig on my head although it didn’t properly fit! The casseroles I tried to make from scratch because that’s what the “good” wife does; the lunch party I tried to host using all my mother’s china for the other moms on the block who showed up in capris and t-shirts wondering why they were drinking soda out of crystal; the many outfits I have tried to put together where my shoes and my sweater have a working relationship; the quilts I tried to make. It was a little scary there for a while.More

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