Lit Hub Asks: 5 Authors, 7 Questions, No Wrong Answers

The Lit Hub Author Questionnaire is a monthly interview featuring seven questions for five authors with new books. This month we talk to:

Nate DiMeo (The Memory Palace)
Juhea Kim (City of Night Birds)
Daniel M. Lavery (Women’s Hotel)
Alan Lightman (The Miraculous from the Material: Understanding the Wonders of Nature)

Julian Zabalbeascoa (What We Tried to Bury Grows Here)

*
Without summarizing it in any way, what would you say your book is about?

Juhea Kim: A love story between an artist and her art.

Nate DiMeo: The Memory Palace is a collection of short, historical, narrative nonfiction stories essays that conjure lost moments and largely forgotten figures and events from the past.

Alan Lightman: The book is a reconciliation of science with the human experience of beauty and awe. Scientific explanations of extraordinary natural phenomena, like spider webs and the Northern lights and lightning, do not and should not diminish our appreciation of their beauty and grandeur.

Julian Zabalbeascoa: The Spanish Civil War and continuing to resist when all the linemakers have you as the underdog, at such odds that no fool would place a wager on you. The need to keep dreaming regardless.

Daniel M. Lavery: Obsolete ways of living, the Automat, dealing with an unexpected change in mealtime routine, and popularity.

*
Without explaining why and without naming other authors or books, can you discuss the various influences on your book?

Julian Zabalbeascoa: American politics. Global politics. The rise of the far right. Rising of the seas. Those rising to resist these forces. The world we’re bequeathing to our children. Much of the amazing fiction coming out of the Irish island these days.

Daniel M. Lavery: The Furrowed Middlebrow, which is an imprint of Dean Street Press, and neither an author nor a book, the Manhattan Zoning Resolution of 1916, and Turner Classic Movies.

Alan Lightman: I have been influenced by artists, scientists, and philosophers. Artists engage my emotional and aesthetic senses. Artists show us how to see the world. Scientists give us a logical and rational way of understanding the world. And philosophers pose the big questions, like “What does it all mean?”

Juhea Kim: My first book was inspired by a symphony. For City of Night Birds, I was driven by the idea of a concerto, which showcases the entire range and virtuosity of a single instrumentalist. So, whereas Beasts of a Little Land is in multiple third person POV spanning over a half century, City is in first person POV—but alternating between the past and present, much like how a soloist would demonstrate their range through rapid arpeggios and bravura, and then suddenly arrive at a legato passage. I was listening to a lot of music—Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Minkus, Adam, Bizet, Bellini—and dancing ballet about two hours a day, five to six days a week, throughout the drafting of City of Night Birds.

Nate DiMeo: One time I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and, while wandering around the American Wing I stumbled into a room called Visual Storage, row after row after row of floor-to-ceiling glass cases stuffed with stuff – masterpiece landscapes by second-tier landscape painters, second-tier landscapes by masters of landscape painting, silver soup tureens, painted ceramic animals, high backed chairs, so many Ben Franklins on buttons and belt buckles and beer steins and collectible cookware; it felt like stumbling into history itself. The stuff of so many dead Americans, the work of so many dead Americans, the taste, the fashion, the fads, the ephemera that was once beloved and treasured and now… not quite good enough for the main museum. Outmoded and forgotten. Or waiting to be rediscovered and loved.  Or not.  Days like that or other experiences in museums and historic sites or with books or movies or art that made me connect to the strangeness and wonder of the past and, in turn, the particular strangeness and wonder of the things that make up our own, contemporary, temporary, historical moment.

*
Without using complete sentences, can you describe what was going on in your life as you wrote this book?

Daniel M. Lavery: Had one baby with two women. Nice fat baby.

Alan Lightman: Teaching at my university, spending time with my wife and children and grandchildren, helping to run a nonprofit organization that works to empower young women in Southeast Asia, trying to age gracefully and to come to terms with my mortality.

Nate DiMeo: Fatigue. Parenting. Post-pandemic fatigue and parenting. Becoming, to my sincere surprise, a poetry reader for the first time in my life. Walking in Los Angeles. Driving and listening to music with my teenage daughter. Lots of movies. Lots of NBA basketball.

Juhea Kim: Promoting the American and international editions of Beasts of a Little Land, touring and meeting readers from around the world, planning our wedding (City of Night Birds was submitted and acquired just days before the wedding day), and an embarrassing amount of vegan hot chocolate.

Julian Zabalbeascoa: West to east migration, dozens of passport stamps, becoming a husband, becoming a parent, whole lots of living can be done in 12 years.

*
What are some words you despise that have been used to describe your writing by readers and/or reviewers?

Alan Lightman: I will mostly pass on this one. But one word I didn’t like used to describe a collection of interviews I did two decades ago was “potted,” as in a potted plant with no room to grow and expand.

Julian Zabalbeascoa: Our lives are short, the time we’ve been given fleeting. If someone is going to dedicate a bit of theirs to engaging seriously with my work, I can’t see myself begrudging any descriptions. Having said that, I do worry that too much ink will be dedicated to trying to classify the novel: Is it a novel? A novel-in-stories? Etc.

Nate DiMeo: This being my first book and having spent my writing career in podcasting – a medium with ostensibly no critical infrastructure – I can only dare to dream to one day become so used to reading about my own writing that I grow to despise any aspect of it.

Daniel M. Lavery: I’m not sure! I don’t love the word trenchant, but I couldn’t swear to it that anyone’s ever actually called me trenchant before. Probably I would be too pleased over being complimented to kick over the word choice.

Juhea Kim: “If you like K-beauty serums, K-pop, and BTS, you will like” this book by “an ambitious young author.” I was quite naïve to believe in basic decency and fairness of the publishing world, and I was deeply wounded by racist and sexist rhetoric degrading my literary novel, a work of art that has nothing to do with Korean commercial products. And I don’t think any male novelist debuting at age 34 would have been called “ambitious,” which we know is essentially a code word for b****. City of Night Birds isn’t about Korea, so I hope there won’t be references to K-pop or K-beauty this time. And I’m 37 now, so I’m less likely to be belittled for being a young woman.

*
If you could choose a career besides writing (irrespective of schooling requirements and/or talent) what would it be?

Julian Zabalbeascoa: Is anyone here not putting rock n’ roll star?

Alan Lightman: Well, I actually did have a substantial career as a physicist. Often, I have thought that I would like to be reincarnated as a bird, but with my human brain. I would love to experience the world in three dimensions and to constantly defy gravity.

Nate DiMeo: I think I’d love being a movie director. But, I’d love to be the kind of person who could love being an arborist.

Daniel M. Lavery: It can be difficult to break into another industry, but I’ve been able to cobble together some part-time work in elder care over the last two years that I’ve found both meaningful and a lot of fun. I would like to be able to make a day job of that at some point.

Juhea Kim: A prima ballerina.

*
What craft elements do you think are your strong suit, and what would you like to be better at?

Nate DiMeo: I’m good at meting out information—knowing what the reader needs and wants to know and figuring out how and when to give it to them. I have a good eye for an evocative detail and am fundamentally, just as, like, a human being, oriented toward metaphor. I am also feel particularly unskilled at rewriting: I have trouble imagining new ways stories can go once they’ve already started along a certain path; I’m too fearful to pull things apart even when I know I need to.

Julian Zabalbeascoa: Despite the doubt and uncertainty that attends this craft, I’m oftentimes gifted with endings by the muses, landings that deliver a feeling not unlike what Simone Biles must have felt in Paris this summer. Areas in which I’d like to improve: the list is long, but I’m impressed by those writers who can maintain tension in a scene while veering off to inform the reader about all sorts of tangential yet pertinent information, making the reader squirm as they do so.

Juhea Kim: My strength is describing the setting and nature, because that’s what inspires me. There isn’t one specific craft element that I want to improve—what I have now is my style, and I need to work on getting that to the best that it can be.

Alan Lightman: Regarding my fiction writing, I am better at scene setting and ideas and overall architecture and less good at developing characters. Regarding my nonfiction, I do not have the patience to do the years of research that some writers do. Of course, I do some research, but I also inject lots of my own ideas and thinking.

Daniel M. Lavery: I like writing dialogue. I’d like to be better at describing the way things look. I always feel deranged when I try to do that: “The building was there. It looked squat. They walked to the left, with their shoes on.” That can’t be right. I read books all the time that just say normal things about how a character’s hair looks, but I can’t quite seem to find my way there.

*
How do you contend with the hubris of thinking anyone has or should have any interest in what you have to say about anything?

Juhea Kim: I give my life force and my soul to each of my works. I don’t do this to attract attention, ingratiate myself to the publishing world, sell books, or even make a living, but only to reveal a truth about the human experience with as much beauty and sincerity as I can. So far in my career, readers around the world have recognized this about my books and my approach to art and advocacy, and they have rewarded me with their love and encouragement. But if one day, readers are no longer interested in my writing, I won’t have any regrets, because I will have always stayed true to my artistic vision.

Julian Zabalbeascoa: It’s like the formation of the universe following the Big Bang, that razor-thin imbalance that existed between matter and anti-matter. Somehow there exists a smidgen more confidence/hubris than humility/common sense. Thus, creation follows.

Nate DiMeo: I realized years ago that I see the world, particularly the past, differently from most people. And that spending my career writing the small stories I do, was a weird way to spend my time. It turns out that this – this kind of writer, this kind of person – is just who I am. Writers have their voices. Have their hang-ups. Have their idiosyncratic fascinations. Things they can’t let go. It’s the most obvious thing, right? But I found it freeing. You write for long enough, and all you can do is write like yourself. And all you can do is hope that there are people who find it, whose own hang-ups and fascinations connect with your own. You can’t assume most people will have any interest in it, but someone will. You just hope to find those someones.

Daniel M. Lavery: I’m not sure hubris extends to “believing anyone might find anything I say interesting.” Niobe forcing the people of Thebes to stop worshiping Leto, saying, “Have I not cause for pride? Will you prefer to me this Latona, the Titan’s daughter, with her two children? I have seven times as many. Fortunate indeed am I, and fortunate I shall remain! Will any one deny this? My abundance is my security. I feel myself too strong for Fortune to subdue. She may take from me much; I shall still have much left. Were I to lose some of my children, I should hardly be left as poor as Latona with her two only. Away with you from these solemnities,- put off the laurel from your brows,- have done with this worship,” that’s hubris. “Someone might like to read my book” is a reasonable and well-ordered degree of  confidence, I think. 

Alan Lightman: No one has to read my books. There are people who like them and people who don’t.