I had the good fortune to catch up with novelist Kate Pullinger at the New Writing Worlds Symposium this summer. We managed to find time to sit down and talk about her most recent novel, A Little Stranger. 

The novel is a fascinating, complex, and textured exploration of what happens when one women wonders if she made a mistake by giving birth. Maybe she's not cut out to be a mother after all. She acts on this notion, leaves her young son and husband, and escapes to Las Vegas where she meets another women struggling with her own doubts. Her journey takes her back to her childhood and her mother's past in an attempt to understand her actions.

Kate and I discuss how she came to write about this often taboo subject, and about the dialogue, and subsequent backlash, generated by the discussion in the media about 'the perils of parenthood.' 

Also check out Kate's cool award-winning digital literature project Inanimate Alice. Enjoy. 

After a gorgeous, yet nail-biting, drive along the rugged coastline between San Francisco and Point Reyes on the way to a friend's wedding reception, we needed the pit stop afforded by Stinson Beach Books (3455 Shoreline Hwy. Stinson Beach, Ca 415-868-0700-no website.) Fortunately, it offered so much more. 

Billed as "the only bookstore located directly on the San Andreas Fault," it's a real gem of an old-style village bookshop.  The knowledgeable and spirited owner interrupted our chat to call the restaurant across the street and tell them to tone down the live music so she could talk to her customers without shouting. The music softened immediately. 

We could have spent all afternoon there, but we had to get back on the snake of a road.  I picked up a copy of Patricia Unterman's wonderful San Francisco Food Lover's Guide and walked across the street for a latte from the Espresso cart before climbing back in the car.

Another surprise in Georgia: Indie Coffee and Books in Decatur, right outside Atlanta.  The selection is not huge, but that's the charm.  All titles are handpicked by the owners and range from classics to contemporary fiction and nonfiction.  There's a wall of BookSense bestsellers, and a display of recommended titles.

It's the kind of place where you can browse, find something you've been meaning to read for years, or stumble across something completely new.  It has that personal vibe and genuine enthusiasm for books so sorely missing from most mega-chains. Odds are the person at the register can chat with you about your purchase and suggest other books of interest.  (Can't tell you the last time that happened to me at one of the biggies.)  Then you can order a coffee, take a seat and read for a while.  I bought a copy of Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire (a brilliant read) and did just that.

What are the boundaries between the stories we tell--to ourselves and each other--and truth? Are facts, and reality for that matter,  just too unimaginative for us to cope with, so we rely on stories to survive?  James Scudamore takes on these ideas in his compelling debut novel, The Amnesia Clinic, which was recently (after our conversation) longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize.

Anti is English, quiet, asthmatic; risk averse. He lives the typical expat life with his parents. Fabian is Ecuadorian, charismatic, always up for an adventure and reckless. Orphaned by a car accident that killed his father and his mother (although her body was never recovered,) he lives with his equally flamboyant Uncle, who entertains the boys with outrageous stories of shrunken heads and adventures in the countryside.  

The boys acquire his passion for outlandish tales and soon begin conducting their relationship entirely through the medium of storytelling.  The stories grow more imaginative, and although they think they know the boundaries between reality and fantasy, those lines begin to blur, especially as Fabian's buried pain over his mother's assumed death rises to the surface. The boys decide that she is in fact alive and at an amnesia hospital on the coast, for those who have lost their memory. That's why she hasn't returned. They set out to find her. On the journey the boys meet many fascinating characters, including an innkeeper who rents rooms in exchange for a good story.  As they become further enthralled in their imaginative world, dangerous consequences await them.

 

James and I discuss the ideas in the novel, how the story came to him, and the role Ecuador itself plays in the book.

We met on one of the hottest days this summer in London, near London Bridge. Because of the heat, we had to keep the doors open and the fans running, so the strange noises you hear are trucks rumbling past on the street below. Last time it was planes. I'll see what I can do to get train noises in the next one.  Enjoy.

On a recent trip to the southern U.S., I ended up with an afternoon to kill in Madison, GA. It's promotional material lauded it as "the town too pretty to burn," a nod to its exclusion from Sherman's highly flammable March to the Sea. Travel Holiday Magazine named it the best small town in the U.S.  It is charming, the architecture stunning, and the general ambience quintessential small town America.  But the biggest surprise for me was its local independent bookshop: Dog Ear Books. They have a great selection and a cool display of recommended reads.  I picked up two fantastic short story collections: Dan Chaon's Fitting Ends, and David Means Assorted Fire Events.  Drop in if you're in the area, or visit online.

After some delay, it is my pleasure to bring you the second part of my conversation with Jill Dawson about her current novel Watch Me Disappear. I've been on the road and, much to my surprise, reliable Internet connections were few and far between. The good news is that while out and about, I crossed paths with several authors who either agreed to do a podcast in the future, or started talking on the spot while I recorded. I'll post those conversations over the next several weeks.  Until then, enjoy the second half of the discussion with Jill Dawson. Please feel free to post your comments here, or email me at literaryconversations@yahoo.com. Thanks for listening. Let's continue the conversation.

For our first episode, I travelled to The Fens near Ely, England, an atmospheric area of rich black soil and wildlife filled wetlands, to talk with Jill Dawson (www.jilldawson.co.uk) at her home.  Jill is the author of five novels: Trick of the Light, Magpie, Fred and Edie, Wild Boy, and, most recently, the Orange Prize longlisted Watch Me Disappear.

Watch Me Disappear tells the story of Tina Humber, a British-born marine biologist now living in the U.S. with her husband and daughter. Her life appears ideal. Then, after a long absence, she returns home to the Fens for her brother's wedding. Surrounded by the hauntingly flat, dark fields of her childhood, an underground river of forgotten, and often ambiguous, memories burst forth.  She begins to relive, in trickles and then torrents, the disappearance of her best friend Mandy during the 1970s.  She turns her scientific eye to these recovered facts hoping to assemble a true report of what happened. But memory doesn't work that way she soon learns as she begins to probe her past, confronting the complexity and contradictions in her dead father's life, her adolescence, and the lies adults tell children to explain the inexplicable.

Inspired by the recent Soham murder case, which occurred not far from the novel's setting, Watch Me Disappear is an important and compelling book that provides a richly perceptive gaze into female adolescence, sexual awakening, and how we talk about (or don't talk about) sexuality, death and violence.

The Fens is also home to an RAF base.  You can hear jets overhead at various times during our conversation.  We ignored them. I hope you can too. I did what I could to minimize the planes and other background noise while editing, but I wanted to maintain the naturalness of the conversation and realness of the setting as much possible. I think that's what makes this conversation so wonderful and interesting. Sound editing is always a compromise, especially for a newbie. You may hear
a faint tinny background noise like a mad scientist's laboratory if you turn your volume up too high. The upshot is that if you set the volume at a moderate level our voices should be front and centre.

We begin the conversation with Jill reading a short excerpt from Watch Me Disappear and then move into the first part of our discussion about the novel. This is a two part conversation. I'll post part two in Mid-June.

Thanks for listening.

Wayne Milstead likes to read. His fiction appears in Ambit, Matter and other anthologies. His nonfiction appears in various publications, including the forthcoming Traveler's Tales: The World is A Kitchen (August 2006)

Listings for independent bookshops in the UK, some with online ordering

The Guardian’s list of Best UK Bookshops

Listings for independent bookshops in the US, some with online ordering. Also try BookSense.

Some favourites:


U.K.

London Review Bookshop — Bloomsbury, London

Foyles — Charing Cross, London (Not exactly a quaint village shop, but a booklovers cabinet of wonders, and a London institution)

The Bookseller Crow on the Hill — Crystal Palace, London

The Owl Bookshop — Kentish Town, London
(no website, but worth a trip, and I don’t say that just because I gave my first reading there.)
209 Kentish Town Road, NW5 2JU
020 7485 7793

Kew Bookshop — Kew, London

Daunt Books — Marylebone, London (also the Hampstead branch)

QI Bookshop — Oxford


U.S.

Malaprops Bookstore & Café — Asheville, NC

Bookpeople — Austin, TX

The Concord Bookshop — Concord, MA

Just Books — Greenwich, CT

Shakespeare & Co. Booksellers — New York, NY

Four Seasons Books — Shepherdstown, West Virginia

Politics and Prose Bookstore & Coffehouse — Washington, DC

Welcome to the Literary Conversations podcast. I'm Wayne Milstead, a writer and insatiable reader, who loves to talk about books, especially with their authors. I hope to share these conversations with you on a twice monthly basis. Along with the show notes posted for each episode, check out the links to independent bookshops, including a list of my favourites in the U.K. and the U.S., where you can buy the books discussed on the show. Many provide online ordering. Please do drop-in for a browse at your local shop, and visit the others during your next travels. There's no better home-away-from-home than a good bookshop. These folks provide a wonderful service and will only survive if we support them.

While I have no hard and fast rules for the show on matters such as: geographic locations, fiction versus non-fiction, or one book conversations versus topical discussions, it is likely that, at least initially, I'll talk mainly to UK-based fiction writers about their current books. Start with what you know, as they say. Hopefully, as things progress I'll have opportunities to talk with fiction and literary non-fiction writers from around the world. And perhaps a show on a special topic now and then.

Above all, I plan to focus the discussions on the written work, avoiding the temptations of the interesting, but often ridiculous, questions about how many hours a day a writer writes, how they first got published, the colour of ink used, or the hour their muse strikes. There may be exceptions. There always are. Along those lines, I hope to talk with writers, whenever possible, at a location that means something to them: their studio, a favourite pub, coffeehouse, museum, bookshop, library, or neighbourhood. What we lose to background noise, I trust we'll gain in naturalness and spontaneity. This is not a traditional interview show. Its goal is to capture, from a fly-on-the-wall perspective, a conversation between an author and an interested reader. Please join us and continue the conversation.

Comment or email at literaryconversations@yahoo.com