February's Hot Writer: Rachel Bertsche

My genre: Memoir

My literary influences: AJ Jacobs, Tim O'Brien, Gretchen Rubin, Sloane Crosley, Malcolm Gladwell, David Sedaris.

My favorite literary quote: “When someone you love dies, and you're not expecting it, you don't lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time -- the way the mail stops coming, and her scent fades from the pillows and even from the clothes in her closet and drawers. Gradually, you accumulate the parts of her that are gone. Just when the day comes -- when there's a particular missing part that overwhelms you with the feeling that she's gone, forever -- there comes another day, and another specifically missing part.” -- John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

My favorite book of all time: The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien

I’m currently reading: Earlier this evening I finished Girls in White Dresses by Jennifer Close. Tomorrow I'll start The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach.

My guilty pleasure book: The Face on the Milk Carton by Caroline B. Cooney

I can’t write without: procrastinating for three hours first.

Worst line I ever wrote: "Like getting a 99 on a test. It's almost perfect, but not quite." This comes from a poem I wrote in fifth grade. I thought it was very profound.

Brief Bio:
Rachel Bertsche is a journalist in Chicago, where she lives with her husband. Her first book, MWF Seeking BFF, came out last month. Her work has appeared in Marie Claire, More, Teen Vogue, Every Day with Rachael Ray, Fitness, Women's Health, CNN.com, and more. Before leaving New York (and all her friends) for the Midwest, Bertsche was an editor at O: The Oprah Magazine.

A writer with an MFA in Creative Writing from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Sarah Terez Rosenblum freelances for a number of web sites and print publications. Her debut novel, “Herself When She’s Missing," (Soft Skull press) is available for pre-order here. She is also a figure model, Spinning instructor and teacher at Chicago’s StoryStudio. Inevitably one day she will find herself lecturing naked on a spinning bike. She's kind of looking forward to it actually.
IMPORTANT: the official Our Town site doesn't support comments. Join in the conversation by following facebook.com/OurTownBlog.ChicagoSunTimes and Sarah on Twitter: @SarahTerez

January's Hot Writer: Conor Robin Madigan

My genre: Literary Fiction, Poetry, Magical Realism, Parable

My literary influences: Thomas Hardy, G.K. Chesterton, Muriel Spark, Arnold Bennett, John Carey, Cervantes, Boccaccio, Cioran, David Albahari, Leavis, Leonard Michaels, Novalis, Pasolini, Lawrence, Gogol, Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, Zola, Flaubert, Maupassant, Greene, Hulme, Kafka, Lagerkvist, Larkin, Desai, Doyle, Henry Green, Gunter Grass, Nadine Gordimer, Huxleys, Yates, Toibin, E.B. White, Whitman, Joy Williams, Mayakovsky, William Trevor, V.S. Naipaul, Baudelaire, Sherwood Anderson, Saul Bellow, Burney, Calvino, Carver, O Henry, Joyce, Ovid, Robert Penn Warren, Vonnegut, Leon Uris, Ian McEwan, Shintaro Katsu, Eamon Grennan, Heaney, Ellison, Hemingway, Hess, Gaines, Dante, Goethe, Raymond Chandler, Cather, Wendell Berry, The Brontes, Tolstoy, Beckett, Plutarch, Neruda, Orwell, Lessing, André Gide, Maxim Gorky, Mansfield, William Empson, Fitzgerald, Isherwood, Housman, William Golding, Hasek, Graham Swift, Swift, Auden, Conrad, Andrew Motion, Dostoevsky, Eco, Fred Chappell, Cheever, the Hymnal, the Old Testament, Paul's letter to the Romans, Bram Stoker, Thurber, F.H. Burnett, Kundera, Gilman, Athol Fugard, Faulkner, Agee, Joe Epstein, LL Magdalen, Ibsen, Bette Howland, Ondaatje, Andrew Hoyem, James Atlas, Gilbert Sorrentino, Winfield Townley Scott, Melville, Andre Bauchant, Bill Brandt, Robert Liddell, Lionell Trilling, Robert Lowry, Poe, Washington Irving, W. Sommerset Maugham, Robert Louis Stevenson, A. Conan Doyle, Schnitzler, Thyra Winslow, Jack London, H.G. Wells, Stephen Crane, Dreiser, Wodehouse, Franz Werfel, Ernst Glaeser, Louis Pergaud, H.E. Bates, Singer, Strindberg, Shikibu, and others.

My favorite literary quote: ...better be with the dead.../Than on the torture of the mind to lie/ In restless ecstasy. --Macbeth

My favorite book of all time: Riki Tiki Tavi

I’m currently reading: The Old Wives' Tale (Bennett), The Man Who Was Thursday (Chesterton), The Secret Agent (Conrad), Briefing For a Descent into Hell (Lessing), Pure Pleasure (John Carey)

My guilty pleasure book: Guilty Pleasures (Barthelme)

I can’t write without: quiet house (DEAD QUIET)

Worst line I ever wrote: "She was angry at what was becoming a horrible thing to say to him." (A Chapel Pond, '00)

Brief Bio:
I was born in Atlanta, GA. I live in Evanston now, and I work on guitars at Guitar Works, a little shop on Main Street. I'm very close to my family and I tend to enjoy laboring around their homes when I'm not reading, writing or at the shop. Pruning trees, car work, and house repair get me into my writing modes. Labor is a comfort. Cut Up, my debut novel happened April of 2011, and John Carey said of it, "acute, sophisticated, and like nothing I've ever read."

A writer with an MFA in Creative Writing from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Sarah Terez Rosenblum freelances for a number of web sites and print publications. Her debut novel, “Herself When She’s Missing," (Soft Skull press) is available for pre-order here. She is also a figure model, Spinning instructor and teacher at Chicago’s StoryStudio. Inevitably one day she will find herself lecturing naked on a spinning bike. She's kind of looking forward to it actually.
IMPORTANT: the official Our Town site doesn't support comments. Join in the conversation by following facebook.com/OurTownBlog.ChicagoSunTimes and Sarah on Twitter: @SarahTerez

Looking to shop local this Holiday season? Look no farther than Woodland Grove Gallery, owned by husband and wife team Tobin Fraley and Rachel Perkal. Not only does the duo show work by artists both regional and national, they are also the creators of The Humbug, a Christmas book and product line available at the gallery. Our Town spoke with Fraley about art, business and Humbugs.

Our Town What’s your favorite part of owning a gallery?
Tobin Fraley Rachel and I are good partners because we both have different strengths. She is amazing in working with customers and her knowledge of the business side of retail is terrific. I really enjoy designing the spaces and setting up product in the stores. And we both love the hunt for new artists and products.

OT You’re responsible for bringing Lyman Whitaker's Wind Sculptures into town. What attracted you to them?
TF Rachel and I first saw Lyman's wind sculptures at a gallery in Santa Fe in 2005 and we were instantly entranced. At that point Lyman's sculptures were in about 10 galleries around the world and they were not looking to expand that number. Occasionally I would check back with them and then, last summer, I spoke to Lyman's wife Stacey, and she said that she would stop by our gallery when she was out in Chicago visiting a friend in June. Stacey came by and we instantly connected. So in July, Lyman and a small crew came to Long Grove and we installed 40 wind sculptures. It was wonderful working with Lyman and the wind sculptures have been a great addition to the gallery.

OT How do you choose artists to showcase?
TF We really only offer work that we like. It is much easier for us to sell a person's work that we would have in our own home, plus we get to enjoy it every day at the gallery. Overall, the retail business is a lot of very hard work, but the pleasures outweigh the difficulties because we are able to meet so many great people and work with such incredibly talented artists from around the country.

OT What’s the story behind the Humbug?
TF One day around Christmas in 1997 I asked Rachel if she thought that Humbugs would make cute Christmas ornaments. Now Rachel had been the creator and manager of Hallmark's Keepsake Ornament Collectors Club, so she definitely had some expertise in this field. She first question was "What's a Humbug?" I said that it's a little bug that gets into mischief around Christmas. A Humbug is what knocks ornaments off the tree when you're in the other room and why brand new Christmas tree lights go out. She then said, "Write a story about this little guy." So I did.

OT What’s the response been like?
TF There is a little mischief in all of us and the Humbug, despite his nature to cause trouble, is basically good at heart and cares about others. People seem to fall in love with the Humbug. Especially little kids. Many times we have had someone purchase a copy of the book before reading it, take it home and then come back the next day to buy ten more copies to give to all of their friends.

OT In a time of economic uncertainty, you’ve managed to grow your business. Any secrets or advice for small business owners?
TF Tenacity and determination are probably our biggest allies in keeping our businesses going. Over the years, we expanded the gallery four times and have opened two women's clothing stores and a garden shop called the Artistic Gardener. But this was all accomplished prior to the economic downturn. Certainly these last few years have not been easy and there were a number of times when we had to assess whether we should continue. But we believed in what we were doing and so we borrowed and used portions of our IRAs to get us through the worst days. The other thing that has sustained us is the loyalty of our regular customers. We feel that the people who shop with us are a part of our extended family and I think that they must feel the same.

Born in 1951, Tobin Fraley spent his first ten years in Seattle, Washington, growing up in and around his grandfather’s amusement park. His interest in photography began in high school and the political environment of Berkeley in 1968 offered him a chance to practice with the camera. As a center of counter-culture and a flashpoint for anti-war activity, there was no lack of relevant subject matter to photograph. But it was not until years later that he began to study photography in earnest before owning and operating Zephyr Press, a wall calendar publishing company. In 2000 Tobin and his wife Rachel moved to Long Grove and settled next to the Reed-Turner Woodland Nature Preserve and now own and operate several shops in downtown Long Grove. He is the author of three books on the history of Carousels along with a holiday children’s story titled, A Humbug Christmas. Fraley currently teaches photography at the Chicago Botanic Garden and the Morton Arboretum.

A writer with an MFA in Creative Writing from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Sarah Terez Rosenblum freelances for a number of web sites and print publications. Her debut novel, “Herself When She’s Missing," (Soft Skull press) is available for pre-order here. She is also a figure model, Spinning instructor and teacher at Chicago’s StoryStudio. Inevitably one day she will find herself lecturing naked on a spinning bike. She's kind of looking forward to it actually.
IMPORTANT: the official Our Town site doesn't support comments. Join in the conversation by following facebook.com/OurTownBlog.ChicagoSunTimes and Sarah on Twitter: @SarahTerez

Photo by Gerardo Pelayo

December’s Hot Writer: Cina Pelayo

My literary influences: Edgar Allan Poe, Jorge Luis Borges, H.P. Lovecraft., Shirley Jackson, Angela Carter, Neil Gaiman

My favorite literary quote: “She says nothing at all, but simply stares upward into the dark sky and watches, with sad eyes, the slow dance of the infinite stars." --Neil Gaiman, Stardust

My favorite book of all time: Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

I’m currently reading: Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs

My guilty pleasure book: The Southern Vampire Mysteries by Charlaine Harris

I can’t write without: Whiskey…preferably Jameson. Maybe it’s a horror writer thing? I don’t know.

Worst line I ever wrote: “She puckered her blood red lips and arched a perfectly lined eyebrow.” It was for a short story I submitted in my Detective Writing Class at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. I am still embarrassed that I actually wrote that…and shared it with other human beings.

Brief Bio
Cynthia (Cina) Pelayo grew up in a haunted house in the northwest side of Chicago with very superstitious Puerto Rican parents. So, a lifelong fascination with Gothic literature, romantic horror and the macabre seemed fitting. Pelayo has a genuine curiosity for superstition, folklore and myth. She holds a Bachelor of Art in Journalism from Columbia College, a Master of Science in Integrated Marketing Communication from Roosevelt University, and a Master of Fine Arts in Writing from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is a member of the Horror Writer’s Association and is also the Publisher/Gravedigger at Burial Day Books. She wears black most of the time and she stays out of the sun as much as (un)humanly possible.

A writer with an MFA in Creative Writing from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Sarah Terez Rosenblum freelances for a number of web sites and print publications. Her debut novel, “Herself When She’s Missing," (Soft Skull press) is available for pre-order here. She is also a figure model, Spinning instructor and teacher at Chicago’s StoryStudio. Inevitably one day she will find herself lecturing naked on a spinning bike. She's kind of looking forward to it actually.
IMPORTANT: the official Our Town site doesn't support comments. Join in the conversation by following facebook.com/OurTownBlog.ChicagoSunTimes and Sarah on Twitter: @SarahTerez

Photo by Traci Griffin

Peter Orner may no longer live in Chicago but his romance with the city rivals that of any resident. A graduate of the Iowa Writer's Workshop and faculty member at San Francisco State University, Orner counts William Faulkner, Grace Paley and Chicagoan, Stuart Dybek as influences. Like Dybeck, Orner uses concrete imagery and issues of object permanence to ground his new novel, Love And Shame And Love. A rumination on memory, loss and renewal, the novel tells the story of the Popper family, but throughout Chicago exists as both supporting player and touchstone.

Our Town You went from law school to an MFA program. What provoked the switch?
Peter Orner It was actually in law school that I started to write seriously. I'd sit in a class like trusts and estates and think how sad it was that a law text book could make people fighting over a will so dull. Families arguing over money! What could be better? So, while the professors droned on, I'd be writing short stories about the people in the cases.

OT Thinking back to when you published your first novel, what surprised you most?
PO That anybody in their right mind would want to a read a novel about a remote place in a remote country, rural Namibia. To my surprise, a few people did read The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo. Not that many, but I'm still surprised when I meet people who have read it, and who might have no relationship to Namibia. You sit there alone, in my case in my garage, and you imagine things, and then, after a few years, these things you imagine, other people are sometimes interested in. I guess this is what I'm most surprised about with anything I write.

OT What was the inspiration for Love and Shame and Love?
PO A desire to write about home. Namibia was tough, and though I lived there, it will never be where I am from. But I found that writing about where you think you are from can be just as hard as writing about places you aren't from.

OT The city of Chicago seems almost a character in the book. Why?
PO Because I love the city, and though I now live in San Francisco, a part of me will always be standing on the beach by the lake. But Chicago, in my imagination, is as much a myth as a real place. Our imaginations warp real places. They become like our personal Oz. For a time I was student at Northwestern, and [I remember] looking at the city and thinking, there, there's where want to be. Now I could have just gotten on the train. And of course I often did. But in some ways, and this may be because I'm just a kid from the suburbs, Chicago is always just a little out of reach.

OT San Francisco vs. Chicago, go.
PO San Francisco is beautiful; Chicago though, fires up my imagination in ways that San Francisco, for all its splendor, never will. There's a scene in the novel that I think dramatizes this. Popper is heading east on Irving Park Road, and he takes a right and begins to drive south on a side street. It's late at night, and yet in the apartment buildings are some lighted windows. He thinks about the people and their lives, all the stories that are behind those lighted windows. It's the most autobiographical scene in the book. I've done this many times, driven around Chicago and thought about all the countless stories beyond late night lighted windows. Could I do this in San Francisco? Sure. But I never have. And this, I think, is the difference for me. It's just me.

OT What are you looking forward to doing while you’re here?
PO Taking my daughter to Oak Street Beach and then, if she doesn't trash the place, to the lobby of the Drake Hotel where I once went with my own dad when I was real little. I remember crawling up those white marble steps. But maybe I miss-remember this too.

All photos by Jeff Wasilko

Every musician dreams of crafting the perfect hook to catch our collective attention, drive hot gay dudes to lip-sync and deployed soldiers to upload their dance moves to Youtube. But sometimes the knack for writing of-the-moment music traps an artist in a certain era. Maybe she becomes complacent; possibly it’s public perception that confines her, or perhaps she’s paralyzed by the fear that she’ll never transcend an early hit.
Not so for artists Nerissa and Katryna Nields, a cult folk/rock duo with a relatively small but matchlessly fervent fan base. Set to release their sixteenth album, the sisters have performed together for over twenty years.

Interviewing Nerissa, I was struck by the similarity between her take on the foundation of their longevity and a comment by R.E.M.’s Micheal Stipe in a recent salon.com interview. “I’m so glad we haven’t had a hit yet,” Nerissa told me. “Because that means the hit we have is still inside of us.”

Speaking of R.E.M.’s 1994 album “Monster,” Stipe said “in classic R.E.M. style, we were yet again out of time. We were doing something that was either a little too before or a little too behind what was actually happening.” Though he does not relate this tendency to the band’s staying power, the two seem inexorably linked.

Such is also the case for Nerissa and Katryna Nields. “We’re not willing to follow the rules in order to have a wider audience,” Nerissa said. But by making their own rules these talented siblings have ensured their permanence.

Our Town I’m sure you constantly field this question, but what’s it like to blur the line between family and career?
Nerissa Nields It’s a great question and I’m never tired of answering it. We don’t understand how people can work creatively with anyone other than their sibling. We work really hard at our relationship. We’re only two years apart and we’ve always been exceptionally close, really became best friends in our late teens and always had this dream to make music and have a career together. Eighty percent of our work together is about strengthening our relationship. We’re very intentional. I’m the songwriter and I’m the older sister and when I asked Katryna if she would be in a band with me, she said, “okay but only if you promise that I’m never going to feel like Art Garfunkel.” If one of us is getting too much attention, we say, “it’s not fair. (We talk the way we did when were little), “I need more attention,” and the other one says “okay.”

OT Your shows feel like a visit with old friends. Was it a conscious choice to let your between-song patter become so much a part of your performance?
NN We grew up in the folk world and early in our career saw acts like Cheryl Wheeler, Moxy Früvous, Ani Difranco and Dar Williams, who is one of our best friends, and it was always part of the show. Certainly Cheryl Wheeler; I love her music, I love her songwriting, but I go to her shows just as much to hear what she’s going to say. When we were sort of forming our identity as an act we were watching a lot of David Letterman and Conan O’Brian and we naturally tried to infuse our shows with comedy. Basically, we’re giving back what we like to see.

OT In addition to your music, you’ve written several books, most recently All Together Singing in the Kitchen. How is writing a book different than crafting a song?
NN I’m a person with a short attention span and I love the song for that reason. You can write a song in an afternoon. I also love the challenge of writing a book, but it’s a much bigger deal than writing a song. We wrote All Together in two years and that was from start to finish. It was a lot of rewriting and thinking and discussing. I feel really lucky I get to both write songs and books.

November's Hot Writer: E.C. Messer

My genre: short stories/poetry/fairy tales

My literary influences: "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," Milan Kundera, Hans Christian Andersen, Lewis Carroll, Kit Smart, Ernest Hemingway, Jorge Luis Borges, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Bin Ramke, Jesse Ball

My favorite literary quote: “Instead of adopting Rimbaud’s gospel, The time of the assassins has come, young people would do better to remember the phrase Love must be reinvented. The world accepts dangerous experiments in the realm of art because it does not take art seriously; but it condemns them in life.”
~Jean Cocteau, "Le Livre Blanc" (The White Book)

My favorite book of all time: "In Search of Lost Time" by Marcel Proust

I’m currently reading: "The Talented Mr. Ripley" by Patricia Highsmith

My guilty pleasure book: Anything from The New York Review of Books Children's Collection Children’s Collection.

I can’t write without: 1960s/70s French pop

Worst line I ever wrote: (from a play called "The Adrian Story," written during my freshman year at UCLA) “That’s why the sky is falling! Because we broke the fourth wall!” Gratuitous use of exclamation points makes every bad line just a little bit worse.

Brief Bio: E.C. Messer lives in a yurt under the Golden Gate Bridge, but still goes out of her way to buy coffee at the one place in San Francisco that sells Intelligentsia. At The School of the Art Institute of Chicago she learned to embrace plagiarism, reject genre, and that “constraint” works just as well in the classroom as it does in the bedroom. She would like very much to know you.

A writer with an MFA in Creative Writing from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Sarah Terez Rosenblum freelances for a number of web sites and print publications. Her debut novel, “Herself When She’s Missing," is forthcoming from Soft Skull, an imprint of Counterpoint Press. She is also a figure model, Spinning instructor and teacher at Chicago’s StoryStudio. Inevitably one day she will find herself lecturing naked on a spinning bike. She's kind of looking forward to it actually.
IMPORTANT: the official Our Town site doesn't support comments. Join in the conversation by following facebook.com/OurTownBlog.ChicagoSunTimes and Sarah on Twitter: @SarahTerez

I’m not saying I moved to Chicago to keep an eye on Kyle Beachy, but I’m not saying I didn’t. As far as you know, it’s just a coincidence, us attending the same masters program, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, if you wondered. Now Kyle’s an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Roosevelt University, and I hang out at that Walgreen’s two blocks from campus. Not hoping for a chance to run into him of course, but because they have the best ace bandages and dental floss in town.

When Kyle’s first novel, The Slide came out in 2009, I definitely didn’t stuff The Chicago Reader’s ballet box, and yet he was voted Reader’s choice! Personally, I found the book edgy and vital, and that’s saying a lot because it involved baseball, the very mention of which gives me a rash. I much prefer skateboarding, the topic of his next novel. My lawyer says I should call that another coincidence, but that’s pretty far-fetched. Really, we’re psychically linked.

Anyway, once I’d ‘borrowed’ Kyle’s skateboard and offered to interview him before I returned it, Kyle proved an amiable interviewee; he only called the police twice!

You know what that makes him: October’s Chicago Crush!

Hometown: St. Louis, Missouri.
Profession: Professor of literature and creative writing at Roosevelt University.
Hobbies: I skateboard as much as the knees will allow.

Our Town The reception for your first novel was pretty fantastic. What was your reaction to post publication events as they unfolded?
Kyle Beachy That's nice of you to say. I should admit, though, that I was pretty much unprepared for any of that stuff, so that even the tiny filaments of attention I got -- which, relatively speaking, were nothing -- forced me to confront dark corners of my ego that I didn't realize I had. There was joy of course, I was grateful to have anyone read the thing, but it was also a kind of ugly, or at least petty, time for me. Because once you start noticing that stuff you begin caring, and caring charges the whole affair with importance, it all feels huge and consequential when in fact it's not -- neither the good receptions nor the bad. It frankly messed with my head and I began to understand claims from experienced authors about ignoring their reviews, whereas before I thought they were posturing. So overall it was an important thing to experience. Made me grow up a bit.

OT Who are your influences?
KB American novelists since roughly1960, friends and assorted acquaintances whose productivity I envy and so try to emulate, a rapper named Serengeti, Spike Jonze, Mike Manzoori, my father, and I'm on a reading binge of non-American authors: Horracio Castellanos Moya, Andreas Maier, Johan Harsted. I'm also reading more poetry, suddenly.

OT If google searches are any indication; people believe there’s a static step-by-step method for novel writing. Thoughts?
KB If google searches are any indication of anything, we're in trouble.

OT You’ve got an essay in the first issue of The Chicagoan. How did you get involved?
KB I met J.C. Gabel when Stop Smiling was winding down, and because knowing J.C. means becoming friends with J.C., he came to visit a DeLillo class I was teaching, we began talking about books, and a relationship developed. So, when he asked for an essay that basically gave me free range to mess about and try some things it was a no brainer. I'm not sure what the publication will look like -- I hear it is large and beautiful, and I think meant to be seen as a kind of experiment. I'm excited to see.

OT Both your Chicagoan essay and your second novel are about skateboarding. What’s the draw for you?
KB The ultra-truncated answer is that there is no possible way to fake skateboarding. There is no cheating. To do it you have to try and fail and bleed and try again.

OT You’re part of Roosevelt’s new MFA program, can you talk a little about that?
KB It's exciting. Free from the baggage of tradition and deeply nested personalities that can conflict and lead to paralysis or stagnation, it's developing into a hugely energetic place to work. Students focus on one primary field, poetry or fiction or creative non-fiction, but are also forced to push against these divisions and attempt new things. And though it's not explicit, you're always tacitly aware of the Roosevelt mission statement about social justice and affecting some nature of positive change on the world. I'm very happy to be there.

By age fifteen, Alexander Maksik hoped to be a writer, but, he admits, “it wasn’t until my late twenties that I realized I wanted to do the work. For a long time I was more concerned with being a writer than writing.” Recently, Maksik’s evolving commitment to his work produced You Deserve Nothing, a much-lauded rumination on power, idealism and morality. Maksik, based in Paris and Iowa City, will visit Chicago’s Seminary COOP Tuesday, September 13th, to discuss his debut novel with Adam Levin. But first he spoke with Our Town about inspiration, practice and Paris.

Our Town What was the original kernel of inspiration for You Deserve Nothing?
Alexander Maksik Both my parents were teachers and school administrators and from an early age I was acutely aware of the distinction between their public and private lives. Who they were at the dinner table was different from who they were in the classroom. As a result, I was never entirely capable of seeing any of my teachers only as teachers. That subject - the divide between the public and private self - has always fascinated me. In many ways, I feel as if I've been writing You Deserve Nothing since I was a teenager.

OT What are the pros and cons of setting a first novel in a place as symbolically loaded as Paris?
AM The advantage, of course, is that the city means a great deal to so many people and so perhaps I didn't have to do quite as much work as I might have if I were writing about a lesser-known place. On the other hand, a certain version of Paris has been filmed and written about over and over and over so the real challenge then was to do something original with the city. I tried my best to reveal it in ways inconsistent with the postcards.

OT Why utilize multiple points of view in your book?
AM It seemed the best way to deal with the novel's primary questions. In large part "You Deserve Nothing" is a book about the difference between the way we imagine ourselves and the way we are, the way we imagine others and the way they are. Those varying versions of "the truth" are also consistent with much of what is discussed in Will's classroom and I liked the idea of mirroring those seminars structurally.

OT What was it like to work with Alice Sebold as your editor?
AM A pleasure. She's an excellent editor. She has such respect for language and she misses nothing. Above all, it was her dedication to the novel as a whole that mattered most. She saw what I wanted to do, and refused to allow me to stray too far from that intention.

I’m a shell. A husk; all my sweet yellow corny bits gone, eaten, tossed aside at the end of some soulless street fest. You see I’ve lost sight of my purpose. Since launching my crush blog and my subsequent meteoric rise, crush suggestions have flown thick and fast. Where once I might follow a crush from Evanston to Pilsen, content only to stare at his back and perhaps tap him on the shoulder before ducking into a Dunkin' Donuts, now I wake sometimes to find crush wannabes camped out in my entryway.

People, crushes are about risk, the potential for public humiliation, sometimes a mild sedative and a telescope. If you prostrate yourselves at my feet and I eat a peeled grape then nod languidly in your direction, is it really a crush?

This month I decided to take a risk. I would renounce my influence, surrender control, I would do the twenty-first century equivalent of standing beneath my crush’s window blasting my boom box. I would tweet. But who to target approach?

In real life, crushes take root slowly. First you spot an attractive stranger at your local five and dime, next she’s cropping up at all your favorite haunts. What’s the online equivalent? I wondered, stepping over Rahm Emanuel, still sitting glumly on my front stoop. That’s when it hit me.
“Not now, Rahm,” I said, averting my eyes from his tattered “make me your crush” sign.
"But I ride the brown line!" He called as I locked the front door.
Back upstairs in my office, I toggled over to Twitter. Heart in my throat I tweeted:

@Zulkey Wanna be interviewed for The Sun Times Blog? This is my first PUBLIC crush request. Be honored.

Claire Zulkey. Blogger, author, critic and local performer. Increasingly, I’d seen her work at various web hangouts, linked to on Facebook, blogging for WBEZ, even moonlighting at Jezebel. Clearly Claire and I were meant to be.

An excruciating ten minutes later she responded:

@SarahTerez me! blush. Thank you--yes, crush on!

Just like that, I was back, adrenaline-fueled and dreamy, all because I took a chance! I encourage you, dear reader, to do the same.

Name: Claire Zulkey
Hometown: Evanston, IL
Profession: Editor's Assistant/Writer
Hobbies: Cooking, Reading, Travel, Chicago Sports, Running, Dogs

Our Town You’re pretty active on the Chicago scene. Tell me about the reading series Funny Ha-Ha.
Claire Zulkey Around 2003 my friend John Green (the future famous writer) and I were talking about how at literary readings, everyone always enjoys the funny pieces most and how it would be great to have a reading that was all funny, nothing serious or pretentious. People seem to enjoy the series despite my constant fear that everyone only comes to be nice and secretly resents me the whole time for passive-aggressively forcing them to attend.

OT So many writers go into writing so as never to speak to a live human being. How important are the increasingly ubiquitous live storytelling/reading series/ stand around having a persona events for a writer’s career?
CZ Unless you're a super famous important person and people are lining up to buy your book and have you sign it, I'm not sure you're very likely to build an audience based off reading appearances. However, I think building a coterie of like-minded people is integral to having a successful creative career and doing and attending readings is great for that. You need friends with whom you can have a beer and bitch about writing [without worrying] they're going to say "Must be nice having 'problems' like that."

OT What inspired your book, An Off Year?
CZ It began as a short story I wrote to entertain myself in an attempt to emulate this book I love called Celine by Brock Cole--it's about an idiosyncratic, strong-voiced female protagonist and I wanted to write a story like that. Over many years it mutated into a full book.

Here are things I pretend to understand:
Numbers longer than four digits
Fractals
The word ‘hegemony’
The difference between broasting and roasting
Twitter direct messaging
Why the Beatles are important
The problem with free radicals
How to tell time
Post-modernism

I got to thinking about these items while reading Psycho Dream Factory, Chicago writer/artist and Green Lantern Press founder Caroline Picard’s gorgeous new book. In the introduction, Lily Robert-Foley writes that the stories collected within the volume deal with reappropriated images, with copies that destroy the original; that Picard’s work makes “an explosion between the point of origin and the point of arrival, thereby opening a new space.”

I’m pretty sure Robert-Foley believes CDF postmodern. Here are my clues:
-this word pairing: copy/original
-gathering tension between my shoulder blades

I kind of assume everyone understands everything better than I mostly because whenever I call my mother to ask how to hard-boil eggs she either says “Same way as last time,” or “How do you not know how to do this yet?” But just in case you’re similarly confused about post-modernism, when I spoke with the seriously brilliant Picard about her celebrity-sprinkled book and the show she’s concocted in conjunction, I swallowed my pride (also my gum, but that’s another story) and asked her to explain post-modernism. Turns out even those who function within post-modernism are more concerned with making art than labeling it. As it should be. Now if only I can find someone to teach me how to pronounce San Luis Obispo.

Our Town Give me a one-paragraph crash course in post-modernism.
Caroline Picard I will fail miserably. [A teacher] showed me a Derrida art piece. He set up a chair in a gallery. Next to the chair he'd posted a photograph of the chair. Next to that he'd posted text: "chair." I think my teacher said, "This is postmodernism." I liked the teacher because she was an angry old hippy who cussed under her breath; because I liked her I believed I understood. The truth is, I wasn't exactly thinking about postmodernism when I wrote these stories. I was thinking about how you can take celebrities and use them like dolls.

OT You do, however deal with the issue of sameness, which is kind of postmodern, right?
CP I got interested in appropriating images and manipulating them. I was thinking a lot about Woody Allen's movies, how--particularly in his films with young people (like Christina Ricci and Jason Briggs, for instance) actors imitate Woody Allen's style of speech and behavior. In Anything Else, you suddenly have more than one Woody Allen-ite in every scene. When Ricci and Briggs talk to one another they reflect a similar neurotic affect back and forth. When that happens, I feel like the narrative of the story collapses; as a viewer I'm suddenly more interested in the directorial conversations that lead to this display of sameness than I am in the actual movie. I suddenly wonder about the actors' freedom [within this] narcissistic Woody Allen fantasy. Also, a book I was reading about Michael Jackson brought up this idea that everywhere he turned, he saw some version of himself. In a car, he would hear his songs on the radio, at the grocery store he might see himself in the tabloids. What happens to "the self" under those circumstances?

OT Why do celebrities fascinate us?
CP I’m into thinking about their placement, particularly in supermarkets. They’re all over the aisles before you check out--so clearly as a thing to consume. Also they're next to candy; these images of lifestyle connect directly sustenance. At the same time, the worldview perpetuated by magazines like Us or Star is really narrow--lots of white people talking about babies and the celebration or collapse of monogamy. Who got what new plastic surgery. I feel like celebrities also represent a particular and pervasive idea of success--one that spreads through other fields. Fame and recognition is a measure of achievement. The marketability of oneself is more important (in many cases) than the integrity of what is being produced. The actor is legitimized if he or she gets a spot on a glossy magazine. In a more general way, those ideas of success speak to a very basic desire to be acknowledged, recognized and known but that impulse has become commensurate with human capital. Something to be bought and sold. One sort of amazing example, celebrity perfume. You can buy J-lo perfume, or Jessica Simpson perfume. A kind of purchasing of essence to fulfill some deep desire to become them.

Writer Sara Levine is stubborn. Though prolific, published in prestigious literary magazines like American Short Fiction and on edgy websites such as Nerve.com, Levine resisted the notion of putting out a book.

“I kept insisting that I did piecework,” Levine says, “an essay here, a prose poem there, a few stories, a series of aphorisms. I had been doing these strange short fictions for a while before it occurred to me that I might gather them together without any great damage to the universe.”

Once she heard that Caketrain Press planned to hold a chapbook contest judged by Deb Olin Unferth, whom she “admired on many levels,” Levine broke down and submitted some work. The resultant short story collection, Short Dark Oracles, is as incisive, intellectually probing and wryly funny as its author.

Levine spoke with Our Town about her writing process, her forthcoming novel and one unexpected consequence of childbirth.

Our Town Do you have a favorite story in the collection?
Sara Levine I don't subscribe to the idea that a writer has a "real" or "natural" voice that she needs to find—a superior voice, waiting, beneath the layers of awkward syntax and the crud of bad grammar, to be excavated. But I feel closest right now to the voice of "Baby Love." I'm sure there are other stories about the intensity of the mother-newborn bond, but when I wrote "Baby Love," I'd been reading around in the motherhood literature and hadn't found them.

OT You’re a parent, has parenting changed you as a writer?
SL Parenting is an exalted and humbling experience. It's changed almost everything about me, including my long-held scorn for people suffering from hemorrhoids. Honestly, it's hard to take this question on in short format; I want to start throwing bibliography at you. (See Jane Lazarre's The Mother Knot; see Tillie Olsen's Silences, see Adrienne Rich's Of Woman Born; see Rachel Cusk's A Life's Work). Parenthood heightens my awareness of the larger world but also brings home my limitations as a human being. Many of the writerly habits I had before becoming a mother I chose to abandon. I've also made choices that make the cultivation of solitude harder. Because I'm aware of the clock ticking, I have less patience for bad work—my own as well as other people's. On the other hand, I suspect I have a better sense of where the story lies for me.

OT One piece in Short Dark Oracles, "A Promise," is a sort of magically realistic look at selfishness and child-rearing. What inspired that story?
SL My daughter likes that I work, but not that I work out of the house. She would prefer that I work at her school, or at least drive an ice cream van. So likely that story comes from my own ambivalence about rushing out of the house each morning. Also, here's the shocking confession the Sun-Times blog readers are waiting for: one day a conductor on the Metra Union/Pacific North line forgot to punch my ticket, and I let him walk on by. Now that I've told you this, I expect to be arrested tomorrow morning when I arrive at Ogilvie Station.

OT What’s your writing process like?
SL Slow and inefficient. I begin things and then put them aside. I look at the same run of sentences, or paragraphs, or pages, over and over, hoping to be able to read it through without feeling mortally offended. It usually takes years, since I'm a better reader than I am writer.

I’ve adored Conor Robin Madigan since the day I met him, both of us first year students at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. It wasn’t just the snake tattoo entwining his bicep, the rambling play about windup toys in an attic room he workshopped, or his deceptive composure that intrigued me. Even in an MFA program in which another student stripped naked in class and circled the room before leaping a chair to flee down the echoing hall, Conor stood out. Now, just a few years after graduation, his novel Cut Up hits the stands—or whatever it is novels hit. The disquieting story of a young couple restoring a falling down farmhouse, the book cultivates a sense of low-lying alarm. Let’s review: tattooed, creative, vaguely menacing. Yep, he’s totally my type. No wonder Conor Robin Madigan is June’s Chicago Crush!

Hometown: Evanston, Illinois
Profession: Guitar repairman
Hobbies: 16mm film, collecting books, typewriters, writing music, gardening, pruning trees at the end of winter

Our Town When did you realize writing was your destiny?
Conor Robin Madigan Early on, my mother took me to the Gettysburg battlefield. We got lost in the orchards and I suffered heat stroke. We walked to a part of the battlefield where a bull was kept in a large field. [He] sat under a big tree and drank muddy water. I made the decision that grunting at the thing was very smart and soon the bull was up and crooning, quite distressed. The farmer came out with a stick and ran [us] away. Back home in Evanston, I had a dream about a boy and his cat. They lived on the battlefield with ghosts and the boy was to stay with his farmer uncle and aunt for the summer. He'd go out at night with the cat and walk with the ghosts. I wrote it on my father's PC in the basement. My oldest brother read it and told me I needed to learn how to spell. I wanted to prove him wrong.

OT Which writers have influenced your concept of the world?
CRM Cervantes was read to me by my mother. [It’s] the only writing that has truly, deeply made a difference in the way I see the world. Henry Green, Muriel Spark, Leonard Michaels, William Trevor; these are the writers who have influenced how I write.

OT What inspired Cut Up?”
CRM One night, a girlfriend wanted me to tell her a story. I was so flattered, I took the task very seriously. The windows were open and the El rattled a few or ten blocks away. Something romantic and quiet came to me. It began with Sheri and Liam walking on a dusty road to market to trade in all of the dead husband's things for fruit.

OT Who is your dream reader?
CRM A teenage man from the Midwest, maybe thirteen, picking up his first novel and his first girlfriend or boyfriend.

OT Do you listen to music when you write?
CRM I listen to Liszt, Mozart, Arvo Part, Wayne Shorter, Dusty Springfield, The Zombies, and in the last five years I've been listening to the music my brother and I write. We wrote a song a week individually, for a while, and I'd listen to the songs as I drafted and wrote.

OT The MFA in Creative Writing is an increasingly pursued degree. Is it necessary?
CRM The MFA is an important experience, [offering] writers the space and time to become highly critical of their writing, but more, to read and read. You need to read the right work. 100:1 [is] a good ratio, book to written piece. MFA programs attached to English departments are a different game. It's risky for a writer to have anything to do with English professors. I kept falling in love with them in college.

OT Where do you find inspiration?
CRM I don't write from inspiration. I write like a turbine spins. I find inspiration to read. And that inspiration is coffee. Maybe I like to print out what I write. In a way that inspires me to edit, which makes me write more.

If I won the Pulitzer I might never recover. When I compose a particularly lucid text message, I’m not sure how I’ll top it, so I can only assume a post-Pulitzer existence similarly nerve-racking. But 2011 fiction winner Jennifer Egan, though no stranger to anxiety, hopes to take her victory in stride.

Hailed as a rock and roll novel, Egan’s book, A Visit from the Goon Squad, does pay homage to the record album, but that’s just part of its aim. Influenced by Proust and "The Sopranos," Goon Squad’s time hurdling assortment of interlocking stories may have captured the imagination of music fans, but its truly notable for its fearless defiance of literary conventions. But then what is rock and roll about if not fearless defiance?

Our Town Congratulations on winning the Pulitzer. Now what?!
Jennifer Egan In a way, I’m not in a position to fully answer--and maybe this is the answer--since winning, I haven’t had time to work, so I’m not sure of the impact. The danger is one sits down to write and thinks, “I’m a Pulitzer winner, where’s the genius?” My hope is I can just relax a little bit. Not feel pressure because, pressure to do what, win a Pulitzer? The ideal way to react would be to say, “ok I got the big award, let’s just keep writing better and also have some fun." I [also] tend to be a fairly anxious person, so I’m used to feeling anxious as I work and having to deal with a fair amount of worry in the writing process. So while the nature of the anxiety may change, I’m used to functioning amidst that feeling.

OT You were born in Chicago. Any specific memories?
JE I lived there until I was seven, when my mother and step-father moved to San Francisco but I visited my father every summer and I still have two sisters there, so I feel very connected to Chicago, even the tiniest details. I love the way the brick is tinted yellow. You don’t see that on the East Coast, it’s always red brick. One place that’s meaningful to me is the Art Institute where I went as a little girl, such a lovely scale with all kinds of nooks and crannies.

OT To what degree does a writer’s geography shape her work?
JE Place is usually my entry point, time and place. The sense of slightly rusty, industrial decay--much less present in Chicago now, is incredibly evocative to me. I did a lot of research on the history of Chicago when I was writing my novel Look at Me, which takes place in Rockford. I was very interested in the industrial revolution as it hit the Midwest; the disappearance of prairie, the railroad, the changing of the landscape. One reason all that fascinates me is my physical connection. When we moved, I remember immediately being struck by the aesthetic difference between Chicago and San Francisco. Feeling that I was somehow from and, in a way, of two such very different places with such different textures and histories and qualities has been significant for me as a writer. I tend to like to write about more than one world at once. My books tend to have at least two—Goon Squad has a lot more than that—very diverse and often opposing landscapes.

OT Speaking of Goon Squad, did you anticipate reviewers’ emphasis on the album aspect?
JE The album—a full vision composed of discreet units of music-- was something I wanted to honor. [But the book] seemed to have been regarded as a rock and roll novel more than I would have expected. There are lots of chapters that really have nothing about music in them [yet] the overall impression many readers walk away with seems to be of a book really steeped in music and the music industry. When it was published, I don’t think we made any special effort to reach out to that whole market of music related publications because I don’t think anyone was quite thinking of it that way. I have no problem with anything that people focus on. I feel like you write it and then people are going to make what they want of it and take what they want from it and that is the nature of writing books. I would never quibble with that, but I was surprised by it.

OT Can writing be taught?
JE It’s funny to me when people say it can’t. Visual artists have gone to art school for hundreds of years so why would that not be possible with writing? I belong to a writing group and we read work aloud fairly regularly, which is not that different than a writing workshop. I don’t like to work in a vacuum because I did that the first time I ever tried to write a novella and I ended up with hundreds of pages of unreadable dreck, and it was very disappointing.

Photo by Honey Lee Cottrell

For almost three decades, feminist sex writer Susie Bright has taken America on a guided tour of her sex life, offering political ruminations, writing advice and titillating anecdotes. But what do we really know about her life outside of the bedroom? Her new memoir, “Big Sex, Little Death” addresses this omission, offering characteristically frank, often startling accounts of topics as varied as Bright’s early work as a founding member of Teamsters for a Democratic Union, her fraught family life, and the truth behind her ongoing feud with anti-sex crusaders.

Our Town Why write a memoir now?
Susie Bright When the publisher approached me, my parents had died recently and I was learning things I never would have discovered if they were alive. I thought I knew everything about my family, but there are people who come out of the woodwork, there’s a box of letters that falls in your lap. I also had a twenty-year perspective on the highlights of the feminist sex wars, things I didn’t discuss when we were in the thick of it. It’s funny how some of the biggest things in your life, you realize you’ve never told anyone.

OT You write that women’s memoirs are often diet books or tell-alls. Why?
SB It’s the snake biting its own tale. Mainstream media and publishers say no to anything truly original. I once proposed a book about my experience as a sex positive feminist and parent to one of my former publishers who said, ‘You can’t be a mom and a sex goddess at the same time.’ I laughed my ass off, although I could only laugh so much because it was a rejection. The professional climate is rife with male chauvinism. A friend of mine’s daughter recently got an editing post at a digital media company, but she wants to do international reporting. She’ll hafta buy her own ticket and airdrop herself into the gnarliest situation she can, because of the gender rigidity in mainstream media publishing. There’s a tracking regime, like, ‘Would you like to write about diapers? How about edit these very important men’s work? You don’t want to do news and hard Op-ed, are you kidding? Wouldn’t you feel better working in PR and marketing and all these other areas where strangely, there are lots of other women?’ We’re faced with those obstacles, which you can get really mad about, and stamp your feet, but you might also find you’re participating. It’s not enough for me to worry about where I get to publish or what I get to say. What am I doing in terms of publishing other women’s real life adventure stories? If I’m not doing that then I can just shut up.

OT Reading your book, I was struck by your bravery. You talked your way out of many explosive situations. Do you look back in amazement?
SB In the moment I didn’t have any doubts. Like, I have to hitchhike to San Francisco, what the hell are you doing obstructing my path with your gun and your psychosis? Afterward is when you open your eyes in the middle of the night. In a narrative, of course, those elements are dramatic highlights. Most of the time my life could be called ‘the kindness of strangers.’ I’m talking to you from Baltimore, where I’ve just been kissed and fed and treated like a queen by people I’d never met. Being plugged in and open to new experiences is definitely worth it.

OT You write about anti-sex advocate Kittie Mackinnon publicly decrying porn and rough sex, but privately sleeping with a woman who in your mind embodied kinky sex. Why do people like her condemn what they enjoy?
SB Look at the GOP Christian zealots who get caught with their pants down in the public square. Same reason, they believe they’re special. If they have a kinky sex life, if they like naughty pictures, if they entertain themselves with taboos, if they have secret prostitute friends, they can handle it because they’re different, they’re entitled. You see this all the time among the uber elite. It’s an aristocratic point of view, which is why sexual freedoms and sexual speech is the foundation of democracy, the litmus test. If people can’t make their own decisions about their sex life and speak freely about it--we’re talking everything from reproductive rights to what you like to fantasize about-- it means there’s a group of people setting up and enforcing public policy in vindictive and prejudiced ways.

Interviewing someone you’ve never heard of is easy. Sure you gotta research, but becoming informed on a deadline is cake compared to fielding a phone call from an icon. Amber Benson may be a minor mainstream star, but for fans of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” she’s a major deity. Thankfully, she’s also one of the most genuine, forthcoming celebrities I’ve had the privilege of interviewing. On the final leg of her book tour, Benson hits Challengers Comics Saturday April 9th, and she’s looking forward to it, but maybe not as much as she’s looking forward to grabbing a burger while she’s in town.

Our Town How’s the tour?
Amber Benson A little crazy. I feel like I haven’t been home in months. We had a really amazing turn out in New York and Houston, people waiting in the rain, crazy stuff.

OT You knew early you wanted to act. When did that goal crystallize?
AB I was a hyperactive child. My mom put me in ballet and lots of after school programs to wear me out so I would sleep. I remember being onstage in “The Nutcracker,” this little marshmallow rolling out of some guys skirt and realizing I did not like ballet. It’s beautiful and I appreciate it, but the rigor was not very appealing as a child. But being onstage and having people clap? That was like catnip, so I sort of matriculated over to the drama world.

OT Acting led you to everything from producing to writing for TV to novels; surprising or part of the plan?
AB If you have a brain and you’re a woman, being one thing isn’t enough. As a creative individual, you have to diversify. Plus you can’t really make a living as an actor. A small percentage does, but then there’s everybody else who’s struggling. As an actor, you’re regurgitating somebody else’s dialogue invented in their world rather than yours. I knew I would go crazy just being an actor. I had always written short stories, bad poetry, plays, that sort of thing. When I was approached about doing the Willow/Tara comics for Dark Horse, I was excited to try something new and writing-centric. After the BBC read the comics, Chris Golden and I were asked to do the “Ghosts of Albion,” an animated program. Then Random House asked us to novelize that universe, so that was my entré into writing long form prose.

OT "Death’s Daughter" was your first solo novel. Since then you’ve written two more. Is it getting easier?
AB I’m at work on the fourth as we speak. You have to treat writing like a business. I like to go places to write. Like, ok, I’m leaving to go to my office. I try to do 1500 to 3000 words every time I sit down. It’s daunting to see a blank computer screen and know you have to fill it with 90 to 100,000 words. But the process gets easier—maybe easier is the wrong word. I get better at the process because I’m doing it more. Especially revisio where the book comes together. You vomit it up as a first draft, then go back and rewrite until you get it to a place where it’s not vomit anymore, it’s cotton candy.

OT You blog, tweet and are active on facebook. Social media, boon for artists or distraction?
AB Traditional ways of reaching people don’t work anymore. Magazines and newspapers are going under, everything is becoming internet based. You have to use what you got and what we have is social media. It puts you in connection with fans in a very intimate way. It’s awesome but frightening because all the walls separating the creative from the real world are knocked down.

OT Any social media regrets?
AB I did something just stupid. I was trying to direct message a friend to give them my new e-mail address and whoops, it popped up on Twitter for everybody to see. But I work hard not to talk about where I am while I’m there. I was at the New York comic-con a couple years ago and another writer, a friend, Anton Struass was at the booth and I tweeted, “I’m at such and such booth,” and then I went to do my signing and he’s like, “dude you left and a bunch of people came over, going ‘where’s Amber, she says she’s here.’” I’m learning you have to be protective of your personal space. I’m not on Foursquare. If I get checked in it’s somebody else doing it and I have to beat them up later.

Illinois judge and writer Michele Lowrance didn’t choose to become an expert in divorce. However, years spent on the frontlines first as a divorce lawyer and then as a family court judge gave her unique insight into the personal ramifications of the divorce process. Determined to offer guidance to hapless couples, Lowrance harnessed her background in Easter philosophy to write “The Good Karma Divorce,” a sort of psychological how-to on navigating divorce’s uncharted emotional territory.

Our Town To what do you attribute divorce's increasing prevalence?
Michele Lowrance Poor communication, lack of problem resolution skills, increased geographic mobility and the ability to have emotional needs met outside marriage. Studies also show divorce is contagious; you’re more likely to view divorce as a [solution] when you are surrounded by others going through the divorce process.

OT What compelled your book?
ML I was a divorce lawyer for twenty years and have handled over 15,000 divorces during my sixteen years as a judge. I have seen firsthand the devastation divorce leaves in its wake and I have become increasingly alarmed by its long-term effects. I developed the principles on which the “The Good Karma Divorce” is based to try to reduce the cycle of anger and resentment that are so damaging to all parties to a divorce.

OT You write about your history with divorce. Why get personal?
ML I am a child of divorce and have been divorced myself. I had to reveal these things because I didn't want readers to think I was speaking from an ivory tower. I felt they could only trust me if they knew I understood what they were going through.

OT What made you connect the concept of karma to divorce?
ML It began to dawn on me that divorcing people were often missing two things: a game plan and a Sherpa guide to direct them from beginning to end, while keeping them from falling into the crevasse on the treacherous journey. My professional and personal experience with divorce, combined with my studies in Eastern philosophy, led me to consider the law of karma and how to effectively apply it to the breakup and divorce process.

OT How does karma relate to surviving divorce unscathed?
ML I believe it is not our job to enforce emotional justice to those who have wronged us. It is the job of karma, life or a higher power. When we think it is ours, we imagine the courts will help us [receive] emotional satisfaction or vindication, or we stay attached to the wrongdoer waiting for them to get what’s coming. In Buddhism, good karma, or good action, comes back to you in countless ways. If you act graciously with compassion, you may receive compassion [and] your act of compassion changes you for the better [independent of] someone else’s reciprocal behavior.

(Photo by Mark Trockman/trockstock.com)

Brazen memoirist Marya Hornbacher’s writes like she’s breathing. From “Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia,” to “Madness: A Bipolar Life,” her books feel somehow both spontaneous and painstakingly considered. In person, Hornbacher is as brilliant, honest and witty as her writing; a delight to interview. Currently teaching creative nonfiction at Northwestern University, Hornbacher spoke with Our Town at length about everything from her teaching style to her yoga practice.

Our Town Can writing be taught?
Marya Hornbacher You can’t teach an ear, you can’t teach talent, but you can teach people who have those things not to just fly by the seat of their pants. Part of it is reading good literature, deconstructing the way beautiful language works. There’s value to having a conversation with someone who’s been [writing] a while, who knows craft. I feel like I chat with my students more than I teach them.

OT Is it hard to switch gears from writing intensely vulnerable memoir to then having to show up and be this professional teacher?
MH The assumption that your teacher will not have a life—teachers believe that more than students do. My students know I have a life, they know I’ve written about my life. They know some detail, probably more than they know about their physics teacher, but I would’ve told them anyway! When you’re teaching creative nonfiction it helps to have written about your life in a very open way, because you can say, ‘look, how much are you willing to risk emotionally to write? How careful can you be with the other people you’re writing about?’ When you deal with nonfiction you deal with human characters. How do you characterize them fully? How do you deal with dialogue? You have a way of talking about those craft points which you might not had you never taken those risks.

OT Memoirist Vivian Gornick famously admitted creating composite characters in her memoir “Fierce Attachments.” What’s your take on the ethics of that sort of invention?
MH I’m kind of a hard ass on that. I feel like in memoir you tweak dialogue in order to characterize the people involved as accurately as you can, but in terms of conflating characters, hell no. Making up events, absolutely not. Memoirs are structurally more like novels than essay, so you elide and you cut and you pare. Memoir has a narrative arc [but] life does not follow that nice, neat path to resolution and hope. So memoir is neater than life, but you can’t lie. Why would you? Write a novel.

It isn’t that Brenda Wilhelmson journaled her way sober, but her writing practice and background as a freelance writer and journalist certainly facilitated her recovery. A self-described high-functioning alcoholic, Wilhelmson realized it was time to get help when the bad days began to outnumber the good. Looking to the literary world for aid, however, she found the self-help genre more scandalizing than beneficial. Her response? To write the book she craved. Fifteen months of journal entries led to a streamlined manuscript which she first blogged, then sold to Hazelden. Recently, she spoke with Our Town about her book, "Diary of an Alcoholic Housewife," her sobriety, and what it’s like to count David Sedaris as a fan.

Our Town How did your journalistic background influence your writing?
Brenda Wilhelmson Early on, I showed a friend the beginning of my book and he showed it to his wife, an English teacher. She pointed out places where she thought I should elaborate on my thoughts and feelings. I thanked her but didn’t take her advice. I used the who, what, when, where, why, and how approach because I knew if I didn’t, “Diary of an Alcoholic Housewife” would be maudlin drivel, and I wanted to stick close to the facts.

OT You describe your experiences as milder than other addicts’ which made you question whether you were truly an alcoholic. Can you talk about that?
BW When I started attending recovery meetings, I'd listen to addicts tell stories of their children being taken away, selling sex for drugs, burning down their houses, going to prison. It was like they knew they had cancer but waited until stage four before getting help. I felt like I was at stage one. I had a good husband, two great kids, a nice house, two cars, I hadn’t lost my driving privileges like most of them had, and no one knew I was a drunk. I’d sit in meetings and tell myself I wasn’t that bad, that I could drink again. But when I took [an] honest look at myself, I sounded bad, too. The battle of I'm-not-that-bad/yes-you-are raged in me for most of the first year I was sober.

OT What keeps you sober?
BW When I'd seriously contemplate drinking again, I’d remind myself of two truths that made me cringe. The first: I’d begun drinking the dregs from my party guests’ glasses after they left my home. The second: I knew I’d quit drinking if I got pregnant, and that’s part of the reason I had my second child.

Last night at Target I thought a lot about Peggy Orenstein. A bestselling author and contributor to the New York Times Magazine, Orenstein is perhaps best known as a girl culture commentator. From the “Confidence Gap,” to the identity-cementing effect of Facebook on teenage girls, Orenstein is both fascinated observer and wise critic. Her new book, “Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture,” offers an invitation to pause for a breath and examine the increasingly sexualized, appearance-centric culture in which girls are raised.

But back to Target. I’ve written here before about my conflicted relationship with all things girlie. I’m a feminist and pop-culture skeptic, but if it’s hot pink or slathered in sequins I cannot look away. So last night, even as I found myself sucked down the pinkety-pink Barbie aisle, entranced by heart-shaped Valentine’s Day dinner plates, and enviously examining flouncey red lace mini-skirts in the girls department (If they’d made clothes like that when I was a kid, I wouldn’t have resorted to wearing my mom’s silk slip to school.), I thought of Ms. Orenstein and wondered. Did Cinderella eat me too?

Our Town What was your purpose in writing “Cinderella Ate My Daughter?”
Peggy Orenstein I liken my approach to the food movement. Ten years ago, who knew from trans fats? Now, because of a couple of books, because somebody started the conversation, we’re more aware; we know there are physical health threats. I wanted to start the conversation about the rise of this girlie girl culture that encourages girls to define themselves by appearance. It’s a very personal book because it’s about my daughter, all of our daughters.

OT Your discussion of Disney Princess play and its possible impact on girls as they grow drew the attention of a Disney spokesperson who called you absurd and said in part, “little girls experience the fantasy and imagination provided by these stories as a normal part of their childhood development.”
PO It is developmentally appropriate. That’s what’s pernicious about it. Girls (and boys) are really focused on asserting their gender when they’re that age. They hook onto whatever culture provides that’s most extreme. At one point, it was dustpans and brooms, then baby dolls; now it’s focusing on becoming the fairest of them all. It’s great that Disney feels they have to respond to me-they’re that threatened. Their response that princesses help girls expand their imagination? Nothing says expanding girls imaginations like pink Disney princess mouse ears with a tiara and a bridal veil.

OT As girls mature, how exactly do their playthings impact their self-image?
PO There’s this way that little girls are encouraged to confuse self-absorption with self-confidence. My daughter got a make your own messenger bag kit for her birthday. It has all these iron-on transfers: hearts, flowers, stars, ones that say “brat,” and “spoiled and pampered princess.” And she said, “Mom why would anyone want that on their purse?” I call it Girlz with a Z culture: Bratz and Monster High dolls, toys and movies that promote the idea that the way you show you’re confident and powerful as a girl is to look like a Sesame Streetwalker.

OT You cite studies connecting young girls playing at sexiness with older girls experiencing body image issues. What’s that about?
PO With all this emphasis on play sexiness at unprecedentedly early ages, girls don’t understand what they’re doing. It becomes a performance and maybe they never learn to connect to their internal feelings and grow up seeing sexuality as something they perform for others. This blew me away: I talked to a researcher who asked teenage girls to describe their feelings around arousal. They responded with how they looked. She had to tell them looking good isn’t a feeling. Girls are going through puberty younger; they look like adult women at younger ages, so they need protection from being sexualized too soon.