You never know what we'll churn up in cleaning a stall
In my novel What’s Left, Cassia’s aunt Nita continues her ongoing role of knowing just about everyone and what they’re up too. It’s a vital social role that a few rare individuals seem naturally inclined to fill, as my novels Daffodil Uprising and Hometown News demonstrate.
Tell us about somebody you know who serves as the “switchboard operator” in your circles.
though I did see a moose along the Kancamagus and the next day, at sea, three humpbacks, including a mother and calf we followed more than an hour as the wind blew their misty exhalations across us a week before a perfect ocean sailing and that was about it, except for my annual Labor Day trek up the rails along the Merrimack and a brisk swim before the pool closed yet any view says there’s something out there you’re not getting
In my novel, What’s Left, Cassia becomes a rising executive with half of the country as her territory. The experience of growing up in the family restaurant gives her a head start over her colleagues, but she’s also much more vulnerable in a highly competitive, often hostile, financial world, than she’d ever been back home.
What are the biggest threats in being a woman in management? How would you avoid them?
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Using skills and connections he acquires working in a shipyard in Greece, Aristotle relocates to Indiana in my novel What’s Left.
How did your grandfather wind up pursuing the work he did?
fittingly ends spooky summer mostly continuous deluge (four Yuppieback novels and a collection of essays) a Labor Day weekend reading binge as its best of thee often . hoping for all perfection, write sometime, OK? I never could keep up with developments / Everlastingly
Let me repeat, What’s Left is my final novel, even though it’s appeared before several earlier ones — or their later revisions. That doesn’t mean I might not rework some more of my earlier books, but I have no intention (at this point, ahem) of undertaking such an ambitious project.
Still, if it’s ever successful, there can be a demand for a sequel. There are many possibilities that point to further development.
One plot twist I considered was this:
A handful of the Erinyes’ grandchildren rebel by returning to attend college across the street from Carmichael’s. Perhaps it’s inevitable that they apply for jobs in the restaurant.
Can they work? We’ll let them decide about becoming cousins.
This could have opened considerations about rebalancing the ownership, for one thing. Or more dimensions to our understanding of what it means to be a family. Or even their own reasons that parallel those of Cassia’s father in moving way back in the early ’70s.
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It’s a big book, admittedly. But it could be a lot bigger.
Where would you take the story of What’s Left from what’s already there? What would you like to have answered?
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more complex than I’d suspected / morally rigid but sensual: her garden a clue, not straight rows but clusters and clumps with small surprises inserted wherever, all kinds of colorful dimensions, some of them tasty or sweet along with some bitter /
In my novel What’s Left, Cassia’s great-grandmother and her sister marry two brothers. One is named Aristotle.
Do you know of any brothers in one family who marry sisters from another?
about it, except for an annual holiday trek up the railroad tracks along the river and brisk swim before the pool closes with Labor Day as ritual with a list of things to do filling four pages feeling depressed half the time even overwhelmed would be natural, too much I lose balance, lose focus, lose center then need to get back into the room by myself relating her entire summer rather beat
It’s is not my debut novel. Rather, I have the feeling it’s the opposite — the final one. I could never do this again. What’s Left is a big novel chock full of surprising turns, deep thoughts, and lively details. Unless Cassia starts speaking to me again, there will be no sequels. For me, at least, the story condenses so much into its pages I’m feeling completed.
Unlike my earlier novels, this one was not written on the fly while working full-time as a journalist. Like them, though, it’s undergone extensive revision.
Woven through the book are themes I’d explored in my earlier stories, now seen in a new light, while investigating others I’m tackling for the first time. Family and family enterprise, adolescence and childhood, death and divorce, and Greek-American culture, especially, are new while counterculture, romance, spirituality, community, nature and specific place, livelihood, journalism itself all run through my previous work.
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Think of this bit as going into the compost rather than being served on the plate:
All I’m doing is asking you to apply your new comprehension to the rest of your life.
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Of course, you’ve heard somebody blurt out, “I’m never going to forget this as long as I live!” Or some such. And sometimes it’s true.
Me? I have trouble remembering nearly everything. Could it be one reason I read so widely is to help me remember? Of course, writing gets it down on paper, once again so I don’t forget.
So while I read to help me remember and to gain insight on the world around me, it’s not the only reason by any stretch.
What do you look for most in a novel or poem?
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Jnana's Red Barn 