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Burning Questions
Wondering what happened to your favorite author? Gosh, so are we. Ask away: Send your cards and letters to Burning Questions, 2143 Belcourt Avenue, Nashville, TN 37212. Or better yet, send us e-mail. When you write, please include your full name and the city and state where you live. Sadly, personal replies are not possible. And if your question is too hard, we'll simply put it in our big file labeled "We dunno."
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JUST IMAGINE
Dear Burning Questions,
Joann Gardner National Book Award nominee Beth Kephart's lyrical and insightful prose wins over readers and critics alike. Her latest book, Seeing Past Z: Nurturing the Imagination in a Fast-Forward World (Norton) was published last month. In it, she writes about her preteen son Jeremy who has become an avid reader and writer and is a budding Steven Spielberg. The book includes tips for inspiring other children. Kephart's next nonfiction book, Ghosts in the Garden (New World Library), is due out in March 2005. She tells BQ: "[It] is about coming to terms with middle age set against the backdrop of Chanticleer, one of the world's great pleasure gardens. For that book my prose will be accompanied by my husband's sepia photographs; the words and the images together tell a story that feels almost folkloric at times." She has also started a novel, but has put it "on the back burner" in order to concentrate on a business venture with her husband. This summer Kephart will take time out to run a writing workshop for inner-city teenagers at Chanticleer.
THE FFAMILY FFORDE
Dear Burning Questions,
Dorothy Compton "Well, yes, I am still writing," Katie Fforde responds from her home in the UK, "and, yes, I am related to Jasper, sort of! He is my husband's cousin, so while it's not a blood relationship, we do meet up as family quite often." Fans of the Fforde scribes will be delighted to know that both have books on the way. In Katie's Paradise Fields (St. Martin's), to be published in December, widow Nel Innes divides her time between running a farmer's market, decorating lavish cakes (which may be why she attends the occasional Weight Watchers gathering) and raising her teenaged daughter. As if that weren't enough, she tries to save the day—or the fields, more specifically—when the new owner threatens to develop the property. Cousin-in-law Jasper's Something Rotten (Viking) will be published next month. The fourth book in the Thursday Next series finds our intrepid heroine raising a son, still trying to restore her retroactively murdered husband and dealing with that melancholy Dane, Hamlet.
FREE RADICAL
Dear Burning Questions,
Wayne Slaven
After fleeing to West Africa, Hannah and her Liberian husband become involved with the infamous Charles Taylor. She organizes Taylor's escape when he ends up in a U.S. prison, and faces the repercussions years later when her sons join the rebel movement. As for Nick Hornby, his book of album reviews, Songbook, was recently nominated for the National Book Critic's Circle award in criticism. He continues to write fiction as well, and a new novel, The Blues (Riverhead Books), will be published in 2005.
NOT YOUR AVERAGE BOOKMOBILE
Looking for a little something different this summer? Then keep an eye out for the distinctive Great American Writing Road Trip van, which could be heading your way. Writer's Digest Books is sponsoring this cross-country journey to connect authors, agents and editors with aspiring writers of all ages and backgrounds in bookstores from Portland to New Orleans, with some un-planned stops along the way.
You can find tour dates, times and locations on the official Road Trip website, www.livetowrite.com.
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You're in luck: both authors have novels on the way. First up is Russell Banks (pictured), author of the Pulitzer Prize-nominated Cloudsplitter. His new book, The Darling, which will be published in October by HarperCollins, combines fact and fiction in the story of Hannah Musgrave, a member of 1970s radical group the Weather Underground.
The tour kicked off last month in Chicago at the Book-seller's Expo America, and visited stores in Ohio and Kentucky on the way to the west coast. This month, it will stop in cities throughout New England, including New York City. Mid-month, the van will head south to tour Tennessee and Mississippi before the final workshop, scheduled in New Orleans on July 27. Workshop leaders include Tom Franklin, author of Hell at the Breach; Donald Maass, an established literary agent; Jack Kerley, author of The Hundredth Man; and Jane Friedman, executive editor of Writer's Digest Books.