January 2008
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"It was helpful to have a ready-made story, and when I read about the facts I thought, Oh my God, this poor woman. What [Mata Hari] went through here, and how she overcame that and did this. At the same time, though, I knew that presenting her life would be much more interesting if I showed the things that no one could find out about. I was excited when I thought I would write this book because I said to myself, 'No one else is going to write this book the way I would.'"
by
Donna Seaman
"I was a young toddler when I left Vietnam with my mother and her husband (a white American working for the State Department). It was just after the Tet Offensive, deep in the war when sentiments in the US were not so great. It was a difficult time to be Vietnamese (or in my case, half). The language rides on my nerves when I hear it; it stirs me in some fundamental way. I taught a workshop at Naropa one summer called "Lost Languages" -- an attempt to write toward some never-had tongue. I sometimes think that is why I write poetry. Trying to conjure something barely available, seeking to retrieve it."
by
Joshua Marie Wilkinson
"Until the U.S. comics industry devotes a substantial portion of its market to comics for women and girls, and recruits a whole parade of female comics artists to tell their stories, we as an industry or a fan culture may want to take a hard look at our own comics rather than critiquing manga’s representation of women. I don’t mean to belittle the work of the many women in the industry today, from creators to fans, but as a market, female readers and creators are often considered too little, too late."
by
Jeff VanderMeer
“I believe in God -- nothing will ever change that. You can hook me up to a torture machine and I’ll still say I believe. I’d die if I didn’t have God. But I also believe in science. Does that make me a bad Christian? Why do I have to ignore facts just to prove my faith is strong?” These words, the unmistakably dramatic words of a teenage girl, belong to Mena Reece, the central character in Robin Brande’s YA novel Evolution, Me & Other Freaks of Nature. Mena’s story twists the coming-of-age high-school novel toward the American culture wars, and reading it, we learn something about the state of religion-science writing these days.
by
Barbara J. King
"I’d also refer you to something Lee Child said to me this year, to wit: 'The idea that thrillers are peripheral to literature drives me nuts. The thriller concept is why humans invented storytelling, thousands of years ago. The world was perilous and full of misery, so they wanted the vicarious experience of surviving danger. It’s the only real genre and all the other stuff has grown on the side of it like barnacles.'"
by
Clayton Moore
