The Enlightenment Show with Winnie M. Li

Welcome to The Enlightenment Show, Winnie! I’m so excited to have you joining us to talk about your novel, Complicit.

·       Can you give the readers a synopsis of what Complicit is all about?

    

                39-year-old Sarah Lai teaches screenwriting at a local college but was once an aspiring film producer ten years ago. When she’s approached by a New York Times journalist about a powerful male producer she once worked with, she’s forced to confront the truth of her ruined career in the film industry -- and how she may have been complicit in certain injustices.

           ·       Complicit has a lot in common with your personal experiences with the industry. You pull back the curtain to spotlight those who turned a blind eye to sexual harassment, abuse, and assault. Did you know that you’d be addressing these much-needed topics going into writing Complicit? 

 

              Oh absolutely, that was the whole reason I wrote the book!  Shortly after the Weinstein allegations broke, a friend remarked: ‘I don’t get it. If people knew Weinstein had been doing this to women for years, how was he able to get away with it for so long?’ And I remember thinking ‘Ah clearly, you’ve never worked in the film industry before…’ So what I wanted to do in COMPLICIT was show how and why professionals in these workspaces would turn a blind eye to that kind of behaviour -- because they don’t want to endanger their job, because they’re ambitious about their own careers, because they don’t feel like they would even be listened to or taken seriously.
 

 

         ·       Did you and your main character Sarah walk together in healing as you wrote this book? What things did you learn from Sarah along the way?

 

 

             Ah, interesting question! In regards to my own experiences, I probably went through more healing when I was writing my first novel, Dark Chapter.  But writing Sarah and Complicit, I probably did absorb a sense that at some point, you will have to let things go. Whether that’s bitterness, anger, pain over things that happened in the past… there is a way to be at peace with the past if you learn to let things go. If you realize that back then, you did your best – or what you thought was your best at the time.  
        

           ·       What’s one of your favorite things about writing novels?

 

              Oh man, the sense of freedom!  That I can create a completely new world, or construct a completely new character and life story, and THAT IS MY JOB as a novelist.  So it’s an escape in many ways, and also a chance to let my imagination run wild -- while at the same time, I’m creating a story that is relevant to issues and experiences I care deeply about.

        ·       Often, when writing those traumatic memories of a story, there’s a need to step back and process. Did you have moments through writing Complicit where you took time to take care of yourself? What were your “go-to” spaces or things that helped with the processing?

 

             It was probably more with my first novel Dark Chapter that I needed to process my own traumatic memories.  Complicit was pretty fun for me to write.  Because it allowed me to revisit the glamor and the excitement of working in the film industry, while also speaking truth to the inequality and precarity of that work environment.  I got to indulge the cinephile part of me and make loads of film references in a way that was relevant to the story and the character of Sarah.

        ·       You openly express your personal story about reframing how we think after sexual violence. What is something that people share with you often after your presentations? 

 

 

             After I do a public talk, people will come up to me with their own stories of sexual assault – or about times when it almost could have happened to them, or when it happened to their friend or their cousin, mother, sister, etc. There are so many hidden stories of trauma or almost trauma that I think sometimes it just takes hearing one other person’s story to trigger a collective sharing.

                                           

     

          ·       You mention that people need to be seen, heard, and remembered. Why do you think this is so important?

 

                 As much as we’d like to think it’s just about the art of filmmaking (or book-writing), at the end of the day, humans are social creatures. We have hopes and dreams and egos. And we do care whether or not we feel valued by other people.  So it’s heartbreaking to pour so much hard work into a project or a company – and to not have that effort recognized by other people. Likewise, it’s heartbreaking to share a story of trauma – be really open about our own suffering – and not have that pain acknowledged by others.  I do believe every person out there has an important perspective and an important story to share, but our society is so used to only hearing about the contributions and stories of certain types of people.  

  

 

 

                        INNER CHILD SEGMENT

 

 

        ·       When you were a kid, what were some of your favorite movies that you could watch repeatedly and never tire of?

 

                  The Little Mermaid – I must have worn my VHS tape of it so thin from repeated viewings. My sister and I were also bizarrely obsessed with Gone With the Wind (for all its faults). We would play it on VHS and record ourselves speaking over the dialogue on audio cassette tape (remember audio cassettes?)  I was always Rhett Butler.

          ·       What spice is your favorite, and why?

 

               Wow, random question. Smoked paprika.  Because it’s smokey and a bit spicy, but not overpoweringly so?

 

         ·       What’s the oddest food combo that you’ve liked and tried, or just tried?

 

              Hmmm… strawberries and balsamic vinegar. When I was living in Ireland, some Irish friends of mine had just come back from Italy, and they were like, ‘Oh this is how they do things in Italy.  They eat strawberries with balsamic vinegar sprinkled on top.’  It kind of worked….? I haven’t tried it since, but I feel like over time, one could acquire a taste for strawberries and balsamic vinegar. 

         ·       What advice can you share with our readers about living a joyful life?

 

               Embrace it all.  You never know what’s around the corner, you never know when you’ll get another chance to enjoy something.  I don’t want to cast that in a pessimistic light.  But I was a victim of a criminal assault where if it had gone another way, I might have died. So I make sure to take every opportunity that comes my way – and to make the most of the chances life gives me. 
 

         ·       Where can the readers connect with you? Where can they find your book?

 

               I’m on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook as Winnie M Li.  I have a newsletter I occasionally send out, which you can sign up for via my LinkTree on my Instagram. And you can find Complicit in hardcover, e-book, and audiobook pretty much wherever books are sold!

 

Congratulations on the release of Complicit and thank you for your voice and raising awareness!! It’s been an absolute pleasure getting to know you, Winnie.

 

 

The Enlightenment Show Interview with Barbara Graham

 

Welcome to The Enlightenment Show, Barbara! I’m so excited to have you join us to discuss your upcoming book, What Jonah Knew.

• Can you give the readers a brief synopsis of What Jonah Knew?

          Absolutely. What Jonah Knew is a psychological thriller about the unbreakable bond between mothers and sons, even when it seems that all is lost and the bond is ruptured beyond repair. At the novel's opening, Henry, Helen’s son, has mysteriously disappeared, while a bit later, Lucie’s toddler Jonah shows signs of PTSD, with no known cause. Eventually, the lives of the two families overlap in upstate New York, putting Jonah’s life in grave danger, and forcing all the characters to redefine the very nature of life and death because of what Jonah knows.

        Throughout the novel, trauma and memory are explored through a variety of lenses: Zen, Tibetan Buddhism, inherited family trauma, and decades of research at the University of Virginia on kids who spontaneously recall a previous life.

• Where did the idea about a seven-year-old boy having a connection to a missing person come from? Where did your concept stem?

          As a journalist, I wrote a lot about psychology, including memory and trauma. Some years ago, I was assigned to write an article about past life regression therapy. As part of my research, I had a session with a Jungian psychologist who specialized in that work, and I seemed to have a memory of a previous life during the Holocaust. The session was powerful, but I didn’t know what to make of it. Not long after, a friend gave me a copy of a book by Dr. Ian Stevenson, a psychiatrist at the University of Virginia who for decades had been studying young children with a spontaneous recall of a previous life. That research was very credible and blew me away.

        Around the same time I was pursuing my interest in Buddhist meditation and heard a number of Tibetan Buddhist teachers—who were considered to be reincarnations, including the Dalai Lama—talk about past and future lives as casually as last Thanksgiving or next Christmas. I was fascinated by all of it, and one day the idea for the novel just came to me while walking down the street in New York. A possible link between young Jonah’s distress and a missing person was part of that same download.

•  Your main character, Helen, is searching for her missing son and is determined to find him.  How did you draw on that urgency and feel into her emotions to create the tension within your story?

           As the mother of a grown son, it wasn’t hard to imagine how I’d feel if he went missing. Like Helen, I would be desperate to find him and turn over every rock and follow every lead. Writing about that was painful, but I was also immensely grateful that it wasn’t my story or my son’s. That’s the wonder of fiction: being able to draw on your own gut emotions in imaginary situations.

• Mothers and sons have a special bond. What are the things you loved most about Helen and Henry’s relationship? Lucie and Jonah?

          From the moment my son—and only child—was born, I’ve had the sense that we have a deep karmic connection. I’ve also found that the power of that connection hasn’t diminished over time, even now that he’s grown and has two daughters of his own. I feel very lucky: Our relationship is loving, playful, and respectful—the greatest gift of my life. In the novel, both Helen and Lucie feel the same sort of deep bond with their sons. At one point early in What Jonah Knew, Helen talks about sensing an invisible cord connecting her to her son, Henry, “a sort of phantom umbilicus composed of pure energy.” As for Lucie, “From the moment she set eyes on her baby, she understood that there were now so many more ways she could be mortally wounded by love than she’d ever dreamed possible.” I can’t speak about being the mother of a daughter, but I imagine the feelings are equally profound, though the relationship has its own particular flavor.

• What was your creative process for writing What Jonah Knew?

          I worked from a bunch of different outlines during the course of writing the book, but I never followed any of them for very long. They provided good jumping-off points, but then my characters rebelled. They knew better than me—or my outlines—what needed to happen next. To me, that’s the real joy of writing fiction—not knowing what happens next and then, as if by magic or some mysterious process that you can’t force, it comes to you. When I got stuck, I’d stand up from my desk and take a long walk or do something else until it came to me. The process was like trying as hard as you can to remember someone’s name and coming up blank. But then, as soon as you put it out of your mind, suddenly you remember.

• Do you believe in the supernatural? Why or why not?

        I believe that there’s far more to existence than what can be detected by the five senses and that consciousness is not bookended by birth and death. That’s the understanding inherent in the Buddhist teachings I’ve studied, as well as in various other mystical traditions, including the Kabbalah in Judaism. Some people might consider occurrences that lie outside the conventional materialist view of the universe to be supernatural or paranormal. For others of us, though, who have a different sense of things, phenomena such as reincarnation, which is explored in What Jonah Knew, might just be considered normal.

• How do you think that dogs connect with people?

         As Jonah says, “Dogs know stuff people don’t.” I believe dogs are super sensitive and attuned to much that lies outside the limits of human perception. Dogs are also highly empathic and can provide enormous comfort to humans in times of distress, as Charlie does in the novel.

• How are writing a play and writing a novel similar? How are they different in the creative process?

       That’s a great question. Both plays and novels are works of imagination and call for the same kind of creative vision. And both depend heavily on dialogue. But the similarities end there. In novels, the author must create the entire universe in which the story takes place—characters, setting, all the external circumstances, as well as the dialogue and the thoughts occupying the minds of the characters. In a sense, plays are like composing a musical score. But instead of writing notes for musicians to play and a conductor to orchestrate, playwrights write dialogue and stage directions, and the rest is brought to life by actors, the director, and a whole team of designers—sets, lighting, costumes. Plays and novels are two very distinct forms.

 

                                          INNER CHILD SEGMENT

·       What things did you like to do when you were seven?

      I read voraciously and acted out stories that I made up. By the time I was eight, I was writing the stories down, and at nine, I wrote, directed, and starred in my first play, which was performed in a friend’s attic. Our mothers were a very appreciative audience.

·       Who’s your favorite character in Lion King? Why?

      Simba, for his independence, pluck, and, ultimately, the guts to follow his destiny.

·       What would you make and sell at a bakery?

      Well, since I love very good bread, croissants, brioche, and morning buns—just like Helen bakes in the novel—I would make and eat those. And if any were left over, I’d sell them.

·       What advice can you share with our readers about living a joyful life?

     Don’t fight your life circumstances or argue with reality. That’s the recipe for suffering, not joy. Be grateful for what you have. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t aspire to realize your goals, but rather try to focus on the process, not the outcome, and trust your intuition to guide you. You’ll be happiest and do your best work that way. And take time every day to simply be present and savor the life inside you and around you—the trees, the birds and other animals, the people you pass on the street. When you think about it, it’s pretty remarkable that we’re all here. Right here, right now.

 ·       Where can the readers connect with you? Where can they find your book?

My website, www.barbaragrahamauthor.com 

Thank you so much for being with us, Barbara. Congratulations on the release of What Jonah Knew!! It’s been an absolute pleasure getting to know you.

The Enlightenment Show Interview with Siena Sterling

Welcome to The Enlightenment Show, Siena! I’m so excited to have you joining us to talk about your debut novel, Tell Us No Secrets.

           

·       Can you give the readers a brief synopsis of what Tell Us No Secrets is about?  Tell Us No Secrets is set in an all-girls boarding school in 1970. It centers on the relationships between four of the students there: beautiful, streetwise Cassidy Thomas, debutante jock Abby Madison, sensitive Karen Mullens, and sophisticated, trouble-making Zoey Spalding. The four are all Seniors and should be happily cruising through their last year, but new friendships are formed and old friendships are broken and relationships unravel disastrously.

Zoey plays a game with the class list: if you lose your virginity you get a star beside your name and the resulting peer pressure sets in motion a chain of shocking events. Adolescent angst, rivalry, and betrayal in the hothouse atmosphere of a single-sex boarding school result in a murder and Tell Us No Secrets deals with the aftermath of that—the guilt, the pain, and most of all the need to keep a deadly secret as the girls become women.

 ·       Tell Us No Secrets is a multiple POV story with woven layers all throughout the book. Did you get to know your characters or the story first? I had an idea of where I wanted the story to go when I started. I wanted to write about the break-up of a teenage friendship that would lead, ultimately, to violence. I knew I was going to have four main characters and had a rough idea too of who these characters would be, but I had no clue who would be the perpetrator or the victim of that killing until I started writing. I needed to know more about who the girls were before I knew what would happen to them, so the story and characters developed simultaneously.

·       What inspired you to write the setting in a 1970s boarding school? I had a falling out with a friend, and it affected me so much I began to question why I was having such a strong reaction. Then it struck me that I was feeling the same kinds of feelings I'd had when I went to boarding school. At that point, I knew I wanted to write about the experience of living with a group of teenage girls 24/7, cooped up in a school away from family and, basically, normal life. I set it in 1970 because it was such a momentous and confusing time: a time when the whole hippie movement was in full swing when sex drugs and rock n roll was the norm when sexual liberation was starting—and yet a time when abortion was illegal when homosexuality was not widely accepted when the Vietnam War was impacting so many young peoples' lives. So there was a huge sense of freedom and yet an underlying darkness, mirrored in the book.

Your characters, Cassidy, Zoey, Abby, and Karen, are very dynamically different from one another. What are two things that surprised you most about each of your characters and why? The best part of writing to me is when the characters start to take on a life of their own. Asking what surprised me about them all is a perfect question and I'll start with Zoey. I had never planned for her to turn from being a rebel into a woman leading a conventional life—it just happened. Also, she was more practical and logical than I'd first thought she'd be. As far as Karen was concerned, her falling in love with Zoey surprised me, and I hadn't expected her to be quite so vindictive. Cassidy's relationship with the science teacher, Mr. Doherty, came out of the blue and I was actually pleased to find her trying to stop the others from ostracising Karen. Abby turned out to be insecure in a way I hadn't expected and her reaction to the events as they unfolded was more selfish than I would have thought when I was first creating her character.

 ·       You mention the peer pressures and family dysfunction in your book, stirring the choices that each of these girls ultimately decides to make. What is something that you’d like to see changed in our society today to help teenage girls thrive and feel more confident in their world?  I'd like the impossible. I'd like for society as a whole not to focus on looks the way it does. The need for women to be attractive in an accepted way seems to get progressively worse rather than better—and teenagers suffer the most. There are so many great things about social media but if I had the power, I'd ban photographs on social media sites of any person under the age of twenty-five. I know that sounds ridiculous, but having to compare yourself constantly with others, and being judged on what you look like—it has to take a huge toll on anyone. One of the main themes of Tell Us No Secrets is peer pressure and all those photos of perfectly posed selfies ramps up the peer pressure to such a degree that I believe it plays a part in the increasing problem of mental health in teenage and young women.

                            

·       What’s a secret that you tried to keep, but couldn’t keep hidden? My secret had to do with peer pressure too. Friends of mine started to shoplift items of clothing when we were all about fifteen. Which was a stupid thing to do but if you hadn't shoplifted something you weren't "cool." I was desperate to be cool so I shoplifted a bathing suit. Not only was I terrified doing it, but when I got out of the store, I felt so ashamed, I didn't want to tell anyone—ever—not even my friends, even if that meant that I'd failed the cool test. I didn't dare go back into the store and pretend I'd mistakenly taken it, and when I got home I stuffed it in the back of my closet. But of course, my mother found it, with the tag still on. Which meant I had to go back to the store, apologize to the manager, pay for it, say I'd never do anything like that again, and experience total humiliation on all fronts. I failed to keep that secret but I've managed to keep a lot of secrets since.

 ·       Did you learn anything new about yourself while you were writing Tell Us No Secrets? While writing Tell Us No Secrets, I learned just how much of the teenager lurks in me still. I can claim to be an adult but it was ridiculously easy to relive all those feelings of insecurity, the need to fit in, and how painful it can be when friendships break up—and I learned to be a little easier on my teenage self. So much seems to be at stake during those adolescent years and knowing I've grown far beyond them doesn't diminish the experience. It also struck me when writing just how powerful female friendship is, at any age. I tell my female friends everything, I trust them with things I wouldn't even tell my partner, and if that trust is broken it can be equal to, or even more painful, than sexual infidelity. As I wrote about the interaction between these four girls, I saw similarities to friendships through the years. How women can so often revert to the playground mentality of "who is socializing with who?" and "who is the most popular?" or "who is talking behind someone's back"? So I learned that some things never change. Even if they should. Maybe the teenage self lurks in all of us.

·       What was one of your favorite things about working at Doubleday Bookstore in New York? I loved working at the Doubleday bookshop in Manhattan. At that time, the store was open until 10pm and I worked from 4-10. We had regular customers who would treat it like a bar—they'd drop in every evening, hang around at the counter chatting about books and their lives, so there was an odd sort of party going on every night. When the store closed, we'd move on to the bar across the street, which made it a real party.

One memorable time there was when a crazily rich woman came in and ordered a copy of every single book in the store. I couldn't figure out why she'd want How To Get Rid of Weeds In Your Garden as well as The Great Gatsby and over a thousand other titles. We had to shut the store down, and figure out how to get enough trucks/vans to ship them all to her hotel. It was mayhem and adding up the cost of it all was a major mission but also pretty hilarious.

 

                            INNER CHILD SEGMENT

·       Who were some of your best girlfriends growing up? What were your favorite things to do together? My best friend at age 12 was a girl named Susan who was very artistic and a little wild. We were the class outsiders and we were inseparable. Most of what we did outside of school was to sit up in our rooms and talk and listen to music. When I went away to boarding school, I became best friends with Candy, who was in some ways like Cassidy in my book. She was stunningly beautiful and popular and she had a great sense of humor. Everyone worshiped her so I was thrilled to hang out with her. We spent most of our time too in our rooms listening to music and talking. In the summers, we'd go to the beach and when I got my driver's license, we'd spend time driving around blasting the radio. Music was the key to life in so many ways and when we were old enough, we'd find clubs and places to go where we could dance.

After she left school, Candy became a Playboy Bunny in Denver, a blackjack dealer in Reno, and finally a nurse.

·       Did you receive an article of clothing or an object from your parents that you loved? My father gave me Anna Karenina when I was thirteen. At the same time, he told me to wait until I was at college to read it, but that it was one of the best books ever written. I loved it the first time I read it and I've loved it the five times I've re-read it since. He knew I was a voracious reader and I think he just wanted to make sure I read something brilliant as soon as I'd be able to appreciate it. It still fascinates me that he gave it to me though, because it's such a passionate book and on the surface, my father wasn't passionate except when it came to sports. So it gives me a glimpse into a part of him that is really meaningful to me.

·       What were some of your favorite subjects and things to learn about as a teenager? As I said, I loved to read, so English and History were my favorite subjects. I was totally hopeless at any of the sciences. Really weirdly, I was a huge fan of Latin. I'm pretty sure I was the only one in the class who thought translating Virgil was fun. Looking back I think it was a help with sentence structure and vocabulary. At the time it felt as if I was delving into an exciting foreign world that no one else I knew wanted to visit.

·       What’s the oddest food combo that you’ve liked and tried, or just tried?

This is truly disgusting—the oddest food combination I've tried was pasta and seal's paw. I was in Iceland, out to dinner with an Icelandic friend. I ordered some nice pasta dish and then he informed me I had to try the seal's paw—that this was an Icelandic staple and I couldn't turn it down. The pasta was great. The seal's paw was a hunk of blubber. Cold, wobbly blubber. Food doesn't get any more revolting than a cold, blubbery seal's paw. I took the smallest bite possible and forced myself to swallow it. It was as awful as it looked, which is saying a lot. I would have thought he was playing a practical joke on me, but I watched him happily eat it. Sometimes it's not a great idea to listen to locals.

·       What advice can you share with our readers about living a joyful life? How to live a joyful life. That's a tough one. It's great to have dreams and goals and ambitions, but my advice is to put people and relationships first. And to have a team of people who you know will always have your back, who are loyal, empathetic, and good listeners. You don't need a huge team, but if you have two or three people who you can always count on, who know you well enough to ride through the tough times with—and enjoy the good ones—then it is much easier to negotiate the inevitable ups and downs.

·       Where can the readers connect with you? Where can they find your book? Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/siena_sterling

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Sienasterling 

My website: www.sienasterling.com 

They can find my book at any of the below places: 

https://www.amazon.com/Tell-Us-No-Secrets-Novel/dp/006316180X/https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/tell-us-no-secrets-siena-sterling/1140137277

https://bookshop.org/books/tell-us-no-secrets/9780063161801https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780063161801

              

The Enlightenment Show Interview With Vanessa Savage

Welcome to The Enlightenment Show, Vanessa! I’m so excited to have you joining us. Congratulations on your book, THE NIGHT THEY VANISHED, that just released! It’s a thrilling and shocking ride.

 

•            Can you give the readers a brief synopsis of what THE NIGHT THEY VANISHED is about?

                    Hanna has a good life. Estranged from her family, she’s moved on from a troubled past to a life where she has a good job and is surrounded by loyal friends. Adam is a web developer. As a sideline, he’s built The Dark Tourist, a website that explores sites of notorious crimes in the UK. One day, a new house is listed on the website. It tells the story of a terrible crime – a family murdered; the killer never found. The date of the crime is today. The family is Hanna’s. When she rushes home, the house is abandoned and her family has vanished. Adam is insistent that his site was hacked, that he never put the house on there. Hanna and Adam have never met before now, but there’s a dark connection that links the two of them, and in a race against time to save Hanna’s family, they have to find that connection before it’s too late…

•          What was one thing that surprised you about your main character, Hanna?

                   It’s a very small thing, but I was surprised when I wrote her first scenes, to find she doesn’t drink alcohol. It wasn’t something I planned; it was just something I knew as I started writing. It was a clear marker of her determination to overcome the mistakes of her past.

•         Hanna has quite a past of trauma and family dysfunction. Where did you draw from to write the emotional scenes tied to her pain and fear?

                  I think this is where the ‘write what you know’ advice comes from. I haven’t experienced the trauma and dysfunction that Hanna has, but like everyone, I’ve experienced fear and grief, pain and insecurity. I understand the emotions although my life experiences are quite different and I’m able to draw on my own emotions when writing from Hanna’s point of view.

•       What inspired you to dive into creating THE NIGHT THEY VANISHED?

                My first novel, The Woman in the Dark, focuses on a family who move into a notorious ‘murder house’, and have to deal with the curiosity of strangers as they attempt to make a place of tragedy into a home. As part of my research for that novel, I became fascinated by the idea of dark tourism and it sparked a ‘what if’ question that wouldn’t go away until I began writing The Night They Vanished - what if you found your family home listed as the site of a terrible murder on a true crime website? And then you can’t get hold of your family, they’ve vanished into the night… What really happened the night they vanished? Where is the family? Who listed the house on the website? And why?

 

•       Have you had something vanish in your life that left you asking questions? What happened?

               Many years ago, we had a pretty cat who liked to wander. She wore a collar and was very sociable. She disappeared for about three days once and came home looking very well-fed and wearing a completely different collar. We bought her another collar and a few weeks later, the same thing happened. And then it happened again. Over the next few months, we got through a lot of collars and each time, she’d come home from one of her wanderings wearing a different one. Eventually, she vanished completely and despite us putting up posters and searching and asking neighbours, she never came home. I don’t think anything happened to her – I believe she chose her second home over ours. Perhaps they moved away and took her with them. Perhaps she just preferred the food they gave her!

•    What are three character traits that you like about Hanna? Why?

              I like her strength and determination – she went off the rails as a teenager and has really turned her life around since. She fought her demons and won and is determined not to let herself be dragged down again. I also like her sass and bolshiness! I’m far more reserved and shy away from confrontation, so I admire her confidence!

•    I love how you mention that you realized that you wanted your characters to kill each other, not kiss each other 😊 What do you love about writing thrillers and mysteries that keeps you coming back for more?

            I started out writing women’s fiction, character driven fiction that was all about the lead up to the happy-ever-after. But the more I wrote, the more I became fascinated by the darker side of my characters. Relationships – whether romantic or familial – are at the heart of my writing and for me, a psychological thriller is the flip side of a romance novel; it’s what happens after the happy-ever-after moment, how a relationship breaks down, how a friendship can spiral into paranoia and obsession… that’s what fascinates me as a writer. In real life, I’d much prefer the happy-ever-after.

 

 

                                                INNER CHILD SEGMENT

•      What is your favorite tea? How do you like to make it?

               I drink a lot of coffee in the mornings, but in the evening, I prefer a cup of green tea, made simply with boiling water and teabag in a favourite mug!

•     What’s something mysterious and suspenseful that excites you, and that most wouldn’t know about you?

              In common with many crime writers, I like to think I’m a very nice person in real life, who has never committed a crime and does not live a dark and tortured life! I’ve had many people who know me in real life express surprise at some of the dark turns my fiction takes…

•   What are a few things that you love about living by the sea in South Wales?

            Living by the sea in the summer months is wonderful – ice cream at the beach, sunbathing on the sand, the buzz, the excitement… but mostly, I love living by the sea out of season. The beaches are quieter but just as beautiful. I can walk the coastal paths with my dog for hours without meeting another person and it’s like my own private paradise. But, there can also be something eerie about a seaside town in winter, and the lonely, windswept beaches, with the mist creeping in from the sea have inspired the fictional settings for all of my books…

•   What’s the oddest food combo that you’ve liked and tried, or just tried?

            One Christmas, a friend persuaded me to try a slice of fruitcake with a chunk of blue cheese on top. I’m not sure it’s an experience I’ll repeat!

•  What advice can you share with our readers about living a joyful life?

          Appreciate the little things that make every day joyful. I think living through a global pandemic taught many people this – to take the opportunity to reconnect with family and enjoy the smaller moments. Don’t spend too much time regretting mistakes you’ve made – learn and move on. Don’t spend your life constantly looking forward to the big things, or wishing you had more money, were more successful or more anything – appreciate what you have.

•    Where can the readers connect with you? Where can they find your book?
•    Twitter as @VvSavage, 
•    Facebook as @VanessaSavageWriter
•    Instagram as vanessasavageauthor
•    My book is available from https://www.grandcentralpublishing.com/titles/vanessa-savage/the-night-they-vanished/9781538708231/ utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=MailChimp&utm_campaign=Night_They_Vanished&utm_content=GCPMysteryThriller_April_2022&mc_cid=a4b5fa2a9e&mc_eid=7372548d8b
•   Amazon https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/153870823X?tag=hacboogrosit-20
•   Barnes & Noble, https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-night-they-vanished-vanessa-savage/1140136990?ean=9781538708231&st=AFF&2sid=Hachette%20Book%20Group_8040641_NA&sourceId=AFFHachette%20Book%20Group
•   Books-a-million, https://www.booksamillion.com/p/9781538708231?AID=11552245&PID=8040641&cjevent=2f76a39ec61911ec803c01ac0a180514&cjdata=MXxZfDB8WXww
•   Indiebound, https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781538708231
•   Bookshop.org https://bookshop.org/books/the-night-they-vanished/9781538708231
•  Hudson Booksellers https://www.hudsonbooksellers.com/book/9781538708231/aff/HBGUSA
•  Powell’s,  https://www.powells.com/book/-9781538708231
•  Target,  https://www.target.com/s?searchTerm=9781538708231
•  Walmart https://www.walmart.com/search/search-ng.do?q=9781538708231

       Thank you so much for being with us, Vanessa. Congratulations again on the release of THE NIGHT THEY VANISHED!! It’s been an absolute pleasure getting to know you.

 

 

 

 

The Enlightenment Show Interview With Laura Jarratt

Welcome to The Enlightenment Show, Laura! I’m so excited to have you joining us. Your book, Two Little Girls, was an emotional, character-driven book that held me from the beginning. I couldn’t put it down!

                    ·       Can you give the readers a brief synopsis of what Two Little Girls is about?

                         Lizzie is a professional working mother in a marriage that’s beginning to feel the strain of work commitments. On the way home from a holiday with her daughters, she crashes the car into a lake and has to make a terrible decision when she can only get one daughter out of the car. The rest of the book deals with the consequences of her choice until events take a more sinister twist. And I’m in spoiler territory there so I’ll have to stop.

                  ·       Where did the idea for Two Little Girls spring from? Where were you when the first idea came in?

                         I was on a coffee break in the office kitchen at work. At that time, I was the Principal at a school for children with special needs. One of the office staff was telling us about a recurring dream she had about crashing her car into a lake and knowing she could only get one of her two girls out – and then she always woke up. It’s a classic expression of maternal anxiety and we all had some form of dream-like that so everyone was super-sympathetic, except me. I just stood there, frozen, and exclaimed ‘That’s such a great start to a book!’ It’s a good job she knew me well by that point and they all laughed. And the rest of the book came from that opening scene.

                ·       Your main character Lizzie Fulton makes a choice that haunts her throughout the book. What’s a choice that you’ve made that’s haunted you at some point in your life?

                     My mother and I were very close. She suffered from ill health for years but towards the end of her life, she deteriorated quite quickly and her kidneys began to fail. She had vascular dementia and so dialysis wasn’t appropriate as her dementia was accelerating too. In her last few days, she became really unwell and couldn’t stay in her own home with visiting care staff so I made the decision to ask for her to go into a nursing home in the village. I had to really battle to get this as they wanted to send her to a cheaper one miles away, where me and my daughter (who was three at the time) would have struggled to visit daily. My other option was to have her at home in our sitting room but we had no downstairs bathroom and also I was working full time and couldn’t afford to take extended leave. The nursing staff said she wasn’t close enough to the end of life for a hospice, although our family doctor said she wouldn’t have long. I finally got her into the nursing home in the village and we visited every day but she died less than a week later in her sleep. If I’d known she had so little time left, I would have brought her home with me. I still wish I had.

            ·       I love how you brought in the reality of how a traumatic experience causes PTSD. Have you personally gone through that? What kind of research did you do to make this aspect so relatable to connect to the readers?

                  I hadn’t experienced it myself at the time, although last year I was in a serious car crash and I did have some issues for a while after that and I got treated with EMDR because I recognized what I was experiencing. My husband was in the Army and I used to teach a Public Services preparation course so PTSD is something I was relatively familiar with when I was writing this book. I was Principal at a school with a number of children who had suffered early childhood trauma so I had read a lot about it as well as having direct professional experience. There’s one example I always quote about PTSD. I was watching a documentary on the conflict in Afghanistan to show to my class and there was a helicopter pilot talking about his PTSD. He said he’d flown 35 Med-Evac flights in close succession, bringing out casualties under heavy fire. He’d never had a problem until flight no. 36, but that one broke him. There was nothing different about it. It was just one flight too many in too short a space of time. That’s the thing with PTSD and what I wanted to convey – it can happen to anyone. Nobody is immune. In fact, PTSD can be defined as a natural response to an unnatural set of events.

 

               ·       What was one thing that surprised you about writing this story?

                    Dan, Lizzie’s husband, surprised me as a character. I thought he’d be far less sympathetic than he is after she makes her choice but he simply refused to be as judgmental as I believed he would be when I actually came to write the story. He took the first part of the book down a quite different track to my vague idea of where it would go.

              ·       What are some of your current fears that you’d like to examine and explore?

I’ve been doing that a little in my next book, where two of my characters are facing the impact of menopause and old age. It’s an uncomfortable place to be when you realize you’re past the halfway mark of life. While I think there’s so much about women’s lives post-menopause that is great and should be celebrated, there are moments when my breath catches at the thought that one day I won’t be here anymore. My daughter is still under ten so I think it hits me harder because of that. I want to be around as long as possible for her. I was 44 when my mother died and it was too soon – it’s always too soon when you’ve had that close mother/daughter relationship.

              ·       What’s one thing you loved about your two main characters, Lizzie and Dan?

                    I love how their roots are so entwined with each other that despite everything, how they’ve drifted, how damaged they are by their daughter’s death, and the fallout from that, they find their way back to each other. All marriages go through rough patches but some couples keep finding their way back to each other through the hard times. There’s tremendous hope in that and I love it.

 

                                                   INNER CHILD SEGMENT

·       As a teenager, what was your favorite thing to do? Eat? Wear?

                   I was quite a moody teen. Very hormonal! I liked hanging out in my bedroom in the dark listening to music as a younger teen. But in my late teens, I blossomed into a much more feisty and outgoing character. I was shy as a child but that vanished. I was into the alternative music scene so was usually found in second-hand combat boots, stripey tights, and cut-off shorts with my hair in cotton hair wraps with beads or twisted up into two matching top knots. My favorite meal would have been, as it still is, a Sunday roast with the family. And I’ve just remembered, I used to collect quotes as a teenager! I had diaries full of them. I’ve always loved words. I’ve still got those diaries in a box somewhere. I might need to dig them out and read them again.

              ·       What’s something mysterious and suspenseful that excites you, and that most wouldn’t know about you?

                     I’m laughing as I write this because I’m absolutely the worst person around mystery and suspense. I always cheat and look at the back of the book because I can’t wait to find out. I’m much happier with predictability and I like being comfortable, physically and emotionally. That doesn’t reflect my writing in any way, except I do like endings with some positivity to them.

I am scared of werewolves though if that counts, and that’s something most people don’t know about me. Yes, logically I know they don’t exist and it’s utter nonsense but put me in a strange rural location at night with odd noises and I’ll remember every werewolf film I’ve ever seen and frighten myself silly. We were once staying in a gite in France and I made my husband get up at 2am to close the skylights because I’d convinced myself a werewolf could get in when I woke in the night to a strange noise. My mother used to say I have a very vivid imagination, but I guess that goes with the territory of being a writer. My husband is the exact opposite and he just rolls his eyes and laughs.

            ·       If you could take a theatre workshop for any play, what would it be and why?

                  I absolutely love theatre and I used to go all the time before my daughter was born. I’m hoping she’ll come with me when she’s older. She’s just starting to show signs she might love it too. I’ve got no interest in acting myself though, so I think I’d have to be a director or do lighting and take a workshop around that. And I adore Shakespeare so it would have to be Twelfth Night because it’s my favorite. The use of language in that play is just so clever.

           ·       What’s the oddest food combo that you’ve liked and tried, or just tried?

     Mint sauce on toast. I used to love it as a kid. I invented it as a combo. I haven’t had it for years but I might just try it again now.

          ·       What advice can you share with our readers about living a joyful life?

           I can find a quote or a story for most things and this is no exception. ‘If you choose not to find joy in the snow, you will have less joy in your life but still the same amount of snow.’And one that I think of when the fear of aging edges into my mind is ‘Do not regret growing old. It is a privilege denied to many.’ It re-grounds me. Fighting aging is a battle we will lose. The secret is to embrace it and find joy in it. Some cultures are much better at this than Western society and we can learn from them.

   ·       Where can the readers connect with you? Where can they find your book? 

               My book is available in all the usual locations and you can find me on Twitter. I don’t tweet a lot but I’m always happy to connect with readers. I generally dislike social media now. Not in principle – it’s a great idea, but too many people behave badly in that environment. It would be better called Antisocial Media. Working with teens, I’ve seen how unhealthy it can be and how it promotes insecurity. I’ve got acquaintances who try to pitch this perfect image of their life on Instagram when their reality is nothing like that and I wonder why they feel the need to pretend, and why people use filters. I just don’t get it personally. Love who you are and what is real – it’s a choice we can all make.

                       ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

            Thank you so much for being with us, Laura. Congratulations on the release of Two Little Girls!! It’s been an absolute pleasure getting to know you.