Interview with Kristin Bair O'Keeffe, author

Welcome, Kristin, and thanks for visiting!

Q: Can you tell us what inspired you to write your debut novel, Thirsty? (link to review)

Kristin: Two things: my family history with domestic violence and my family connection to the steel industry. I grew up in a suburb of Pittsburgh, and my maternal grandparents lived just down the road a bit in Clairton, one of Pittsburgh’s most dynamic steel communities. In the 1960s and 1970s, I spent a lot of time at their house with the smokestacks of the mills bearing down and barges hauling steel along the Monongahela River. My grandfather and great uncles worked in the steel mills so it was a big part of our family story. When the steel industry collapsed in the late 1970s and early 1980s, so did Pittsburgh’s steel communities. At that point, the storyteller in me jumped up and said, “Ooohh, there’s something to be told here.”

Before I wrote fiction, I wrote poetry. As an undergraduate at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, I wrote and published “Crumbling Steeples,” a poem about how the crash of Pittsburgh’s steel industry affected its steel communities (and more specifically, my grandfather). After I wrote it, I thought I was done writing about Pittsburgh and steel. Obviously I was wrong; the poem was just the beginning.

Q: When did you write the book, and how much research went into it?

Kristin: I wrote the first full draft of Thirsty during graduate school at Columbia College Chicago in the 1990s, and although I am definitely not a historian or a steel-making specialist, it was very important that I get the details right (fingers crossed). I did a heck of a lot of research at the Harold Washington Library Center on State Street in downtown Chicago.

Q: Which writers have influenced you the most?

Kristin: Here’s a sampling, though there are many more:

• for language, rhythm, and soul: Toni Morrison and Gabriel García Márquez
• for writing about women’s lives in significant ways: Alice Walker and Toni Morrison
• for thinking like me: Dr. Seuss and Amy Krouse Rosenthal
• for keeping me centered: Thich Nhat Han and Pema Chodron• for writing inspiration: Natalie Goldberg and Anne Lamott

Q: Are you planning another book or any other work?

Kristin: Absolutely. I’ve got two big projects on my plate right now:

a. a memoir about falling in love with an Irishman, marrying him (um, rather quickly), moving to China, and becoming a mom.

b. a second novel...which is wildly different than Thirsty

Q: Can you tell us about your work in Shanghai?

Kristin: You know, living in China is this wonderful, kooky, frustrating, thrilling, eye-opening experience. When I moved here in 2006, I didn’t know much about Chinese culture and I didn’t speak a word of Mandarin. For a lot of people, that kind of change is overwhelming. For me, it was inspiring. I love being nudged (pushed/shoved) out of my comfort zone, plunked down into a culture about which I know little or nothing, and forced to reexamine who I am and how I define myself in the world.

The good news after almost four years in China?

I’ve got enough material to write about for a lifetime.

Q: Is there anything else you would like readers to know?

Kristin: I love to hear about writers’ quirks. My own? As a writer, I’m obsessed with the rhythm and sound of every single word in every single sentence I put on a page. I read everything out loud (including this guest blog post)…over and over again; if I hear a clunker word, I replace it, and then I read the entire piece out loud again.

Of course, if you’re thinking I only do this in the privacy of my own office, you’re dead wrong. I read my work out loud in coffee shops, book stores, airports…pretty much any place they’ll allow me to plop down with my computer and work.

Thanks for sharing your experiences and writing tips with us, Kristin. Good luck with your memoir and your next novel!

Bio
Kristin Bair O’Keeffe’s debut novel Thirsty (Swallow Press, 2009) tells the story of one woman’s unusual journey through an abusive marriage, set against the backdrop of a Pittsburgh steel community at the turn of the twentieth century. Her work has been published in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Poets & Writers Magazine, San Diego Family Magazine, The Baltimore Review, The Gettysburg Review, and many other publications. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia College Chicago and has been teaching writing for almost fifteen years. Kristin lives in Shanghai, China, with her husband and daughter.

 If you’d like to learn more, visit http://www.thirstythenovel.com/ and her blog “My Beautiful, Far-Flung Life” at http://www.kristinbairokeeffeblog.com/.You can also follow her on Twitter: www.twitter.com/kbairokeeffe and friend her on Facebook at www.facebook.com/Kristin.Bair.OKeeffe.

Book Review: Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen

Water for Elephants is the story of a young man who runs off to join the circus during the Great Depression, leaving his troubles behind plus an unfinished veterinary degree from an Ivy League university. His vet training lands him a permanent job with the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth, but life in the circus is not all the fun it seems.

There is animal cruelty, unscrupulous practices by the owner and manager of the circus, and unexplained disappearances of unneeded circus workers every so often. Jacob falls in love with an equestrian performer, Marlena, who is married to August, a circus boss. When August repeatedly beats the new elephant bull, Rosie. for not performing, Jacob and Marlena band together to protect the elephant and each other from the unscrupulous practices of August and the circus owner, Al.

Comments: I listened to the book on audio, expertly and entertainingly read by David Ledoux and John Randolph Jones, who were the voices of Jacob at age 90 and Jacob in his early 20s, remembering and telling the story.

Jacob at age 90 is delightful, telling us with humor his unhappiness with being confined to the nursing home where his family has placed him. Jacob at age 20 plus recounts his three and a half months with the Benzini Brothers Circus, his work with the animals, his love for Marlena, and how they survive the brutality of their bosses and environment.

I don't know if reading the book would have been as enjoyable as listening to the audio. I might have skipped over Jacob's complaints about his nursing home food and the other residents and missed a lot. Listening to the book being read was not at all boring but made Jacob endearing and made what he does at the end of his story entirely plausible.

Definitely a 5 star novel.
Challenges: 100+ Reading Challenge, Support your Local Library Challenge

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The Sunday Salon: Change in Plans

Welcome to the Sunday Salon! Two reasons to celebrate today: Valentine's Day and the start of the Lunar New Year of the Whie Tiger.

I had planned to have eye surgery last  Thursday and borrowed  about 4 audio books to listen to while recovering. Change of plans! My eye doc had to be sent to the hospital and will be fine, but postponed my surgery for a month!

Nevertheless, I started the audio book, Mrs Pollifax and the Lion Killer, am almost through with Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen, which I highly recommend as a very interesting and entertaining story of life in the circus during the Depression era, told by two men representing the main character as a 90 year old man and as a young man.

The other audio books I got are R is for Richochet by Sue Grafton, and A Fine Place for Death, a mystery by British writer, Ann Granger.

I also went to the library and picked up another book by Christopher G. Moore, The Risk of Infidelity Index. Moore writes detective fiction set in Bangkok. I'm enjoying this one too. Also had fun doing a 100-Word Writing Challenge hosted by Verbal Verbosity, which happens every week.

Can't believe I also squeezed in 3 reviews and an almost-review- one crime fiction, two general fiction, and one non-fiction:  Paying Back Jack by Christopher G. Moore; Thirsty: A Novel by Kristin Bair O'Keefe, I Ching: A New Interpretation for Modern Times, and The Pig and I by Rachel Toor.

Overall, I did more on the blog that I had planned! How about you?

The Pig and I by Rachel Toor: Must Reads # 1

I've always wondered what it would be like to have a pot- bellied pig for a pet. I've read they are as smart as a 3-year-old!

My Must Reads is a book I found online and decided was too entertaining to pass up.

The Pig and I: Why It's So Easy to Love an Animal and So Hard to Live with a Man
by Rachel Toor

The cover and title caught my attention, and then the description from Goodreads:

Funny, heartfelt, and irreverent, The Pig and I follows the hilly course of author Rachel Toor's romantic life as she falls in love with a series of pets and in and out of love with an equally eclectic string of men, many of whom bear a striking resemblance to the animals, both in looks and temperament.


From Prudence, a sweet white lab mouse who hates Rachel’s sweet, mousy actor-boyfriend Charlie, to Emma the pig, a fifty-pound force of nature that Rachel coparents with her ex-boyfriend Jonathan, we accompany Rachel as she learns how to bring into her human relationships the same kind of acceptance she so easily extends to her pets. Anyone who knows the comfort of coming home after a disastrous date or day at the office to a wagging tail or a ready purr will find The Pig and I irresistible.

The Pig and I: Why It's So Easy to Love an Animal and So Hard to Live with a Man. You can click on the title to sneak a peek through Amazon's "click to look inside" feature.

What Must Reads  have you found recently? Must Reads details a book that you can't resist, one you definitelly have to read.

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Book Review: I Ching, A New Interpretation for Modern Times, review

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I Ching: A New Interpretation for Modern Times by Sam Reifler

I'm not superstitious, but using the ancient Chinese classic, I Ching, as a form of divination or fortune telling can be just plain fun. It's general enough so that you can interpret the results in different ways. And it's often uncannily accurate!

In the I Ching, there are 64 hexagrams made of six lines each. Each hexagram represents a human situation, and all 64 together are said to "encompass the whole of human experience." You ask a question of the I Ching and throw coins to determine which hexagram will answer your question.

From Goodreads: What is the I Ching?

For centuries the Chinese have consulted the I Ching both as an oracle and as a means of self-understanding. The moral and psychological depth of its wisdom has been celebrated by its scholars, psychologists, poets, and scientists.

In this clear, immensely readable interpretation, Sam Reifler eliminates the obscure and dated references of previous translations to provide an accurate and accessible version of the ancient Chinese classic for the contemporary seeker. With easy-to-follow instructions for using both the yarrow stick and the coin toss method, this new interpretation of the I Ching reveals the hidden forces at work in our relationships, our careers, and our emotional lives - and suggests new directions and choices for the future.

For everyone who seeks to better understand themselves and the world around them, this new translation of the I Ching is... "practical and remarkably effective...."

My personal experience using the I Ching: This week I was expecting to have eye surgery in a few days and wanted to see what the I Ching would say about my situation, which I was a little nervous about.

I pulled out my copy of the book, threw three coins six times and formed the hexagram 5 - Zhuy, translated as "Waiting."

Oracle: Great success. Auspicious
If you keep to your course,
You may cross the great water.

So everything was going to be okay - auspicious.

But wait! Hexagram 5 had a moving line, according to how I threw the coins! Line 6 changed Hexagram 5 into Hexagram 9! Here's what line 6 said:

Waiting no longer,
Three rescuers arrive at the cave.
Auspicious if you treat your rescuers well.

Here's what line 6 of the new Hexagram 9 changed to -Zhiao-Khuh or "Minor Restraint".

Rain has fallen; Progress is delayed

The next day I got a call saying my eye surgery was postponed as my eye doc was in the hospital. Not too serious, but a minor restraint. What could I do but gloat about my rescue/respite, and hope my doc would be okay.

Did the I Ching foretell this change of events?
They say not to use the oracle as a parlor game ,even though some people do. It could get confusing, especially if you ask more serious questions than mine.

Well, that Q & A was a bit of fun!

Challenges: 100+ Reading Challenge, China Challenge
 

Book Review: Thirsty by Kristin Bair O'Keeffe

A gutsy book by a gutsy writer.

Summary: Klara Bozic raises three children and, though she fled domestic violence from her father in her native Croatia in 1883, lives daily with physical violence from her husband Drago in her new home in the steel mill town of Thirsty, just outside of Pittsburgh.

Klara's daughter grows up and also marries an abusive man, continuing the cycle of violence in the family. She is haunted by dreams in which she takes revenge. What Klara endures and how she pulls herself and her daughter out of the cycle to find some measure of peace and stability is the theme of the novel.

Well written, fluid prose, well developed characters. Thirsty shows the effects of domestic abuse on individuals and the family, as well as gives a view of the hardship of life for families dependent on the Pennsylvania steel mill industry in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

I give a lot of credit to the author for addressing the topics in her well written novel, making more people aware of domestic violence and the cycle it creates.

Author Kristin Bair O'Keeffe wrote a complete draft of this book as her thesis for her MFA in Creative Writing at Columbia College Chicago. Her book is based on her own experiences and observations of life in a working class community in a steel mill town. Watch for an interview with the author which will be posted this month.

Thirsty: The Novel was published 2009 by Swallow Press. More information is available at http://www.thirstythenovel.com/

Source: ARC from Phenix & Phenix
Challenge: 100+ Reading Challenge

Book Review: Paying Back Jack by Christopher G. Moore

Paying Back Jack is 11th in the detective series featuring PI Vincent Calvino. It has a complex plot about paying back old scores, in Bangkok, a city which seems like one of the most interesting but challenging places in Southeast Asia.

The novel has so many plot components that it's sometimes hard to keep track of and link all the people and their activities. There are personal scores to settle involving people who had worked in many different places - Southeast Asia, in Iraq, and in the Middle East war zones.

The intrigue starts when Calvino is hired by Casey to find the man responsible for his son's death. The case is more complex than it seems. Calvino becomes embroiled in more than he bargained for.

"Casey, the private contractor with interrogation expertise, good street contacts, and a payload of anger over a dead son, was locked in a version of the past fueled by hatred." (p. 206)

This is more than just a detective novel set in an exotic location. Moore's writing shows flashes of creative brilliance as well as insight into the local culture.

"A vapor trail of superstition hung above the table, streaking the conversations with sentiments from an old, traditional culture. For a moment, she almost felt at home."

"He was happy that she finally had what every Thai woman wished for: motherhood. To become the mother goddess was to achieve a vindication, to have climbed to a sacred platform and claimed a throne." (p. 134)

After finishing this book, I thought Moore could easily use his talents to write literary fiction.

I then discovered, thanks to a comment by blogger Mark David, that Moore has written 20 books, including short stories and nonfiction books on Thai culture and customs. In this Amazon link, Christopher G. Moore, there is a list of titles in his Vincent Calvino PI series. Moore, a Canadian, has lived in Bangkok since 1988 and has a background in law.

Paying Back Jack , hard cover, 339 pages, was printed by Grove Press in 2009.

Challenge: 100+, Support your Local Library Challenge, Thriller & Suspense Reading Challenge
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