An Interview with Ellie Alexander

Posted on June 25, 2015 by Ed Battistella
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Ellie Alexander is a Pacific Northwest writer who loves testing pastry recipes. Her work (as Kate Dyer-Seeley) has appeared in The Columbian, The Vancouver Voice, Seattle Backpacker, Portland Family Magazine, and Climbing Magazine.

EB: How did you decide to set Meet Your Baker in Ashland, with an Oregon Shakespeare Festival subplot?

AE: My family and I used to come to Ashland for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival growing up. It’s such an idyllic setting. One of the things that I find unique about it as a setting is that there are almost two towns within Ashland. Visitors travel from all over the globe to catch a production at OSF, but then when the theater is dark for the season Ashland becomes a small town again. I think that makes for a very rich setting—there are always new characters rolling in to shake things up, or to kill off.

Shakespeare sets the ultimate stage for drama. I enjoy weaving in quotes from the bard and details about the history of the theater. And Ashland has so much more to offer from its gorgeous parks and hiking trails, to its thriving art community, surrounding wineries, farms, the Rogue River, Mt. Ashland. I could go on and on.

EB: Can you tell our readers a bit about your background?

AE: My degree is in speech therapy. I worked in an early invention program for years before shifting my focus to writing full time. In college I minored in creative writing, but I didn’t know what I wanted to write. I wrote a lot of horrible first drafts that ended up in the recycling and I read everything that I could get my hands on from literary fiction to sci-fi to non-fiction and historical fiction. In hindsight that time was invaluable to me.

Aspiring writers often ask me for advice and the first thing I tell them is to read. You can’t be a writer in my opinion if you’re not a reader first.

I freelanced for a while before taking the plunge into writing fiction. I wrote for a variety of magazines and newspapers. That experience helped strengthen my writing. I worked with editors who gave me feedback and suggestions to tighten my story. I had to meet deadlines, and finesse a story arch. My speech therapy background also come into play. When I’m writing dialog I will go to a coffee shop or a park and take extensive notes on how people are talking—all the nuances of their speech—just like I used to when I was working in the field. I hope that it makes the dialog in my books very believable.

EB: Did you grow up in Ashland? Is part of the book at all autobiographical? Are you Jules Capshaw? Are you a baker? Was your father a Shakespeare buff?

AE: I grew up in Vancouver, Washington. I came to Ashland frequently with my family and on school field trips. Yes, my dad is a Shakespeare buff. He taught high school honors English and introduced me to Shakespeare at a young age. One summer my parents threw a Midsummer Night’s Eve party, where everyone came in Elizabethan costumes and were assigned roles. I was Peaseblossom. I spent weeks making a fairy dress with my mom. My dad spent weeks crafting an authentic menu. In addition to his literary knowledge he’s an incredible cook. In fact a number of his recipes appear in the books, like his recipe for Chocolate Hazelnut Torte.

My mom got me hooked on mysteries at a young age. We would walk to the local library each week and I would return with a stack of books to devour. She was also an amazing baker. There would always be homemade pies, cookies, and cakes waiting for my brother, sister and me when we got home from school. Many of her recipes are in the books as well, like her Raspberry Danish.

Like Jules I love to bake. After I hit my word count, I’ll spend time testing recipes in my kitchen. Food is such a love language and I think she and I both show our love for friends and family through food. However she’s a trained pastry chef. I’m not. She’s also much more romantic than me.

She has just returned home to Ashland after spending the last ten years working as a pastry chef on a cruise ship. She’s left her husband on the ship and is coming home to mend her broken heart. I love writing Jules. She’s a romantic—blame it on the name—but despite the fact that her heart has been broken she’s not broken. I think that’s an important distinction.

EB: How has Ashland changed?

AE: It’s changed over the years, but the core downtown plaza still feels much the same to me. That’s a good thing. When I was working on Meet Your Baker, I interviewed a number of business owners and they talked about the ebb and flow of tourists in town. Longstanding businesses do well and can weather the off season, but many small business owners shared that some of their friends and colleagues have opened businesses at the start of the season with no plan for the slower winter months and have ended up having to close their doors.

I appreciate that downtown is still predominately small businesses. There’s so much gentrification that’s happening in the Pacific Northwest, and it would break my heart to see that happen in Ashland.

EB: Meet Your Baker is a cozy mystery. What’s the attraction of that genre to you as a writer, and in your opinion, to readers?

AE: I got hooked on cozies mysteries with Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden. One summer in early high school I read all of Agatha Christie’s books. Cozy mysteries are escapism at its best. They take readers on a quest to figure out whodunit, with a dash of romance and plenty of page-turning twists. They’re typically light reads without gratuitous violence, featuring amateur sleuths who stumble into solving a mystery while going about their everyday lives. The reader has the same opportunity as the sleuth to solve the puzzle. I think that’s one of the reasons the genre continues to be so popular. Even though cozy mysteries are lighter reads they’re still cerebral. You have to use your brain to piece all of the clues together. That’s my favorite part of writing mysteries—I want to keep the reader guessing all the way up until the very end.

I also read them like travelogues. I’m a sucker for anything set in the English countryside. That’s my goal in writing this series—to give readers at taste (pun intended) of the Pacific Northwest. I’ve received email from readers all over the country who’ve had said they can’t wait to visit Ashland now that they’ve read the book. That’s the best compliment I could ever receive.

EB: Meet Your Baker is the first in the series and the next is coming out this very soon. What happens in A Batter of Life and Death?

AE: In A Batter of Life and Death Jules is going to be competing in a television bake-off, Take the Cake. The Pastry Channel is in town to film the popular competition that pits top chefs against each other in a culinary challenge. She’s a bit camera shy, but the top prize is $25,000 and Torte is in desperate need of new ovens so she agrees to compete. Just as she starts to feel more comfortable in the spotlight, one of her fellow contestants is discovered buried in buttercream. Of course Jules is on the case and in the mix for murder!

I’m so excited about this next installment. Readers are going to get to know Jules and the team at Torte a little better and there are some delicious recipes that I can’t wait to share.

EB: You are a full-time writer. What’s your writing life like? Any tips for aspiring writers?

AE: I do my best work in the early morning hours. I write a minimum of 2,000 words every day. That structure works for me. Then in the afternoon I get outside and go for a walk or hike, or spend time in the kitchen testing new recipes.

Before I start writing I sketch out the story. I know exactly what every character is hiding and lying about, what red herrings I’m going to use to throw readers off the scent of the killer, and who the killer is. After I’ve made my initial sketch I write a thirty page outline. From there I start working on the first draft. I don’t do any editing as I write. Instead I keep notebooks next to my laptop to jot down things that I need to change or come back to. Once I have a complete first draft I print out a copy and set it away for a few weeks or more. I find that having some distance helps tremendously. After I’ve taken a break from it I’ll go back over it and incorporate all the notes I made along the way. It usually takes me at least two or three more drafts before it’s ready to send to my editor.

As far as advice goes—read! I know I already said it, but it’s worth repeating. And write daily. I think new writers sometimes believe that they have to wait for the muse to strike. I used to think that too when I wrote all those terrible first drafts, but what I’ve realized is that the discipline of sitting down and writing every day makes you a better writer. Or at least able to hit word count. Set a daily writing goal. Writing is like any muscle in your body. If you don’t use it, it’s not going to get any stronger.

EB: Thanks for talking with us.

AE: Thanks so much for having me!

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An Interview with Mary Norris

Posted on June 15, 2015 by Ed Battistella
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photo by Josef Astor

Mary Norris began working at The New Yorker in 1978. She has written for The Talk of the Town and for newyorker.com on a wide range of topics and recently published Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen (Norton).

Originally from Cleveland, she now lives in New York.

EB: I really enjoyed Between You & Me and loved the way you were able to bring drama not just to the work of copy editing but to the English language itself. All my copyeditor friends are reading it. What prompted you to write the book?

MN: That’s so nice! Thank you. The original impetus for the book was a blog post defending New Yorker commas that I was asked to write for The New Yorker’s Web site. I’d been writing for decades, and this post, In Defense of Nutty Commas, got the largest readership I ever had. So I wrote about other facets of New Yorker style (the diaeresis, doubled consonants), and about pencils, and the response was such that it occurred to me that there might be some interest in a book on the subject. The subject itself—language, really—had never drawn me before, but, with some thirty years of copy-editing experience, I found I had a lot to say and that I held strong opinions.

EB: It occurs to me that you must have had to be extra careful proofing the book. Did you worry about that at all?

MN: Oh, yeah. The publisher provided a copyeditor, I read the proofs three times, my boss at the magazine read the proofs, a production editor read them, and still mistakes snuck in. In retrospect, I wish I had hired a fact checker.

EB: Copyeditors are a special breed. What sort of person is attracted to the work? And do you find yourself editing things in your time off? I know one copyeditor who mentally rewrites billboards.

MN: There is no denying that attention to detail is an asset in a copy editor. So I would say that it attracts fussbudgets and neatniks. But, beyond being detail-oriented, a copy editor is someone who loves words and has a good facility with them, whether it’s for foreign languages or crossword puzzles. Some can’t turn it off and mark the mistakes in everything they read. I have learned to let go. It’s not that I don’t notice mistakes or odd choices in punctuation—I just don’t correct them.

EB: You talk about some of the great reference books that copyeditors use. Do you have a top three?

MN: Are you counting dictionaries? Because that’s the top reference: the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary, or the online version of the unabridged dictionary, which is available by subscription. (There’s a free one, too, but it has ads.) For basic grammar and typography, Words Into Type has everything you need. And if you want to go deep into the usage wars, Garner’s Modern American Usage will keep you occupied. It’s more accessible (and American) than Fowler’s.

EB: And what do you read for fun?

MN: Fowler’s! Seriously, I can’t stop buying usage guides. I like things that are funny—one of my favorite books is John Kennedy O’Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces. I liked Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis. The best writers have a deep vein of humor running through everything they write. Ian Frazier is funny, and so is John McPhee. I like Patrick Leigh Fermor, who wrote about travel in Greece and Eastern Europe—I find him transporting. I have a huge collection of books about the sea and about ancient Greece that I am saving to read in retirement.

EB: You seem to have a very sensible attitude about the flexibility and fluidity of language. Do copyeditors get a bad rap among the general public?

MN: Yes, there are some rigid types, some who are very literal-minded (I am like that myself—it’s an occupational hazard). I have friends who are copyeditors manquées or wannabe copyeditors, and they cannot resist pointing out my mistakes. It is not an endearing trait, and I have made an effort not to cultivate it. If I am flexible, it’s largely because I’m a writer myself, and I try to give the writer the benefit of the doubt.

EB: I have to say I loved the discussion of the hyphen, which has always been a favorite punctuation symbol of mine. Do you have a favorite punctuation mark?

MN: I’m glad you liked the hyphen chapter. I was surprised, in the end, to feel that it is the heart of the book—maybe because compounding depends more on judgment than on rules. I like the dash myself. It’s versatile—you can write a whole sentence within a sentence if you set it off in dashes—and eloquent, and it works well in informal prose—letters, e-mails. The ellipsis is growing on me . . .

EB: What’s up with The New Yorker and colons, by the way? I often see them where I might expect a semicolon.

MN: That’s something I’m not aware of—or wasn’t until you pointed it out. I think there are too many semicolons in The New Yorker. There certainly are instances where I vacillate between a semicolon and a colon, but I think if I wasn’t sure I’d use the semicolon. Either one could be replaced by a dash!

EB: If there was one thing you could change about the English language, what would it be?

MN: I think I’d go back to thou and thee. Wouldn’t that be nice, to have a special word to use in a tender relationship? When I speak Italian (which I don’t do very well), I never use the formal “you”—I address everyone in the familiar. Italians are very nice about it.

EB: Any advice for today’s English majors who aspire to copyediting?

MN: I would say pay attention to the details in everything you read, just to see how various publishers do things. Stay flexible—if you get a job in Canada or in the United Kingdom, you’re going to have to accept their conventions. You don’t need to be dogmatic about a house style outside the house. Give the writer the benefit of the doubt. And try to keep the big picture in mind. I say this because I have been warped by years of copy editing and have a habit of focussing on the details without being able to discern the larger pattern.

EB: Finally, any predictions about the longevity of the diaeresis?

MN: It’s lasted this long! I would say that when the current generation of copy editors passes away—the baby boomers—the diaeresis will melt into the past, and nobody will even notice that it’s gone.

EB: Thanks for talking with us.

MN: My pleasure. Thank you!

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An Interview with Jennifer Margulis

Posted on May 26, 2015 by Ed Battistella
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Jennifer Margulis, Ph.D., is a former Senior Fellow at the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University, is an award-winning travel, culture, and parenting writer. Her work has appeared in many of the nation’s most respected and credible publications, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Smithsonian Magazine.

Her book, Your Baby, Your Way, was just published in paperback. We checked in with her this week to find out more.

EB: Scribner recently released the paperback version of your book: Your Baby, Your Way. I can’t help but notice the new title. It’s no longer The Business of Baby. Why the title change? Are you aiming for new audiences?

JM: The publisher’s marketing team decided to change the title to give the book a fresh and more accessible feel. About 4 million babies are born every year in the United States, so we wanted to appeal more to first-time moms and dads.


EB: What else is different in the paperback?

JM: It has a completely different introduction, which is friendlier and more mom-to-mom than in the hard cover version. The content is also revised and the research is updated. You may have noticed, too, that the baby on the cover is turned vertical instead of horizontal. Same baby, different orientation. The thought on that was to make the book more appealing and less daunting.

EB: I know that your book has evoked strong feelings. Were you surprised?

JM: One Cornell University trained M.D. contacted me through my website to say she bought 14 copies of the book and that she was making it required reading for all her pregnant patients. I’ve also had moms tell me it was the best book they’ve ever read. Then there are the naysayers on the book’s Amazon page. One reviewer hated it so much his suggestion was to shred it and use it in the hamster cage. So, yes, the book has evoked very strong reactions!

I present information about the overuse of C-sections and the harms of the birth dose of the Hepatitis B vaccine. Readers who had C-sections they really did not need seem to have one of two responses: kill the messenger (me) and trash the book or feel totally empowered by having their eyes opened to a maternity system that puts profits over people and find the support they need to have a gentler, more evidence-based birth the next time.

EB: Getting the word out about books takes a lot of effort. What did you find was the most successful author-marketing tool?

JM: Good question. I’ve worked hard to build social media platforms. Your Baby, Your Way’s Facebook page has about 6,700 likes on it. I have over 750 followers on Pinterest, and strong networks on LinkedIn and Facebook. (Your students and colleagues are welcome to connect with me, by the way.) But what is the best way to translate those numbers into actual book sales? I don’t market my book to my readers and followers because marketing makes me cringe (and my book is about why we should not be trying to sell new moms and dads things but rather be educating them about best practices for healthy outcomes.)—but I do provide them with excellent content on-line and hope their interest will lead them to read the book.

Market researchers say being on NPR is a great way to sell books, as is being mentioned by popular bloggers, especially when they recommend your books. When a popular L.A. blogger did this interview with me, we saw a mighty spike in book sales. I am often invited to speak at conferences and we’ve sold out of books at this one and this one (the profits benefited the conference organizers, not me), so public speaking is very effective too. Word-of-mouth is also tremendously important. If you like a book, recommend it to a friend or write about it on Facebook and chances are your friends will want read it. Here are 7 ways to best support a friend who has just published a book.

EB: You’ve got a new project started. Can you tell us about that?

JM: I’m teaming up with one of the country’s foremost pediatricians to write a book that will revolutionize children’s health in America. We’ve had a very exciting couple of weeks when the book attracted a lot of attention among New York publishers. I’m not at liberty to reveal the details but I will be soon. Check back with me in a couple of weeks!

EB: What is your writing schedule like? You always seem busy, with interesting projects.

JM: I have an office with a treadmill desk so I am always standing and often walking (s-l-o-w-l-y) as I work. My best writing time is in the morning. The earlier I get started, the more productive I am during the day. I like to work from 8:30 to noon, take a break for lunch, and then put in two hours in the afternoon if my brain is still working.

EB: Any advice for aspiring non-fiction writers out there?

JM: We could spend the next hour talking about this, Ed, but here are three pieces of my best advice to get non-fiction writers started: 1) Read like a writer. If you want to be writing for newspapers, pitch the ones you read every day, since you are their audience and know what their readers are looking for. If you want to write books, read as much as you can and analyze the ones you like to figure out why you like them and what the authors are doing right. Then emulate them in your own work. 2) Be professional. Take writing seriously and be businesslike in all your dealings. Don’t ever write for free. Always meet your deadlines. Address editors you do not know formally. Dress up. Don’t wear jeans and a T-shirt to interview a source. 3) Join ASJA and attend their annual conference in New York City. You have to apply to get in and you need to have clips, so this can be a good goal for the aspiring writer.

EB: Thanks for talking with us.

JM: Always a pleasure.

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Grad School: An Interview with Matt Kent

Posted on May 14, 2015 by Ed Battistella
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Matt Kent is a 2014 graduate of Southern Oregon University; he is studying higher education administration at Old Dominion University and is the Assistant Hall Director for the Virginia and Ireland Houses at ODU.

EB: What is your graduate program like? What courses do you take and what sorts of things are you reading?

MK: I am in a Higher Education/Student Affairs Master’s program; the focus of my graduate studies is on practical experience and therefore we are required to complete several internships and maintain a graduate assistantship outside of the program while working on our classes. The classes I take have a focus on student development and politics, trends, and issues in higher education. Most of my classes are a blend of the psychology, sociology, and education disciplines. I take classes like Contemporary Issues in Higher Education, The Contemporary College Student and Diversity, and Student Development theory. Much of what I read comes from the Chronicle of Higher Education and then academic journals in the education and psychology fields.

EB: How has your experience so far shaped your career goals?

MK: As far as the master’s program, it is designed so each student is currently working in the field they intend to work in post-graduation. For example, I want to work in Residence Life and Housing, and I have a graduate assistantship as an Assistant Hall Director as well as a summer internship at Sonoma State University as a Summer Area Coordinator. The program puts a heavy emphasis on students having opportunities to apply what they learn in real world situations to prepare them for those first full-time staff and administrative roles. As a graduate of Southern Oregon University’s English department, I feel that I was extremely prepared for the writing intensive work that I am asked to do as a graduate student.

EB: What is the most rewarding part and the most challenging?

MK: The most challenging part of graduate school would be balancing the actual coursework with the job and the internships, all of which is required. It’s very easy to put more of your time and attention into your graduate assistantship and completely let school slide. Much of the assignments consist of reading 10-50 pages of academic writing or working on a group project outside of class, and so it is easy to let these assignments pile up. Staying motivated and engaged can be challenging.

One of the most rewarding parts is interactions with other students and faculty in your program. Every member of my cohort is extremely passionate about students, student affairs, or higher education as a whole and that shared passion is really exciting. We spend a significant portion of class-time discussing various issues and policies and being a part of that discussion is extremely rewarding. Another aspect of my program that I find extremely rewarding is the real-world student affairs experience that I get through my experiences in my assistantship and in my internships.

EB: What’s been your focus and how has grad school changed you?

MK: My personal focus has been on gaining the skills and knowledge I need to work in and make change in student affairs. I have spent a great deal of time learning and applying student development theory through my courses and assistantships. In addition, I have done some research and presentation-work on First Generation Students and their adjustment to college. Grad school has really helped me to widen my focus and expose me to a variety of different issues.

EB: Any advice for students considering going on for more school?

MK: DON’T DO IT!—Just kidding. My advice would be to understand what you are looking to gain out of that experience, understand what you need in a school and graduate program to be successful, and to be prepared for feelings of intense burn-out. I remember while I was in my last year of undergrad, my classmates would talk about how tired we were, how ready we were to be done, and then jokingly compare how long we had experienced “Senior-itis.” That feeling of burnout only intensifies in graduate school; it’s less of getting out and it will go away, and more understanding how you need to motivate yourself while doing the work and the studying. And choose a program that is cohort based—your peers will be your best support network.

EB: What’s next for you?

MK: I am currently finishing my first year of grad school—I will graduate in May of 2016. I’ll be looking for a full-time hall director position, ideally on the West Coast.

EB: Thanks for talking with us.

MK: My pleasure! Congratulations Class of 2015!

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