Welcome to Literary Ashland

Follow

E.R. Brown is the Edgar-nominated author of Almost Criminal, published in spring of 2013.

E. R. Brown (whose first name is Eric) grew up near Montreal and now lives in Vancouver, where he writes and works as a freelance copywriter and communication strategist. His short stories have been published in nationwide magazines and dramatized by the CBC and he was won numerous awards for advertising and technical writing.

We sat down recently to talk about Almost Criminal.

EB: Almost Criminal is your first novel. Have you always been a writer?

ERB: I’ve always written, but I haven’t always considered myself a writer. For years I was involved in theater, media and music. Ultimately, though, writing is the only thing I’ve had real success with. I’ve been a technical writer, an ad copywriter and an editor. I’ve written speeches and video scripts. Storytelling has always been in the back of my mind. Prior to Almost Criminal, I had some literary short stories published, and the CBC (Canada’s public broadcaster) turned one story into an online drama.

EB: Among the accolades was an Edgar nomination. How did that feel?

ERB: I could not believe it. In fact, I didn’t believe it. One morning I did my daily Facebook check-in and saw a post from a writer friend, saying ‘WOO HOO for ER Brown this morning!’ and so on. I had to go to the Edgar website. I was certain she’d made an embarrassing mistake. I mean, really… I’m a first-time novelist with an independent publisher from Canada. Every other Edgar contender is an international success. Most are blockbusters. It was, and still is, amazing. I’m still pinching myself.

EB: I thought the book was both a coming-of-age story and a morality tale, with some social criticism and family comedy mixed in as well. Did you have a particular aim in mind in writing the novel?

ERB: When I began this project, I thought I was writing a family drama, and a coming-of-age tale of a young man struggling to find his direction. Crime was just one element of the story. But the character Randle Kennedy took on a life of his own, and the crime kept becoming bigger and bigger. Then the bikers showed up, and a boy’s struggles with his mother had to take a back seat.

I’m so glad you saw the aspects of social and family comedy. As a reader, I love stories that are grounded in the real day-to-day fabric of families, jobs and how we struggle to get by, and that’s what I wanted to do here.

EB: I enjoyed your lead character, Tate MacLane, the prodigy/dropout/barista who gets recruited to sell boutique marijuana. How do you put yourself in the mind of a teenager?

ERB: I have three children, and one of them was still a teen while I was writing the novel. Two of my kids worked as baristas in high-end coffee shops. But really, I just channeled that part of me that hasn’t fully grown up. That mouthy, opinionated teen who makes bad decisions is just under the surface.

EB: The story was quite suspenseful. I never quite knew what was going to happen to Tate next. What did you manage to build that suspense?

ERB: Thanks! I worked very hard on building the suspense. I’d never written a novel before, and I can honestly say I did not get it right in the first draft. The story went through several end-to-end rewrites as I worked on tone, voice and, more than anything, the narrative arc. All along, I wanted to create a gradual build-up of tension, as the smart-but-naive Tate digs himself in deeper and deeper.

EB: I’m also curious how you research the marijuana business, which has both underground and semi-legalized aspects?

ERB: You don’t have to look very far. There are a lot of people involved in B.C. Bud, and it’s not hard to find someone who knows someone. As Tate reflects in the book, who gives a damn about a grow op? On the block where I live today, there were three grow ops at one time, or so a neighbor tells me.

I did a lot of book research, of course. I spoke to people (indirectly, because no one would meet me face to face) and I visited the areas of BC and Washington State where the book is located. Every grow op described in the book is based on a real place. And some of the subplots, like the mayor of Vancouver telling police not to interfere with storefront cannabis businesses—and the provincial police taking down hippie-run shops with SWAT teams—are true stories, taken straight out of the newspaper.

EB: Tate’s family relations were also quite complex—his mother is an artist who has cancer, his sister is going to the wild side, and Tate is the anchor of the family. Is the chic drug dealer Randle a father figure for Tate?

ERB: A central aspect of the story is Tate’s struggle to navigate his way through to manhood. His father is out of the picture, and Tate takes better care of the family, especially his sister, than his mother does. But he desperately wants a role model, a mentor—a father. Randle is charismatic and wealthy. He challenges Tate’s intellect, pumps up his ego, and sees potential that no one else does. Anatole, one of the coffeeshop owners, is Randle’s opposite: he’s big-hearted and supportive, but he’s a bit of a doofus. They’re two possible father figures, and Tate’s need to choose between them or find a third path, is what drives the story.

EB: Almost Criminal is a wonderful concept. It’s strikingly original I think in the themes it explores—both of growing up and of the middle class drug culture. Some readers will inevitably compare it to the television series Breaking Bad. Were you influenced by that show at all?

ERB: As a huge fan, I find the comparison very flattering. But when the novel was first conceived, I’d never heard of Breaking Bad. I don’t watch much TV, especially when I’m in the thick of writing. After I had finished the first draft, an early reader mentioned it—but then I avoided the show, to be sure I wasn’t going to be influenced. Since finishing the book, I’ve seen the entire series.

EB: What’s your next project? Do you have a second novel in the works? Or something different altogether?

ERB: My second novel is about three-quarters done. It’s not a sequel, but it is a crime novel, based in both Canada and the US. Since it’s unfinished and doesn’t have a publisher yet, I’m not going to say anything more.

EB: Thanks for talking with us.

ERB: Thank you for your interest. It’s really rewarding to hear from people who’ve read this story. For years there was just me and a computer screen, and very little hope of even getting it published. It’s been a remarkable journey.

Follow

Paul Steinle is a veteran journalist and news media manager who has been teaching journalism since 1991. From 1991-2001, he launched graduate journalism programs at the University of Miami and Quinnipiac University; from 2001-2010, he taught journalism and served as associate provost, Southern Oregon University, Ashland, Ore. From 1961-1990, Steinle was a broadcast journalist and news manager. He was the president of UPI and the Financial News Network; TV news director, KING-TV, Seattle, and WIXT-TV, Syracuse; he reported from Saigon and Hong Kong for Group–W radio news; and he was a reporter and producer for WBZ-TV and WCVB-TV, Boston. Steinle has an M.B.A. from Harvard, a M.S. from Syracuse University and a baccalaureate from Amherst College. He is also the co-author of Commune: Life in Rural China.

Sara Brown has over 30 years experience as a human resource professional, management trainer, columnist and educator in the newspaper business. She was vice president of human resources at The Columbian (Vancouver, Wash.), and manager of organizational development at the Los Angeles Times. Brown has a master’s degree from the University of San Francisco and a doctorate in human and organization systems from the Fielding Graduate Institute. She is also the author of How to Create the Life You Want After 50.

In 2010 and 2011, Steinle and Brown founded the nonprofit organization Valid Sources and launched the Who Needs Newspapers? project, a fifty-state snapshot reporting how American newspapers are recasting themselves in the digital age. Their research is reported in the soon-to-be re-released book Practicing Journalism: The Power and Purpose of the Fourth Estate (Marion Street Press, 2014).*

EB: What made you decide to embark on this project?

PS & SB: Professionally, we were intrigued by the constant proclamations that “newspapers are dead or dying.” This is a concern since experience and surveys have proven that newspaper journalists provide most of the independent reporting generated in the USA, and, should newspapers disappear or shrink significantly, we were fearful that citizens would lose a key information source about life in their communities.

So, we decided to go see for ourselves by visiting one newspaper in each state, interviewing their publishers and editors and reporting our findings on a website for everyone to read. Personally, Paul was retiring from his position as associate provost at Southern University in June 2010, and we had been contemplating getting an RV and touring the USA. So, by combining these two goals, we were able, simultaneously, to see the USA, at ground level, and fulfill a reporting mission.

EB: What was the reaction when you set up interviews?

PS & SB: We ultimately visited 50 newspapers in 50 states. We selected each one, working about six weeks in advance, in consultation with the relevant state’s press association.

We were seeking newspapers that had won statewide general excellence awards and/or were innovative. We also selected among a mix of ownership categories – usually family or corporate – and among a balanced range of circulation sizes. We also sought three ethnic newspapers, and one alternative weekly.

Using those criteria, two major market newspapers – The New York Times and The Washington Post – turned down our request for interviews, and one small newspaper that was engaged in buying another newspaper also said no. Otherwise, we found 50 newspapers that were intrigued in our project, and, when they understood it, were all willing to set aside time to meet us and tell their stories.

EB: What is in more danger, newspapers or journalism? Are the two separable?

PS & SB: First, newspapers and journalism are separable – there are plenty of good examples of fine journalism from magazines, NPR, the PBS Newshour, “Frontline,” the commercial TV networks, the cable TV networks, and many Internet-only publications. There are also examples of faulty journalism from all these news media organizations.

Newspapers are in danger because their traditional business model, which had produced high profit margins of 20-40 percent until about 2000-2005, has been squeezed for dollars by advertising competition – such as Craig’s List, which undermined newspapers’ classified ad revenue.

Newspapers have been squeezed for readers by competition from alternative news and information sources – many of them on Internet platforms – that have driven down newspaper readership and circulation figures.

Newspapers have responded by embracing the Internet to deliver news through digital channels and by devising new sources of revenue – online ads, online subscription fees and various direct sales techniques — to earn revenue. On the whole – when you combine newsprint readers and online readers — newspapers have probably increased their readership. But the new digital revenue sources have not been as lucrative as the display ads they could previously sell when they dominated the news market. There are too many alternative Internet news channels that keep ad rates, online, relatively low.

So, if local and national advertisers can achieve the sales impact they are seeking on the Internet alone, newspapers are going to be constricted further as their revenues shrink.

But, some advertising seems to work better via newsprint – like supermarkets with multiple items and those weekend inserts that newspapers drop on readers’ doorsteps along with the news. So newspapers have some unique selling properties.

The same seems true for newspaper readership. If the reading-a-newspaper habit dies, newspapers are similarly unlikely to last beyond the current generation of baby-boomers many of whom who still practice the newspaper reading habit.

Reading a newspaper and discovering the news on each page is a unique experience and perhaps that experience may endure, but the digital generation is not being nurtured on that phenomenon. So unless reading habits change, newspapers could have a limited shelf-life — hence the danger to their future.

As for the dangers to journalism, journalism has always been, and presumably will always be, a mixed bag of Pulitzer Prize winners and fish wrappers.

It seems reasonable to expect that some citizens will always want to be informed well. That there will always be a market for pertinent, accurate, compelling information. And the people who gather that information – the journalists — need to learn certain skills and certain ethical standards to ensure that the news they deliver is timely, relevant and comprehensible.

But journalism, per se, has lately been swamped by a tsunami of information-style products. They have arrived like a thousand food vans, driving up to your front door and trying to sell you dinner.

It’s easy to become inundated with so-called news. So perhaps finding valid journalism is a harder chore than it used to be.

Journalism would be in mortal danger if nobody continued to seek it any more, but it’s still in demand and is capable of being produced by the cadre of journalists this country has produced.

If you doubt they exist, listen to some of the journalists whom we interviewed on our website — www.WhoNeedsNewspapers.org. Or please read our book, Practicing Journalism: The Power and Purpose of the Fourth Estate, and meet some of them there.

EB: As you traveled did you get a sense of how newspaper readers felt as well?

PS & SB: We did not set aside time to talk in depth to newspaper readers on our journey.

EB: The Oregonian recently announced it was cutting jobs and reducing home delivery. What do you make of that?

PS & SB: That’s a strategic move by Advance Publications, a newspaper firm owned by the S.I. Newhouse family, which controls The Oregonian. Advance is seeking to develop a new business model that can support a local newspaper.

In 2009, Advance shut down the print-side of The Ann Arbor (Mich.) News and replaced it with an all-digital online newspaper. Then Advance started publishing a several-times-a-week print edition, again in Ann Arbor.

Advance also owns the New Orleans Times-Picayune newspaper, which since June 2013 is now printed and delivered three-days-a-week, and supplemented with a newsstand-sales-only tabloid on the remaining days.

Advance has come up with a similar formula for Portland. In October 2013, the Oregonian reduced its delivery cycle – this time to four days a week – and laid off personnel.

So Advance has cut its overhead and reduced its delivery cycle, hoping to find a business formula that will allow it to survive with one foot in the newsprint world and one foot in the digital world. In the process it has reduced its reporting staff, constrained its reporting prowess, and tampered with its relationship with the community by reducing its community leadership role.

Newsprint readers in Portland have lost three days of local news delivery, and, unfortunately, since Advance is a private company and its financial results are held privately, there is no way to tell from the outside whether these distribution experiments can help their newsprint business.

Bottom-line, the community is getting a newspaper produced with fewer journalism resources, fewer days a week. The reduced Oregonian still has an important role in reflecting life in Portland back to its citizens, but it’s a more passive role since its newsprint edition is no longer landing on the community’s doorsteps seven days a week.

EB: If you were starting a newspaper today, what would it look like?

PS & SB: It would emphasize compelling stories (so people would read them) – of success and failure — about life in whatever community it served. It would try to tell the story of what it is like to live in our community. It would reflect the community’s priorities, it would attempt to offer a news agenda that reflects those priorities, and it would celebrate the positive aspects of that community’s life.

It would attempt to be “the first draft of history” about life in our town.

EB: I appreciate the way that the book was focused on individual stories? Did you come to any conclusions about what motivates people to become journalists? And about what makes a good one? Why do people become journalists?

PS & SB: What motivates people to become journalists: Curiosity, a desire to tell stories, and a desire to make their communities better places to live.

What makes a good journalist: Honesty, empathy, curiosity, persistence, industry, ethical balance and the skill to tell a compelling story.

Why do people become journalists: A rabidly curious nature, a desire to tell stories and a concern for the well being of the world in which we live and the people who populate it.

EB: What’s next for WNN?

PS & SB: We’re going to take an extended look at Canada and see what newspapers are like there. Stay tuned.

EB: Thanks for talking with us.

*The title of the first edition was The Power and Purpose of Journalism: Journalists’ Epiphanies.

Follow

Molly Best Tinsley has written a novels, short fiction, plays, a memoir, a textbook and thrillers She is the author of My Life with Darwin (Houghton Mifflin) and Throwing Knives (Ohio State University Press), as well as The Creative Process (St. Martin’s) and Entering the Blue Stone Fuze Publishing, May 2012), Her work has earned two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Sandstone Prize, and the Oregon Book Award.

She also co-authored Satan’s Chamber (Fuze Publishing), which introduced CIA agent Victoria Pierce. We talked about the recently released sequel to Satan’s Chamber titled Broken Angels.

EB: Tell our readers a little bit about the plot and setting of Broken Angels?

MT: Broken Angels splits its time between the centers of power in and around Washington, DC, and locations in Ukraine. Case Officer Victoria Pierce has been assigned to Odessa under deep cover, so she’s operating without a net, tracking the disappearance of highly enriched uranium from the country’s stockpiles. When she stumbles on a ring of sex-traffickers, she has a tough choice–getting involved in rescuing girls will draw her off-task. Or will it? Another plot thread unspooling stateside may be tangled in the Ukrainian web, and perhaps it is only in battling all evil that you get to its heart.

EB: You’ve written textbooks, literary fiction, journalism, criticism, award-winning plays, short stories, and now thrillers. Does each genre require a different approach? Are their some things you learn to turn on and off? How do the genres come together for you? Or is it all just writing to you?

MT: I do love to write–I start to go bonkers if too many days pass without writing–and I do like new challenges. When I was working on short fiction, I began to sense that I was shaping the same story over and over again–the same epiphany. I expanded to writing a literary novel, but when it saw only modest success, and my agent couldn’t interest a publisher in my second attempt, I couldn’t muster the inspiration to try again. I wrote my first play on a whim. Then it was produced in a summer festival of one-acts in DC, and I assumed it was easier to reach an audience through playwriting than through writing fiction. It sounds like I keep seeking the path of least resistance. Yet I’ve always been a theatre nut, and writing plays has led to amazing journeys, even if the terrain of theatre, now that I see it from the inside, has turned out to be as difficult and problematic as that of mainstream publishing. From playwriting, I finally began to understand the dynamics and value of plot. And I’d always wanted to write a “big” novel with an intricate plot and plenty of action, but also a deeper theme. Since moving away from Washington, DC, I follow geopolitics much more closely, and the spy thriller genre, flavored with conspiracy theory, has seemed perfectly suited to the world I’ve begun to discover. The two Victoria Pierce novels are the result.

EB: In the earlier book Satan’s Chamber your protagonist Victoria Pierce was a junior CIA operative and still a bit of a novice. How has she grown in this book?

<MT: I hope she’s grown. She’s also rebounding from a failed romance, and carrying some trauma from the events in Sudan. She still tends to leap into things without an exit plan, relying on her ability to improvise. I think she’s less fallible and more skeptical now, but she’s still not the female Jason Bourne. Never will be.

EB: How do you go about researching the CIA in your books? Do you know some spies?

MT: I’ve read lots of books about the Agency and its history. One that should be a must-read for every U.S. citizen is Legacy of Ashes, by Tim Weiner. Most books by former operatives are by men, and they are totally gung-ho CIA, spouting patriotic slogans when they aren’t narcissistically chest-thumping. I did come across a fascinating account by a young woman of her five or six years as a Case Officer. Can’t remember the title. She focused more on the contradictions she had to juggle–stationed in eastern Europe, she was discouraged from cultivating one asset because he had a criminal record–and her sense that the whole enterprise was one big game.

I did live next door to an undercover CIA type for several years in the “new town” of Reston, Virginia. He “worked for the State Department.” One day in 1970, a phalanx of men in overcoats came marching down our street. One was the visiting president of Roumania, known for his murderous, repressive regime in the Stalinist mold. (He was taken down by a revolution in 1989, tried, and shot by a firing squad.) The spy’s wife came running out to greet them wearing an apron and carrying a cookie sheet of chocolate chip cookies. It had all been staged–sounds like a worse than silly game to me.

EB: I notice you’ve titled the books Satan’s Chamber and now Broken Angels. What’s the significance of the title Broken Angels?

MT: The title was almost Hotel Limbo, the name of a club in Odessa–so I seem to be getting stuck on religious motifs. Religious fanaticism is exposed in Broken Angels, so in a way the title is ironic. In the simplest sense, the young women trafficked for sex are broken angels.

EB: Who would you like to see play Tory in a movie version?

MT: Someone small and athletic. Reese Witherspoon is a bit old, but an actress of her type.

EB: What’s next for Victoria Pierce?

MT: South Africa. She will probably have resigned from the CIA, and her story will be more of a mystery than a spy thriller.

EB: You handle the editorial duties for Fuze Pubilshing. Did you edit yourself?

MT: I had four readers who gave me notes at different stages of the process, but I was the overall editor. I don’t recommend the arrangement, but Fuze barely gets by on our shoestring, and I couldn’t afford to hire someone with my experience!

EB: Thanks for talking with us.