I
am honored to visit Roxanne’s Realm, where passion reigns supreme. I love Roxanne’s dedication to writing and
books and authors. Thank you so much for
having me!
What
inspired you to become an author?
There’re actually two answers to that question. The first: I’ve been writing ~ and reading ~
my whole life. My mom read us Shakespeare when I was a kid, and I loved books
from an early age. I had an hour bus ride to and from school every day, and so
my backpack was stuffed to the brim with books. I was ecstatic when I went from
grade school to middle school because I’d exhausted the grade school
library. My first story called “The
Silver Locket” was about a girl who went back in time to become her own great
grandmother. I had written things before
but I hadn’t thought about shaping them
into a story until a friend who introduced me to the British children’s
mysteries of Joan Aiken wrote a story that ended with a head rolling in a
gutter. I edited the high school newspaper, wrote a little for our local paper,
and won a prize for a poem, but I still didn’t call myself a writer. Nobody I knew was a writer. Authors were these mystical beings that lived
somewhere else. And so the second
answer: it wasn’t until I was almost thirty that I dared to call myself a
writer, even though I was working as a technical editor. Then I began to take
writers’ workshops and started a novel and the stories that eventually became
the collection How
to Be a Man.
Do
you have a specific writing style?
We all do, don’t you think? We’re drawn to what we like, and we really
don’t have much say over it. For
example, you’re drawn to paranormal romance and erotica, and I am out to sea in
that writing style. The challenges of
portraying erotic experiences aren’t something I’m good at. I’m drawn to taking those little social
violences we inflict on each other and trying to make them meaningful and
aesthetically pleasing. The literary story is a genre with its own conventions,
and that’s the style I like. I like
trying to portray the subtleties of lived experience, and I like nothing better
than the challenge of writing what it’s like to be inside the head of a wife or
a husband or a sister or a brother and the little emotions that go through you
as you interact with your family. In a general sense, the way I write depends
on what I’m writing and where I am in my life.
Being raised in the American West, I had Hemingway tendencies ~ short
sentences, lots of emotional distance, a
withholding style. I worked hard to get a more lush style. I also write both female and male
protagonists, and I once did that online test that measures whether you write
like a man or like a woman. My female
protagonists measured to be women and my male protagonists were classified as
men.
How
did you come up with the title for your latest book?
This title was easy, as it’s the title of the first
story. The story got its title “How to Be a Man” because it’s based on Junot Diaz’s great story “How
to Date a Brown Girl (Black Girl, White Girl, or Halfie).”
Is
the book, characters, or any scenes based on a true life experience, someone
you know, or events in your own life?
Definitely.
An author can only write what they know or what they imagine, don’t you
think? Even if an event isn’t something the writer has experienced, it is his
or her emotional truth. But some of these stories are based on things that
happened to me or someone I know. The title story “How to Be a Man” is based on
those women who try to be men. They grow
up in a male-dominated culture, and the only way they see to have worth is to
be male, and they can’t be a man but they try. I was one of those girls. “A Dangerous Shine” is based on an incident
that happened when I bartended at the Buckhorn in Laramie, Wyoming. “Nose to the Fence” is based on something
that happened on our dude ranch. “Revelations” is based on an incident that happened
to a friend of my brother’s. I could take each story and point out what
inspired each bit: “This is something that happened with my first boyfriend.
This is how I felt when I was in grade school and my friend dumped me. This is
a character I saw in a movie.” All writers are like that, I think.
What
book are you reading now?
I’m always reading a whole bunch of books at a time
because I tend to “taste” a book and then put it aside before I come back to
it. Right now I have the pleasure of
reading books by my two best writer friends.
Pembroke Sinclair is
out with a kick-ass YA called The
Appeal of Evil about being torn between the nice guy and the bad boy,
who turn out to be an angel and a devil.
Nina McConigley
is out with a great book of literary short stories called Cowboys and
East Indians that’s about the intersection of being Indian-American and
living in the American West.
What
is your current “work in progress” or upcoming projects?
Great question!
I have a novel coming out in July and another coming out next January. The one in July is called Deep Down
Things. Set in contemporary
Colorado, it’s about a young woman who falls in love with an idealistic young
writer. They get pregnant, and he blames her, but because he’s idealistic he
“does the right thing” and marries her.
Then they have a darling baby boy with a severe birth defect, and she
tries to save her child and her marriage.
A point of interest: this book is told from four points of view, so you
get not only her and his POV but also her brother’s and sister’s POVs, and they
all have their own arcs. The book coming
out in January is historical fiction called Earth’s
Imagined Corners, the first book in a trilogy. Set in 1885 Iowa and Kansas City, it’s about
a young woman whose father tries to force her to marry his grasping younger
partner, and so she elopes with a kind man she just met who has a troubled past.
Is
there anything you find particularly challenging in your writing?
Writing is just challenging, no two ways about
it. It’s like the most complex puzzle
you’ll ever attempt, and the more you do it the less sure you are of it. You
master the basics but the challenges keep changing and getting bigger. For me,
there’s always a tension between the raw material ~ those messy bits of lived
experience ~ and constructing a satisfying whole ~ the art part of it. What do
you include and what do you leave out? How do you be clear yet reflect the complexity
of it?
Who
is your favorite author and what is it that really strikes you about their
work?
My writing gods are Virginia Woolf and
Hemingway. I love Woolf because she
portrays what I try to ~ the social experience, what it’s like to live in a
family and go through your day. My
favorites of hers are Mrs. Dalloway
(because it’s exactly that) and To the
Lighthouse. There’s this great passage in To the Lighthouse where she writes about a mother and son in the garden
and the father comes up and the son hates the father in that moment because he
takes the mother’s attention away.
There’s also this great part when she shows time passing by telling the
story of a house. I love Hemingway
because he’s my natural inheritance in content and style, growing up the way I
did in the American West. I love “Big
Two-hearted River” and For Whom the Bell
Tolls. When I finished For Whom
at two in the morning, I sobbed uncontrollably for an hour.
Who
designed the cover of your latest book?
I had the pleasure of designing it. I wouldn’t normally recommend that for all
authors ~ you really want to have a professional design ~ but I have a
background in art and document design. I
always knew I wanted to have a face of a girl on it, and I looked for a long
time on iStock before I found the one I liked.
I had to be careful because any time you put “Man” and a girl on a cover
you get connotations of sex or rape, and that’s not what the story “How to Be a
Man” is about. It’s about her wanting to actually be a man. So I positioned the
words over her so it seems to be coming out of her mind. Also, there’s a subtle pink and blue motif,
but not in your face.
Do
you have any advice for other writers?
Read a lot. Write a lot. Write in the style of what
you like to read. The best writing often comes from what obsesses you and makes
you uncomfortable. Be brave. Persevere. Make a lot of writer friends.
How to Be a Man
Tamara Linse
Genre: Literary Short Story Collection
Publisher: Willow Words
Print
ISBN: 0991386701
ISBN-13: 978-0-9913867-0-3
Epub
ISBN: 099138671X
ISBN-13: 978-0-9913867-1-0
ASIN: B00HKSLFSQ
Number of pages: 238
Word Count: 59,650
Book Description:
“Never acknowledge the fact that you’re a girl, and take pride when your guy friends say, ‘You’re one of the guys.’ Tell yourself, ‘I am one of the guys,’ even though, in the back of your mind, a little voice says, ‘But you’ve got girl parts.’” – Birdie, in “How to Be a Man”
A girl whose self-worth revolves around masculinity, a bartender who loses her sense of safety, a woman who compares men to plants, and a boy who shoots his cranked-out father.
These are a few of the hard-scrabble characters in Tamara Linse’s debut short story collection, How to Be a Man. Set in contemporary Wyoming—the myth of the West taking its toll—these stories reveal the lives of tough-minded girls and boys, self-reliant women and men, struggling to break out of their lonely lives and the emotional havoc of their families to make a connection, to build a life despite the odds. How to Be a Man falls within the tradition of Maile Meloy, Tom McGuane, and Annie Proulx.
The author Tamara Linse—writer, cogitator, recovering ranch girl—broke her collarbone when she was three, her leg when she was four, a horse when she was twelve, and her heart ever since. Raised on a ranch in northern Wyoming, she earned her master’s in English from the University of Wyoming, where she taught writing. Her work appears in the Georgetown Review, South Dakota Review, and Talking River, among others, and she was a finalist for an Arts & Letters and Glimmer Train contests, as well as the Black Lawrence Press Hudson Prize for a book of short stories. She works as an editor for a foundation and a freelancer. Find her online at tamaralinse.com and tamara-linse.blogspot.com
About the Author:
Tamara Linse grew up on a ranch in northern Wyoming with her farmer/rancher rock-hound ex-GI father, her artistic musician mother from small-town middle America, and her four sisters and two brothers. She jokes that she was raised in the 1880s because they did things old-style—she learned how to bake bread, break horses, irrigate, change tires, and be alone, skills she’s been thankful for ever since. The ranch was a partnership between her father and her uncle, and in the 80s and 90s the two families had a Hatfields and McCoys-style feud.
She worked her way through the University of Wyoming as a bartender, waitress, and editor. At UW, she was officially in almost every college on campus until she settled on English and after 15 years earned her bachelor’s and master’s in English. While there, she taught writing, including a course called Literature and the Land, where students read Wordsworth and Donner Party diaries during the week and hiked in the mountains on weekends. She also worked as a technical editor for an environmental consulting firm.
She still lives in Laramie, Wyoming, with her husband Steve and their twin son and daughter. She writes fiction around her job as an editor for a foundation. She is also a photographer, and when she can she posts a photo a day for a Project 365. Please stop by Tamara’s website, www.tamaralinse.com, and her blog, Writer, Cogitator, Recovering Ranch Girl, at tamara-linse.blogspot.com. You can find an extended bio there with lots of juicy details. Also friend her on Facebook and follow her on Twitter, and if you see her in person, please say hi.
https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/1481856-tamara-linse
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1 comments:
Thank you so much, Roxanne! You're amazing. Thank you for letting me stop by!
I hope everyone in your family is back to 100% very soon!!
Tamara
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