I had not seen Alessandro in about fifteen years, even though for a time he dated my historical best friend, Anna, in Florence and they have remained good friends to this day. Anna has kept me abreast of his general doings and goings on over the years, but I had no idea that, 1) he speaks near-perfect English and 2) in addition to being one of Italy’s top-ranked gardeners, he is also a writer.
On a recent trip to the U.S. to promote his book and re-establish some of his connections, he graciously agreed to meet with me at the New York Botanical Gardens in the Bronx and gave me a charming interview. Here is the first part of the interview, with some photos of the gardens he has worked in.

New York Botanical Garden

• Alessandro-Tombelli-18-minsAlessandro-Tombelli-part-I-11-mins

Ilaria: I’m here with my friend Alessandro Tombelli, whom I’ve known for at least 20 years or something like that, and he’s from Florence, as am I. He is an extremely talented and well regarded in international circles gardener. Recently he decided to write a memoir called The Garden Connection: Life and Adventures of a Tuscan Gardener. As I understand it’s a combination of a personal memoir and a professional memoir, is that right?
Alessandro: It is.
Ilaria: Okay, so, Alessandro, tell me a little bit about the genesis of the book. Why did you decide to write it, how long did it take you…? Walk me through the process.
Alessandro: I decided to write this book a few years ago, when I was in Texas. Thanks to my garden connections it happened that I was in Texas, working with a landscape architect from Dallas, and I got involved in all these travels and big projects in the area, and I was thinking about how a few years before I was in Italy, I was in Florence, doing some gardening in these historical gardens. And then I was projected in these big, big goings on in Dallas, Texas. I thought, well, you know, this would be a nice story. It would be a nice story for a book. And all the travels I’d done between and all the people I met. I was there because I met somebody, and I met somebody through somebody else. So there was a real garden connection.
Ilaria: That’s great. And between the time that you first thought of writing the book and the time you wrote it, what happened? Why did it take you several years to actually start writing it?
Alessandro: Well, it happened because I’d been thinking for so long but I was not brave enough to write it. And also you have to concentrate on writing. I remember when I was thinking about this book, when I was taking notes, I had some ideas… Oh, this would be a nice idea for my next book. But I kept it for years before I decided to write it. And one day I wrote something like maybe ten pages, and I kept it maybe for a year or two, I don’t remember exactly. And it happened that I was in North Carolina once, and I was taken to a readers’ group, and when I realized that I said, “Oh, listen, I’ve written something. I have ten pages of my book.”
Ilaria: Quote, unquote.
Alessandro: And this friend said, “Oh, you should bring it and read it.” So I had my ten pages saved on a thumb drive, so I printed them out, I took them to this reading group, and everybody was listening. They said, “Alessandro, we like it, you should write this book.” I said, “Come on, I’m just a beginner. Maybe I should have a ghost writer, someone who writes for me.” Because I’m not a writer, I’m not an author. And they said, “No, you have to write it down.” And my friend, this friend who brought me there, she was…she is a writer, she’s an author. And she said, “If you write the book I’ll edit it for you.”
Ilaria: Wow.
Alessandro: So that was a big kick. So I came back home and after a few months, we corresponded, you know, asking if she was serious about it. And she was committed to doing it.
Ilaria: That’s a very big commitment.
Alessandro: Yeah. And she had no idea, poor Jack, how big a job she was going to do for me. Because I do speak a little English, but my written English was terrible. Anyway, I spent one summer, I was home in my little apartment in Florence, and I started writing. Spending like six, eight hours per day, because I was committed to do it. I had to do it. And she said, “Alessandro, you must finish it by the end of August, let’s say.” So I did it.
Ilaria: And how long did it take you altogether?
Alessandro: Altogether a couple of months.
Ilaria: That’s not long at all.
Alessandro: Yeah.
Ilaria: That’s wonderful.
Alessandro: And many things happened in between. I mean, the computer crashed once, so I had to rewrite part of the book because I lost everything. And a few other things. But anyway, I did it.
Ilaria: It’s so funny to see this: “San Donato in Collina and England.” [Come dire, Compiobbi e New York.
Alessandro: No, fa ridere, eh.] It’s very funny. I tried to put some humor in it.
Ilaria: You know what’s so funny is that I relate to this so well. Because this is my life. I’m half Florentine and half New Yorker, and I can relate… and when I was little I lived on a farm, you know, where I picked the grapes and the olives…
Alessandro: So you know what I’m talking about.
Ilaria: …and the chestnuts. You know, all that stuff.
Alessandro: Were you there in 1985 when the big chill came?
Ilaria: I was. Oh, yes. When all the olive trees died.
Alessandro: They died. I remember at that time, I was not really involved in agriculture then, or horticulture either. But I remember the countryside around Florence had changed completely. Because if you look at Florence from the hills… Well, Florence or the Tuscan countryside… you have this kind of silver gray of the olives.
Ilaria: Of course, I know exactly what you mean, that silvery color.
Alessandro: The season after that big chill was brown. It was awful, awful.
Ilaria: I know, it was so shocking. All that snow. I had a Vespa then. It was buried under the snow, I mean completely buried, for three weeks. When finally the snow melted and I could get my Vespa out of there, I kicked it to start it, and the metal pedal [la leva della messa in moto, fatta di ghisa], it just broke in two from the freezing cold. It was so cold. The first few days there were no buses, because Florence was not equipped. Florence is not equipped to deal with that kind of snow.
Alessandro: Nowadays it’s still not.
Ilaria: Yeah. But it never used to happen like that.
Alessandro: No, it was a special year.
Ilaria: And I had to go everywhere on foot. I had to walk everywhere. I lived in, near via dello Statuto, in via Paoletti, and I had to walk from there to the University… which at least then the University was in Centro and not out in the middle of nowhere where it is now. So it was within walking distance but it took me three-quarters of an hour to go to school every day. Wow. So tell me a little bit about the book.
Alessandro: So the book starts about my life in Florence, the beginning of my horticultural interests, some friends, some private life, people that I met at that time, people who made me to be as I am now. And then from the time I spent in England. It was the year 1987 when I decided to spend some time in England. So I moved there and I worked for one year in a very important garden called Wisley Garden. And there the horticultural world opened for me. It was a revelation, you know. “Oh, I see what gardening is now.” It was not just for the plants, for the garden, but also the people. So I met all the gurus at that time of the English international gardening. People that I had never heard of before. And you know, together with the other students we were going to meetings, we were going to see gardens during the weekend. So it was an amazing year for me. So back from that time in England, when I was in Italy, I was a bit shocked, you know, because from the highest level of horticulture in the world, you go back to Italy, back home, and you do nothing like that. So I was doing some little gardens here and there, but nothing very important. So I spent a couple of years, I was quite depressed. And I wanted to go back to England, I wanted to go back somewhere else. I was thinking about Australia, I was thinking about South Africa, but nothing happened, until I had the opportunity to work in a rather well known garden in Tuscany. It’s called La Foce. So I was able to work in this place. La Foce is a garden in Tuscany. It’s in the Val d’Orcia, the Siena province, and it’s one of the most beautiful gardens in Tuscany, nowadays. So I became the head gardener, and there again I was happy. Because after my time in England I could do some practice. So I was involved in the restoration of the garden, in the upkeep of it, and I was absorbed in all these beautiful things I was looking at, you know there were concerts in the villa, nice people, interesting people, riding horses. So many things, it was really one of the best times of my life. And that opened another door. La Foce opened the door to Villa I Tatti, which is another important villa in Florence, which is owned by Harvard University.
Ilaria: Of course.

La Foce

I Tatti #1

I Tatti #2

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Amanda Ackroyd

Finally we come to the end of the series of author interviews with talented British author Amanda Ackroyd. But this is also a glorious beginning! Starting with this post, I shall be publishing Amanda’s first novel, Scarborough Baby, one chapter a week. With today’s interview is the teaser and first chapter. Enjoy!

As always, you may listen to the entire interview or this segment, and/or download either mp3 file to your computer or mp3 player.

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• Amanda-Ackroyd-interview-part-iii-12-mins

Ilaria: Well, I have to say that this ability of yours to pare things down is very evident in your novel. So now let’s move on to talk about that. You sent me this wonderful novel, Scarborough Baby, which I read in 24 hours, or 36 hours maybe. I couldn’t put it down, I found it completely enthralling. I really was sucked right in. I loved the beginning. For the readers I will introduce it by saying that it is a little bit of a mystery. The beginning is just lovely, I think. The atmosphere is very pleasant, relaxed, of life just ambling along at its regular, normal pace, nothing out of the ordinary. But the description of the life is very – the description of the way the main characters are conducting their lives brings them to life completely. They come right out of the page and I just feel like I’m sitting in their living room with them and watching them and interacting with them as they go about their business.
And then the protagonist, a young woman of 24, 25 years old, discovers a diary that her mother had written as a teenager, and in the diary she discovers the possible identity of her biological father, whom her mother has never told her about, has always refused to tell her about. So she has always been wondering, she’s spent her life wondering who her father really was. And of course everything begins to unfold from this moment forward.
Amanda, I think you’re very talented as a writer. I think you definitely must be published, and I’m going to endeavor to make that happen. And in the meantime I just would like to ask you, first of all, how you first got the idea for this story.
Amanda: Well, it came about during a conversation with a friend of mine, and she was telling me – Annie is considerably younger than I am – and she was telling me that she never knew who her real father was. And she had asked her mother over the years, just tried to get her to tell her something. And one day, when Annie was about 22, she said to her mother, “Come on,” she sort of tried to do it in a joking way, she said, “Come on, there must be something you can tell me, like the color of his eyes or his hair or something.” And her mother said, “I can’t remember, it was dark.” And when Annie told me this story I was just stunned. I was stunned by the insensitivity of it. It made me laugh but I was shocked. And I came home and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. And the more I thought about it, the more I wondered why a woman would deny her child, even a crumb of truth, and couldn’t stop thinking about it. And in an incredibly short space of time, because I think my imagination ran away with me, I started to build a story around the lie. Because it was – I can’t remember, it was dark – it’s a lie, like putting your hand in someone’s face. And one morning, sitting in bed, I penned the whole story from beginning to end. I wrote the reason why and how it unfolded and what happened. And it took me probably three hours of intense note-making. And at the end of it I knew I had to write it as a book, something I had never done before. And that’s where it came from.
Ilaria: That’s wonderful. I love how – this is what they mean when they talk about writers channeling writing, have you ever heard that expression? That the writing is sort of coming from another place and you’re just a channel for it. It’s just coming through you rather than out of you.
Amanda: It felt so much like that. That’s a perfect description of how it felt.
Ilaria: As if you were sort of taking dictation from some plain that’s invisible to the naked eye, but from somewhere, it’s just coming to you and the words are flowing through you and out of your fingers, you know?
Amanda: Yeah, it’s exactly how it felt. And I still have the notebooks where I penned it, and it’s full of arrows that refer back. It was almost like it sort of formed itself, not just in general terms, but actually in – there was sort of chronology in the detail and, you know, and referencing, even in those notes, so that I wouldn’t miss that, or that this would be understood. It was actually quite an astonishing couple of hours.
Ilaria: That’s amazing. I love this story, this is wonderful. Okay, and so at that point you knew that you had to write it as a book. How much time went by between this morning that you spend writing the outline of the novel and when you actually wrote it?
Amanda: Virtually none. And there was a reason for that. And the reason was that just prior to my starting to write this novel I was diagnosed with breast cancer. And suddenly my life was completely taken over by the process of surgery and chemotherapy and I had stopped work because I wasn’t tolerating the treatment well at all. And so suddenly I had this huge amount of time on my hands, and it was almost like everything fell into place at the right time, and it wasn’t just that I had the time. I needed the time to write the book, but I needed the book to fill the time. And so it worked absolutely perfectly. And when I couldn’t sleep because I felt sick, I would get up and I would write. And if I was lying awake in the night because I’d slept through the day, my mind would be racing, and I would be thinking about what I wanted to write. And sometimes I would just wake up and be so excited by the next bit that I wanted to write, that I would just have to get up and write it. And it filled my days, and it filled my nights when I couldn’t sleep. And it was just the most wonderful escape and focus during what was a pretty hard time, really.
Ilaria: That’s a wonderful, wonderful story, and the way you tell it is so wonderful.
Amanda: Well, it actually felt very positive, which was great. It made the time feel like a gift, rather than something terrible. It became a gift in a way.
Ilaria: Yeah, that’s fantastic. And tell me, the entire process of writing the first draft of the novel took how long?
Amanda: It took me about seven months.
Ilaria: And when you were finished, were you also finished with your treatments?
Amanda: Yes, just about. Although I did have more reconstructive surgery to come. But I also had a friend, Jake Arnott, who had already successfully published one novel certainly, He Kills Coppers, and Jake was absolutely fantastic. He kind of mentored me through the process and I spent time in London with him, in Soho and learning about the vice squad in London during the period that the events in the book happened. And he was just fantastic in terms of research. And I spent time in Amsterdam researching. So there were all sorts of things going on throughout the process. And when my treatment finished that input remained, because I then started sending drafts to Jake and he would go through it and say, “This is fantastic, this is dreadful. During this bit I was absolutely losing the will to live, there needs to be more of a major dénoument at the end.” And through him and other readers I then started to cut and pare and polish and get rid of. You know, anything that I looked at and I was utterly beguiled by, I just cut it out. I sort of got to realize that anything that I loved too much was written purely for the pleasure of writing, rather than it being relevant to the story. And there was an awful lot that went that was just me being self-indulgent really. So the writing, the first draft was finished at the end of my treatment, but the process went on for long after that.
Ilaria: Well, what you sent me feels very much like a finished book. I find very little fault with it at all. I think it’s tight, I think it’s full of tension from beginning to end. It sucked me in and it never let go until I finished. So, thank you so much for the opportunity of reading it and publishing it. And I really hope that we bring it to the public at large, because everybody should be able to read it.
Amanda: Well, thank you. I’m very excited at the prospect of you publishing it. And I’m very excited by your enthusiasm and positivity. And I really hope that whatever happens, it’s great, the whole process. And I’m just glad that it’s out there and people can read it, and make up their own minds.
Ilaria: Me too. I think it’s just criminal that it’s been sitting in your drawer all this time.
Amanda: I’m sure there are millions of fantastic books sitting in drawers all over the world, so maybe you should make it your life’s endeavor to get them all out and get them published.
Ilaria: Well, that’s precisely what I intend to do, believe me. Obviously I can’t do all of them, but I’ll do as many as I can.
Amanda: Well, I suspect that you could probably do an awful lot, Ilaria. You’re something of a dynamo.
Ilaria: I wish I felt the same way about myself, but thank you very much for the compliment. Okay, so this wraps up our interview, but don’t hang up the phone. Thank you very much for talking to me today, and for telling me about your writing process. I find it absolutely fascinating.

Scarborough Baby – by Amanda Ackroyd

“Joe, NOW. The keys. Where are they?” I was shaking with fear, reaching and turning in an uncontrollable dervish.
Still he gazed, as if he had momentarily short circuited, then suddenly my fear touched him and he sprang from the chair and began frantically rifling his empty pockets then running his hands pointlessly across the table, his face twisted, white with wide-eyed alarm. I grabbed the phone and dialled 999. Still Joe flailed around, panicking for the keys.
A woman’s voice, “Which service do you require?”
“Police, now. People are coming. I think they’re going to kill us. Please hurry. NOW.” I was screaming.

CHAPTER 1.
I was once asked to leave a cinema when the man in the seat behind me complained about my persistent glancing.  I have, many times, changed direction in the street, barging my way down busy pavements so I could turn and examine a man who had just passed me by.  I once approached a complete stranger and asked if he had ever known Angela Pollard. I have spent a large part of my life looking into the faces of men who shared my sweep of cheek or tilt of green eye and wondering if it might be him. I never knew who my real father was.

I am twenty four, it’s a summer Sunday in Scarborough and I’m having breakfast with my mother, Angie, in her conservatory. At the bottom of the garden, I can see my stepfather, Ken, tending his pigeons.  I am pretending to read the papers, but my eyes are focussed somewhere above the page.
Emboldened because of the companionable hour she and I have spent together, I am searching for the words to begin. Hot little jets of nasty anticipation are needling in my stomach like slivers of glass. I steel myself for the excruciating tip-toe into our mostly silent conflict.
Angie and I have been doing this dance for as long as I can remember; me disgusted by my apologetic whine and vile obsequiousness, the corners of her mouth tightening and twitching as soon as she knows what I’m up to and, if I push too far, she will lose her temper and I might cry.
I take a deep breath, words flitter in my mouth like dry butterflies, my heart feels squeezed, I cringe, “So, come on, my dad, there must be something you can tell me, the colour of his eyes, or hair or something.”  I try to adopt a conspiratorial air, leaning in toward her, making my eyes sparkle, wanting her to look at me.
She inflates, sighs and looks up but not at me, just somewhere into middle distance, her face bored and irritated. Then she turns, looks right into my face, lip curled, sneering, and says with a sing-song, sarcasm, “I can’t remember. It was dark.”
She gets up, casting me a look of hateful contempt, that I should force her to behave this way, and leaves the room.
***
Like two positives we repel. We collide with jerky joy and quickly clash, bouncing away like we’ve been burnt. Our spats don’t last long, we’re just different.
To look at, there can be no mistaking that we belong to each other. Whoever my father was, I have no doubt that I’ve inherited more of my mother than of him, but in spirit, I’m more watchful, more careful with people’s emotions.
Angie is sexy and compelling in a rough around the edges way.  She has a vanity gene like a barn side which is why, at her instruction, I call her Angie and not Mum – she likes to think people might mistake us for sisters.  Men like the flash of her green eyes and the thickness of her shoulder length dark hair. She’s coltish, strong, curvy and slender, a Peter Pan woman of dizzy tangents who is not quite joined up. She kind of pushes and pulls you, she’s warm and cold, funny and sharp, forty two but sixteen; a compassionate bitch.
I was conceived in Angie’s seventeenth year, in Scarborough I have always assumed. The reality I had designed for myself in the absence of any information was that the identity of the man I sought had been lost to her in the sheer volume. If I had lined up the men of the town, of a certain age, and asked my owner to stand up, how many, I wondered, would have risen sheepishly to their feet.
I was born on the 6th of March in Scarborough Hospital, unplanned but wanted. I was to have been called Deborah, but was named instead for the Welsh midwife who delivered me; Haf; that was her name and that was how it should have been spelt; pronounced with a long, curling welsh A and a soft Welsh F. Angie never thought to ask and by the time it was pointed out, Harv was on all my papers. So Harv I was, Harv Pollard, but not for long. I was a one year old in a pink Crotchet dress and white sandals when Angie married Ken Marvin, who she had known for just six months, changing me into Harv Marvin; a name that could only happen when things weren’t joined up.
The lucky marriage was captured in now yellowing 1970’s Polaroid’s, with everyone looking older than they did now, and Angie’s parents Brian and Della looking relieved. This wedding made them respectable again, made a successful coup out of a teenage disaster and positioned their slut of a daughter in the aspiring middle classes, with a husband who had just taken over his small, but flourishing, family business, a home in a larger than average semi and a Ford Capri gleaming in the drive.
Everyone suspected that she would prove too fast for the steady Ken, but hoped that he would calm her down; settle her. It made him sound like a remedy for indigestion. Twenty three years later, they are still in the same house in Scarborough, still in love and still, I’m sure, having sex more often that I do, with Angie settled, but not calmed down.
Ken’s passion are his pigeons or ‘filthy flying rats’ as Angie refers to them. The fancier’s magazines which strew every room in the house, offend her in a way that a pile of XXXX Hustlers never would. He loves his birds. He wins no more races now than he ever has, but with his passion undiminished by his disappointments, he continues to strive for the perfect specimen and tends and encourages them like children.
Angie views pigeon racing as a working class habit.  Ken defends his position by pointing out that these aren’t pigeons in the Town Hall sense. “Listen, during past times, it was contrary to law for a common man to own pigeons, they were the birds of kings, little warriors of the airways, the ultimate communication tool,” he told us indignantly as we sniggered behind our hands. “If it hadn’t been for pigeons, Rothschild would never have made his fortune.”
“Rothschild?” Angie had roared. “It’s a long way from a shed in Scarborough. Where’s the bloody fortune Rothschild?” She had laughed tartily, her palm outstretched.
“It’s not a bloody shed, it’s a loft.”  We infuriated him.
***
Angie returns, tossing her hair, defiant and injured and begins flicking through a magazine as if I am invisible. It is only eight thirty, but already the voile morning sunshine has made the air in the conservatory heavy and treacly.
I get up and open windows a little too aggressively then stand, my arms crossed, staring tight lipped out toward the eastern edge of the garden where the sun has not yet lifted over the limes and where, in the dappled shade, Ken tends his pigeons, sloshing sparkles of fresh water and filtering golden grain. I watch him turn a bird in his hands, see his intense gaze as his mouth forms the gentle pout of a shhhh.
Outside I contract, my arms tightening across my chest, whilst inside my anger and frustration swells until I feel I might explode. ‘I can’t remember. It was dark’, is probably her worst and most insensitive dismissal ever. This from the woman who wears her every emotion, idea, or thought, like a gaping wound; she’s an open book pushed right in your face, what goes through Angie’s head, comes straight out of her mouth, but ask her a question about my biological father and she clangs shut like a cell. She has, through the years, blocked me, humiliated me, slapped my face, and denied me any corner of truth until I seethed to know.
The bird flashes mauve, silver and green, like a spiv’s shot satin suit as he rolls it gently over and over, its little bead eyes, unperturbed, flicking like tiny camera shutters, head cracking back to eyes front like a pirouetting dancer as it slowly spins. I know the corky feel of a bird contained between firm hands, the silky sprung ness of quill and feather and the extreme musculature of the wing and breast. When you handle them, you are struck by the sense of power, yet the muscle is not hard, but soft and elastic.
Angie is still ignoring me despite my glances in her direction.  I can’t leave it alone and I don’t care now if I wreck the day and storm back home. “So, that’s all you’ve got to tell me?” I trample in again.
She doesn’t even look up. “Make another cup of tea Harv love.” It’s like I haven’t spoken.
“So that’s it? All you’ve got to say? ‘I can’t remember. It was dark’.” I am aware of spit of my words and the hurt that is thrumming nastily in my solar plexus, but this time I won’t cry. She still doesn’t look up, just continues flicking through the magazine, except now she’s humming as she scans the pages, a way of putting your fingers in your ears without putting your fingers in your ears. It fills me with the petulant emotions of my six year old self and makes me want to scream and smack her blank, stupid face.
This time I leave the room, childishly sweeping the papers and magazines from the table as I go. I pack my things, slamming doors behind me and drive away, determined that however desperately I want to know, I will never ask her again.
I wish it had been that simple.

Look for Chapter 2 in next week’s installment. And please comment on what you’ve read so far. I find this story irresistible. Thank you, Amanda!

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I am sure all you readers have already read and appreciated Amanda’s first short story, and I am thrilled to publish a short-short story of hers, accompanied by a fittingly short-short podcast interview. As always, you can listen to the entire interview, to this segment, download either to your mp3 player, read the transcript and of course, read the story! So, without further ado, after this short-short intro, here are the interview and story:

• Amanda-Ackroyd-interview
• Amanda-Ackroyd-interview-part-II-3-mins

Ilaria: So let’s talk about the other short piece. Because that one, you sent it to me without telling me anything about it, and so I don’t know what it was for. But I understand that it too came from something that had a limit of words, right? It was only 250 words. Is that possible?
Amanda: Yeah, that was just a 250-word story.
Ilaria: Was that part of a competition also?
Amanda: No, that was actually written purely as sort of a discipline piece, taking a sort of an idea and then having to create a story in a complete round in a very tight – within a very tight discipline. So it was purely for my own pleasure. And also it was kind of a lesson in disciplined writing.
Ilaria: What made you decide that you needed to do this experiment in discipline?
Amanda: Well, some of it was – I don’t know if you remember, going back to our school days, but we had an absolutely fantastic English teacher called David Day, who would occasionally make us do précis work. And it took me a while to actually get the hang of doing that, where you would pare and pare and pare something down, without losing the sense of it, into something concise and clear, but still, you know, something that possessed a sort of a creative edge. And I think in terms of my other writing, which is purely something that I absolutely enjoy doing, in terms of just practicing writing, I think it’s very interesting for me to do that. And it’s something that I do practice, is the taking of an idea and boiling it down into something which is sort of sharp and spare. And that’s the reason I do it, really. It teaches me. I learn when I do it. And I quite like the process of going back, back, back and seeing where it was wrong and where I can make it better, but without becoming overly wordy. That’s why I do it.

250-Word Story Number Two

She flashes him the Monroe smile balcony to balcony across long drop and metallic city air. In her twenties he guesses, white teeth, neat nose and giggly eyes, with a chuckle like Betty Boop. She works in the centre as a warden for the old folks.
He beams back and gives her his air force salute, pulling himself tall, feeling his waistband slip a little as he drags in and up.
At night, lying awake, he wonders how her body might feel sliding across the satin sheets which, some days, slink weightily on her retractable line and thinks about running his hand up the unfeasible curve at the back of her waist, her nipples hard and bright as red liquorice torpedoes, her breath warm and puttery like a pony.
By day, he is drawn toward the window, ashamed and pained by this obsessive and desperate checking. He has filled pots with geraniums allowing for prolonged bouts of watering and compulsive dead heading, his mind and eyes never fully on the job.
Does he stand a chance? She looks over often enough and there is definitely invitation in her backward glance as she turns to go inside and once, three years ago she had, at the centre, held his hand, nuzzled her lips against his cheek and whispered, “Happy birthday” as she revealed the cake into which she had, with skilled fingers and faultless symmetry, inserted through the smooth fondant and deep into the yielding sponge, his eighty five candles.

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When I was young I lived alternately in Florence, Italy and New York City on the Upper West Side. At the age of 9 I settled with my family in Florence, but for two years, from 1976 to 1978 I alone left Florence and went off to England to boarding school. How we settled on the particular school I went to is a long and interesting story that I will save for another day. Suffice to say that we settled on a Quaker school (in large part because it was coeducational) in West Yorkshire, outside a small town called Pontefract (from the Latin, “broken bridge”).The school was called Ackworth (and still is, though now I understand things have changed quite a bit from the way they were back then).

At Ackworth I made a small group of lifelong friends, three fellow students and two teachers. Amanda was one of my fellow students, in my same year. We were part of a group of four girls who did pretty much everything together. We used to sing in the hallways, and it was wonderful because the acoustics of the stone walls and cavernous halls were quite marvelous.

About 10 years ago we were back in touch briefly on the occasion of a reunion at Ackworth that I was sadly unable to attend. And then, as these things often go, we lost touch again. Then in November, one morning I receive an email saying, “I’m coming to New York on business, I’m arriving today. Can we get together?” Well, it was wonderful. It felt like no time had passed and at the same time it felt as if a lifetime had passed. The affection and connection between us was, if anything, strengthened and made more mature by the intervening years. This is what I mean by lifelong friends. Whether or not we see each other physically is immaterial. We can pick up where we left off and fill in the blanks as we go. And that is what we proceeded to do in the four or five days she was here. It was glorious!

Below you can listen to the podcast of the entire interview, of this first segment, or download either to your MP3 player. You will also find the transcript of the first segment of our interview and then…. Amanda’s short story The New Scarlet Dress, a retelling in contemporary style of a Canterbury Tale, one of the 7 winning selections out of 17,000 submissions to a competition sponsored by the BBC.

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• amanda-ackroyd-interview-part-i-10-mins

Ilaria:   Hello, everybody. I’m here with my friend Amanda, and I’ll just give you a very quick background. Amanda and I went to boarding school together 30 years ago in West Yorkshire, in England, and she is from Yorkshire… right, Amanda, you’re from Yorkshire?
Amanda: Yeah, I was brought up in London, actually. I was living in London at the time—or just North of, when we were at school together.
Ilaria: Oh, okay. But you live in Yorkshire now, right?
Amanda: I do, yeah, and have done for a long time.
Ilaria: Okay. So, we were out of touch with each other for 30 years – well, we did get briefly in touch a few years ago, didn’t we?
Amanda: We did, yeah.
Ilaria: Oh, there was supposed to be a reunion, right?
Amanda: Yes.
Ilaria: Right. But then we lost track of each other again. But anyway, we never saw each other for 30 years, until just recently, when – was it in December that you came? [2008]
Amanda: No, just before Thanksgiving, in November.
Ilaria: In November, just before Thanksgiving and for just a few days, we got to spend a little time together, and we could not talk quite fast enough to summarize 30 years of living in those four days or however many days it was. But at least we got to see each other again, rekindle our friendship. You got to visit my home, meet my children, and I got to find out all about your wonderful husband.
Amanda: Yeah.
Ilaria: Okay, so you have been so kind as to send me three wonderful pieces of your writing, and I would just like to introduce my readers to you as a writer and to have a little background on these three stories. Let’s start for the piece that you wrote for the BBC, and just tell me first what kind of a competition it was that you participated in and how it all unfolded.
Amanda: Well, this was probably, I don’t know, five or six years ago now. And the BBC were running a series of Canterbury Tales, dramatizations of Canterbury Tales, but done in a contemporary style. And at the time they had a fairly major project running to look – it was to encourage new writing. And they put a call out for people to write short stories which followed the lines of a Canterbury Tale. And it’s so old now that I can’t even remember which Canterbury Tale I followed. But I wrote The New Scarlet Dress, which is what I sent to you. Can you hear me?
Ilaria: Yes, yes.
Amanda: And that was basically the competition. So I wrote the story and sent it in, and it was selected as one of the winning entries, which was fantastic. Out of 17,000, I think.
Ilaria: Wow! Out of 17,000 how many did they select?
Amanda: I think they selected seven stories. And out of that selection I think they broadcast three. Unfortunately mine wasn’t one of the ones they broadcast.
Ilaria: I can’t imagine why they would not broadcast it.
Amanda: No, it was very strange. And I did sort of follow it up and try and chase down why they wouldn’t have done that. And they did send me a pen, a cheap biro, which I was completely stunned by. But when I sort of tried to find out why… You know, my feeling was that if they were going to select three and broadcast three, then that’s what they should have done. But to select seven and only broadcast three seemed like a very bizarre way of working things. But I couldn’t seem to open any dialogue with them about why that was.
Ilaria: Was there a money reward involved, or not?
Amanda: No, there was no financial reward at all. And I think the BBC are quite famous for this. It’s that they pay lip service to the idea of encouraging new writing, but when it actually comes down to it they’re really not that interested. And I have to say, given my experience… I’ve got a telephone ringing in the background here.
Ilaria: That’s okay, unless you want to answer it.
Amanda: No, I’m going to cut it off. Given my experience on that occasion with the BBC I would never take part in anything that they…
Ilaria: Sponsored, again.
Amanda: Yeah. Never again.
Ilaria: I don’t blame you. So anyway, so you can’t remember which Canterbury story you were adapting, as it were, or rewriting.
Amanda: No.
Ilaria: That’s very interesting.
Amanda: Well, it’s slightly shaming, I think.
Ilaria: I found the story a little bit frightening.
Amanda: Did you?
Ilaria: I found it very well written and compelling, and I couldn’t put it down, the same as all your other writing, but I was a little scared by the intensity of the feelings. Obviously the situation in the story would lead to that, would lead to very intense feelings. But I was nonetheless a little frightened by them.
Amanda: Well, I think in terms of the story, what I wanted to get over was the bleakness of life in the Yorkshire Dales. Especially in a Dale like Swaledale. The Dales in Yorkshire are named for the rivers. So the River Swale runs through Swaledale and the River Wharfe runs through Wharfedale, and Swaledale is one of the most bleak and cheerless Dales, certainly in the winter when it becomes very snowy and you can see a long distance down this valley. It’s very inhospitable. And to be farming in somewhere like Swaledale would have been, and still probably is… You’re working on land at the end of its tether, really. And this in a way was what I wanted to portray, was life at the end of its tether. This is the story of a woman who married for all the right reasons a man whom she believed she could make something of. That between them they could create some warmth. But actually he was brutal and cold and singular. He didn’t want to share his life. And it’s really quite a sad story, about a woman who is completely deprived of any joy or affection or warmth. And that plays out in the whole atmosphere of the farm and her life. And her ultimate revenge. And so, whilst it’s kind of bleak and brutal and paints a very stark description of a sad life, there is also a wonderful justice at the end.
Ilaria: Definitely. I agree.
Amanda: It sort of pleased me. It’s almost a joke. She almost has the final laugh.
Ilaria: The last laugh, yes. She definitely does. Although she’s been deprived of so much – I mean, the last laugh can’t quite make up for all those years of suffering, but… Still, it’s a new beginning for her.
Amanda: It’s a new beginning. And I don’t define, I don’t think, how old she is, and so, you know, she could have 30 years of new life.
Ilaria: And I hope she does.
Amanda: Me too! Me too.
Ilaria: I really hope she does. I think that you showed great talent in that story and I’m not surprised that it was selected. But it’s still very nice to know that it was selected among 17,000 entries. I mean, that’s pretty amazing.
Amanda: It was a fairly significant thing. I think the interesting thing about writing that, as well, there was I think a 1,200 word count. And to tell a complete story from beginning to end in 1,200 words takes a lot of polishing.
Ilaria: A lot of chiseling.
Amanda: Yeah, and discipline. And when you’ve got three words over and you’ve polished so much you don’t know where you’re going to lose those three words from, it’s quite interesting. But I really enjoyed writing that.
Ilaria: Well, it’s very good and I’m very pleased that you’re allowing me to publish it.

The New Scarlet Dress

Standing in the kitchen window, she watches him with interest.  She looks him right in the eye, staring him down with blend of curiosity and encouragement in her face and continues with the washing up.

She watches with fascinated pleasure as he clutches at his ropy brown neck and drags at the buttons of his work shirt, clawing at his chest, his mouth opening and closing like a crooked barn door. Throughout his monstrous stumble across the yard, he keeps his eyes on hers, disgust, hatred and frustrated rage still presenting through the fear, which flashes and glistens in his watering eyes. She knows that he is imploring her with gurgling ratchety gasps, but she cannot hear him now that she has closed the window. She gives him a final sunny smile and turns away, quickly drying her hands and lifts her bag and the keys to the old Land Rover from the hook by the door.

She steps over him in the yard, he has fallen now and one outstretched, sinewy hand is weakly flexing and grasping toward her sturdy ankle. She hears him whisper, “Please” and feels gratified that his final word to her is one, which he hasn’t spoken in forty years of marriage.

Bouncing down the farm track, tooting a jaunty good-bye on the horn she clicks on the dusty car radio, – The Archers, was this how she had imagined farming life would be when she had married him?  Harsh years have blotted out any memory of youthful hope, but now on this unexpectedly joyful morning, she can feel the long forgotten but familiar and beautiful rush as a plume of adrenaline rises up and tickles excitedly at her soaring heart.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

He had made her life an unrelenting hell of spite and emotional deprivation, with the occasional end of a blunt rolling pin jammed hard into the soft of her waist or a push in the face thrown in for good measure.  Absorbing the crushing force of his verbal and physical assaults, she never answered back, but she refused to cower in the face of his hateful disregard.

When she met him he had been quiet and stern, traits she had misread as shy and measured. He had barely left the remote farm, the benefit of schooling limited by the seasons of lambing, haymaking and inclement weather. Now she knew that he would have had neither the time nor personality for playmates or play.

In common, they shared no siblings and older parents, hers brittle, his joyless and mean in their isolation. She had been twenty-eight, old for those days to be unmarried. He had been her one boyfriend and she had believed in her inexperience that she could soften him, make him shine, that together they could make something warm and wholesome of their lives, like good bread.

They had married on the second Saturday in January.  Just six of them and the Minister shivering in the inhospitable Methodist chapel, his father refusing to pay extra to have the lights switched on, the date chosen because it wouldn’t interfere with farm work.  They had spent one fumbling night in a Bed & Breakfast further up Swale dale and then had moved on the Sunday morning into the farmhouse, a coffin of damp and silence, which she was to endure alongside his chilling parents.

Grudgingly, he shared his boyhood bedroom, cold and shabby with twin beds and sad wallpaper. One mean chest of drawers, a narrow wardrobe and a strip of scrim on the linoleum floor furnished their loveless nest.  She recalled her new mother-in-law snorting with astonished derision when she requested more hangers for her clothes.  “You won’t be needing dresses round here. I should stack your fine stuff at the bottom of the trunk in the box room.”  She had not lied.  In forty years, she had never been further than a village dance, the last time thirty-five years ago.  She had never danced. Not ever.

His parents had lived on for twenty unkind years and then both died within six months; his mother quickly of cancer and his father she had found folded and cold in the chair by the pale, used ashes of the fire on Valentines day.  Her heart had soared a little on that February morning, it had been the best and only Valentine gift of her life.

Once she had tried to leave, to despondently re-insinuate herself into her parents dispirited home, but they traditionally believed that you made your bed, and jeered in disbelief when she had tried to tell them how her life was.  “Don’t be ridiculous Margaret,” her father had said dipping another plain biscuit into his tea and turning back to the Sunday evening church programme.

She had trudged her way through forty years of misery, every hideous second marked by the mocking metronome of the kitchen clock ticking the bleak rhythm of their existence, while she imagined a life that she saw only through other peoples windows. He had made for her a plateau of grey, punctuated by black pits of sadness and mountains of bleak despair.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

She parks in the market square and goes shopping for the things that she will need over the next few days while it will be unseemly to be seen out and about. Simulated grieving won’t be necessary, she doesn’t really know anybody and those who might observe, once the news of his death gets around, will read her calm as quiet dignity. As for the funeral, she is sure that she will be the only person in church. She’ll need a new dress. Not black, it will have to be something she can wear again.

She drives slowly back to the farm, rippled ice cream, pasta and Belgian chocolate biscuits, three things she has never bought before, brightening the basics in her bag.  He lies where she left him, his arms and fingers stretched toward the house.  A piece of straw has lodged in the corner of his sticky, contorted mouth and a few blades of grass mingle in his wispy hair. A fly sips at one corner of his drying eye, which stares opaquely at her brown sandals.  She looks down at him for a few moments and nudges him with her foot, the fly circles and settles again.  She contemplates a sharp kick in the kidneys but then thinks better of it, instead, humming, she unlocks the house, puts her shopping on the kitchen table and phones the doctor’s surgery.

The doctor arrives ten minutes later followed by an ambulance; its blue lights make a strange stuttering strobe against the stone farm buildings. The doctor, realising there is nothing to be done looks into her face with pity and puts his arm around her shoulder, she adopts an attitude of resigned blankness.  Inside, he makes tea whilst she stands at the window watching the men lift him onto the stretcher and cover him with a blanket, feeling contempt for the tenderness with which they handled his vile, wiry body.

The doctor asks if she has someone who could come and sit with her.  She says no.  He stays an interminable hour, sympathising with the horror of finding him dead, insisting that her lack of tears indicates delayed shock and leaves three sleeping tablets, telling her to call the surgery if there is anything she needs.  She stands in the doorway, arms folded until certain that he has gone, then goes upstairs and lays her dead husband’s only suit on the bed ready for the undertakers.  Everything else she stuffs into bin liners, handling his spent possessions between pinched fingers, her lips curled in disgust.

Moving from room to room, she throws wide windows and curtains, thinking of his mother who had kept them closed, insisting that it faded the wallpaper. The same dark discipline was maintained even after the poisonous old bitch had died.  She revels in the pure smoothness of her forty year old, but still new, cotton wedding sheets as she makes up the big bed in the best room.

Picking Chrysanthemums from the garden, she arranges them in a crystal vase from his mother’s cabinet and places them on the best linen cloth now spread defiantly on the scarred kitchen table.  She gets out the silver and the fine china, throwing the plain stuff in the bin and tunes the radio to a music station.

The kettle whistles on the battered cream Aga and a clean breeze filters through the kitchen as she places six chocolate biscuits on a plate, determined to eat every one as she remembers the time he had hawked and spat into the leftovers of a rice pudding.  “Fat cow,” he had muttered, sneering as he had closed the door behind him.

Pushing the last of the biscuits into her mouth and releasing a sigh of delicious satisfaction, she makes her way to the boot room and retrieves the key he had artfully hidden, but not artfully enough, from a groove in the top of the doorjamb. She drags the blanket box into the light, its scraping across the flags a now familiar sound.  This same scraping, years before, had drawn her from her bed one night and she had walked in on him, bent over the open trunk and rifling through the pile of rough blankets like a nesting rat. He had stood quickly the tin which he held fell to the floor and opened, spilling tight rolls of pink and green.  He had grabbed her, squashing her compliant cheek hard against the wall, pinching with vicious fingers “It’s mine,” he hissed and foamed, “You will have none of it. This goes with me. Do you understand you hateful silent bitch? Or I’ll haunt you to your grave.”

Just once when he had been out for the day at a county fair she had looked, running her hand across the bumpy ridges of the neat rolls of notes. It had felt like freedom. She had been scared then that he would know what she had done, until she heard the scraping of the trunk several nights later and suffered no retribution.

She tips the tin with a flourish onto the kitchen table, rolls of money running onto the floor and finds a note, written in his coarse hand, which reads.  ‘This money belongs to Jack Barker and its total value will be buried with him. This is my final and solemn wish.’  She opens the Aga door and throws the note into the flames.

The inquest showed that he had died of a heart attack, the undertakers had collected his suit and he had been spruced up for display at the chapel of rest.

He looks as foul in death as he had in life although they have straightened his face.  She leans over the coffin beaming at him and taps his hard cold cheek. “Just thought I’d pop in. Let you know, I’m going to sell the lot, the farm, the furniture, all of it.  Should see me right for the rest of my days.  The money in the tin, I counted it last night, sixty three thousand four hundred and twenty seven pounds. And I found your note. Although I hate you with every last morsel of my being, out of respect, I agree with your final wish. It’s only right and fair.”

She reaches into her new handbag and draws out a folded piece of paper. With one hand she prises open his right eye, peeling it apart like a dry wound. With the other she unfolds the cheque and holds it close before his captive stare. “See now. Sixty three thousand, four hundred and twenty three pounds exactly.”  She folds it again and tucks it into his inside breast pocket, pats the outside of his jacket and then flicks the end of his nose hard.  “There you go Jack.” She says smiling as she smoothes down her new scarlet dress.

Can you tell which of the Canterbury Tales inspired this excellent story of Amanda’s? I will go back to my copy and see if I can figure it out. Meanwhile, stay tuned for more inspired and inspiring surprises from this highly talented new author!

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Mario on the Brooklyn Bridge

I am thrilled to present the final segment of my interview with my friend Mario Kluser. This was such an enjoyable experience. Mario is so refreshingly free of ennui or any kind of unnecessary drama. He enjoys writing, he loves the work he has produced, and I am proud to be the first one to publish an interview with him in English. So, without further ado, here is the conclusion of our interview.

You can listen to this segment, to the entire interview, download either to your mp3 player, and/or, naturally, read the transcript.

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Ilaria:   One last question before we end the interview: You have a tattoo on you arm.
Mario: Yes.
Ilaria:   That you got during this first visit in New York.
Mario: Yes.
Ilaria:   Your first ever visit in New York.
Mario: And my first tattoo.
Ilaria:   And your first tattoo ever. And this tattoo is inspired by something that happens in one of your novels.
Mario: This tattoo is the tattoo that my main character has on his back.
Ilaria:   Now, is this the first novel or the second one?
Mario: The second.
Ilaria:   The second one. So, Andy.
Mario: Andy, yes.
Ilaria:   So one of the many flashbacks he has, thinking about his tattoos, one of them is about this tattoo.
Mario: One is about this.

Ilaria:   Would you tell that story?
Mario: Yeah. Where have I to start? Andy had this tattoo on his back in prison. In the chapter where he is asked about the tattoo he ends up in hospital, because what follows is a fight with the guards, because he is provoking them. Then comes the flashback about how he got this tattoo. He wanted to have the sentence on his back, “I’d rather die standing than living on my knees.” And to make it more mysterious he wanted it in Chinese letters, and so he put it in Chinese letters on his back. The back story from my part, why I had to put this tattoo into the book, because when I was a young boy I worked in Germany and I had a workmate there, and he had this tattoo on his arm, but not in Chinese letters; but just in German there stood, “Lieber stehen sterben als kniend leben.[Any misspellings in the German are mine.]” And I loved this, I found it impressive, the sentence. So when I came here to New York, Ilaria was that friendly to ask her Chinese friend Qing to translate the sentence in Chinese, in Chinese letters. And it was actually a Chinese… how do you call it, idiom?
Ilaria:   Chinese characters, but there are two kinds.
Mario: Yeah, but the saying.
Ilaria:   Oh, a Chinese idiom, yes, it’s an idiom.
Mario: A Chinese idiom, and it says, “I’d rather get killed than humiliated,” that’s pretty much the same. If you would translate it literally there would be many Chinese symbols and I don’t know if I have that much skin on my body to put it there. So she sent a couple of different kinds to write it in Chinese, the traditional and the more modern kind that looks more like printed. And I chose one of the traditional, and it’s very beautiful.
Ilaria:   And so now the tattoo you have on your arm says, “I would rather be killed than humiliated.”
Mario: Yes.
Ilaria:   In idiomatic Chinese.
Mario: Yes.
Ilaria:   Okay. Well, I was going to ask you a little about National Novel Writing Month, which you participate in, this is your second time participating in it.
Mario: Yes.
Ilaria:   So, National Novel Writing Month is a non-profit organization based in San Francisco that celebrates its tenth anniversary this year. It started out in somebody’s garage with two guys or something, or four guys, whose goal was to write a novel or the first draft of a novel in 30 days, from November 1st to November 30th. And since then hundreds of thousands of people have joined this project every year, and the goal is to reach 50,000 words in 30 days, and you can upload your word count and your file to the website to make sure… to keep everybody honest. If you reach the 50,000-word goal you “win.” You don’t actually win anything, it’s a competition with yourself. You win the satisfaction of having done it.
Mario: Yes, and you have fun with the guys on Viddler.
Ilaria:   Right. And there are many communities that have grown up around this project. There are people who share their videos on a popular video social networking site on the internet called Viddler, and who share their stories and who read from their books and so on and so forth, and are very entertaining and interesting to watch and fun. But several famous novels have come out of NaNoWriMo. Obviously not the first draft: they were then edited and submitted to publishers. But one very popular novel in the United States called Water for Elephants started as a NaNoWriMo novel. NaNoWriMo being short for National Novel Writing Month. So last year you wrote a novel and you won, you reached the 50,000 word count.
Mario: Yes.
Ilaria:   Are you going to publish that novel as well? Are you going to edit it, or finish it… it’s not finished, right?
Mario: It’s not finished. I promised in one interview to the audience in the Netherlands to publish it in 2008, but I didn’t get that far. It still has to be finished, but it’s a great one.
Ilaria:   Oh, yeah?
Mario: Yeah. It’s a literary thriller too. It’s about a serial killer. I thought one time in your life you have to write about a serial killer. I don’t know if he’s that bad, or if my main character is actually the serial killer. It’s about a Vietnam veteran, the main character, who has post-traumatic stress disorder, and he is admiring a girl he sees regularly on the bus, but he doesn’t dare to speak to her because his social… he’s socially not that good. And on the other hand there is a gap in age, and while here and there murders are happening, and when you read it you suspect him in fact… but at one point the girl speaks to him, and they meet, and then… I don’t know. I don’t know further what happens. But it’s a very tender story.
Ilaria:   That sounds very interesting. Now, were you writing that in English?
Mario: I write it in Dutch.
Ilaria:  Oh, you were writing in Dutch. Because I remember you reading a bit of it… oh, you were translating on the fly.
Mario: Once I had translated on the fly the plot, the back cover text of my first novel. I translated it in English and read it on Viddler.
Ilaria:   No, because this story of the guy on the bus…
Mario: Oh, this was when I…
Ilaria:   A scene on the bus.
Mario: This was when we… when we were doing, or trying to do Script Frenzy.
Ilaria:   Oh, you were going to make a movie of your NaNoWriMo novel, that’s why I remember.
Mario: My idea was to finish my novel, make that film script of the novel, so I know when I finish the script how my book has to end. Because I had no plot in my mind or something. I just wrote out of my stomach. So my first book I wrote out of my head, and the second one, which is the best book in the Netherlands, ever…
Ilaria:   Meaning Loser: Director’s Cut?
Mario: Yes. Maybe I’m the only one who says that, but it’s just true.
Ilaria:   Wait, just let me, for our readers, make one specification: that Script Frenzy is also an initiative of NaNoWriMo, where in April, I believe, every year in April people write a movie or play or television script and that has to be 100 pages of script. You have to reach 100 pages of script in a month. So you were attempting to discover the ending of your third novel, which was your NaNoWriMo 2007 novel, by writing it in the form of a script during Script Frenzy. Okay, and your second novel, you think it’s the best Dutch book ever.
Mario: Yes. For me it is.
Ilaria:   Because you just love the story so much.
Mario: I love the story so much. It’s for a big percentage autobiographical, and of course I overestimated some things.
Ilaria:   Well, you’re not on death row in Detroit, for one thing.
Mario: No, but you… Thank God for that. More symbolic.
Ilaria:   Yes.
Mario: I put very much of myself in it.
Ilaria:   Okay, well I think that’s just about all the time we have today. Thank you so much for giving me this interview.
Mario: You’re welcome.
Ilaria:   It’s been wonderful.
Mario: I can talk for hours about Loser. There is so much to say about Loser.
Ilaria:   I hope this… this may be the first step towards finding an English language publisher for the book.
Mario: One time it has to be translated.
Ilaria:   Well that’s what we’re going to see… if we can make this happen.
Mario: Yeah.
Ilaria:   This will be the beginning. And then we’ll maybe talk to some publishers and agents.
Mario: Yeah, we have to talk to Nicolas Cage about the Orderboek, because he was the inspiration for my main character.
Ilaria:   So he has to be in the movie.
Mario: If it will ever become a movie, he has to play the main part.
Ilaria:   And that was your first novel.
Mario: Yes.
Ilaria:   Well thank you very much, and we will interview you again if you finish the NaNoWriMo novel or you write the script, or you write the script for one of your other two novels into a movie. And then we will have another interview.
Mario: Okay.
Ilaria:   Thank you very much.
Mario: You’re welcome.

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Now we come to the second part of this 3-part interview. You may listen to the podcast right here, download this segment or the entire podcast, or read the transcript below. Enjoy!

Mario on the Brooklyn Bridge

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Ilaria: So is it possible to order your book somewhere else, or is it just in the libraries?
Mario: Local bookstores have copies and you can order it via my own website, the Dutch website.
Ilaria: Okay, I’ll put the url of that in the interview. [http://mariokluser.nl/boeken/index.html]. Okay. So you wrote your second novel.
Mario: Yes.
Ilaria: What’s that about, and how did that all fall into place?
Mario: First I have to say that it’s what we call a literary thriller. Partly because I wanted to make a transition, not to be just another thriller writer, but also to write some kind of other stuff. Fun stuff, when I feel like I want to write fun stuff, and not just be the guy who writes thrillers. Because you get stuck to it, and then if you write ten thrillers everybody expects a thriller. People who are used to reading your books and don’t get a thriller they don’t read you anymore. So I wanted to make a smooth transition to the broader…
Ilaria: …kind of audience.
Mario: And so I wrote Loser – Director’s Cut, it’s an English title of course. The subtitle, “Director’s Cut,” is because – there are a couple of reasons. First because there was no editor who said to me which character I have to change or something. There was even a chapter that was too long, and I knew it was in fact a book in itself. It was too long. And I said, you have to read the book as if you watch some of these Sergio Leone movies. The long, slow shots. You remember, Once Upon a Time in the West, when you look at these guys at the station. But it’s an atmosphere you have to prove [experience]. There are some long shots in the book too, and I would refuse to cut there. And this is one of the reasons why it’s “director’s cut,” but it’s also part of the story because the main character, Andy, he says always to his friend when he was young that he has to live his life on his own terms. That he has to see it like a book or a movie, and that one part of his life is for the public, where he makes some concessions and says, okay, I don’t do this, I do that, because the parents feel better with it and stuff like that. And on the other hand he could live like he wanted, and that’s his director’s cut, so he had to live his life like a director’s cut. The book begins in Detroit prison, but you didn’t ask me that.
Ilaria: No, no, I did. I want to know the story, I want to know about the book.
Mario: Okay. It’s a very long story. The book has nearly 600 pages. And it begins [with] Andy lying on the bed [in] Detroit prison, waiting for his process…
Ilaria: His trial, you mean.
Mario: Oh, yes, his trial. And he already decided for himself that he wants the death sentence. And his lawyer says, you don’t get that sentence in Michigan. Michigan doesn’t have the death sentence for you. And he doesn’t want a lawyer. He’s provoking everybody, he has trouble with everybody. There is not guard… just one guard where he has normal conversation with. And he is just a troublemaker. And he’s sitting on the bed in the beginning and he’s looking at his tattoos, and every time when he looks at a tattoo there is a flashback. So I had this concept always to write one chapter in Detroit prison, one chapter was telling the back story of the tattoo or of the thoughts Andy had at this particular moment. And so it begins, the first memory is when he looks in his armpit and there is the word – I don’t know the English word – it’s a kind of revenge. Like vendetta. If you swear I got this guy even if it costs me a hundred years to find him, I kill him. This is vendetta?
Ilaria: It’s a vendetta, yeah. Having a vendetta against somebody.
Mario: Something like this is in his armpit. His first tattoo, so that nobody could see it. And he’s thinking about what was the reason for this tattoo and then you get the flashback, you get insight into his youth, when he was living alone with his father, they had a bad relationship. His father was always turning [putting] him down. They always had to fight in his youth, later on it went better. Then…
Ilaria: And you told me something very interesting about the timeline of this book, that the past is coming to meet the present. That each one of these flashbacks, you start out from the farthest away, when he was younger.
Mario: Yeah, 25 years away…
Ilaria: And then you move closer and closer to the present time.
Mario: Closer and closer, so that past and present meet and then comes the closure.
Ilaria: The ending, right.
Mario: And the funny thing is, one Dutch interviewer asked me… one blamed me that I didn’t tell the climax of the book in the beginning. That I waited with the climax until the end of the book. And I thought, yeah, you should look for another job if you don’t understand this.
Ilaria: Because the climax should come at the end.
Mario: Yeah, it’s supposed to.
Ilaria: There are writers who put the climax at the beginning and then go back and tell the whole story, but that’s a choice.
Mario: Yeah. I did this with my first book, Het Orderboek. A part of the climax began…
Ilaria: In the beginning.
Mario: It began on a beach where Jack Acers was laying in the sand, dizzy and all, and drunk, and he doesn’t know how he got there, and things like that. And then at a particular point it stops, and then the whole book is one flashback. From chapter 2 it is one year earlier, and then you come to this point on the beach, and then you’ve got your whole climax.
Ilaria: And you understand everything.
Mario: And then you’re on the beach and it goes further. Then you see the end. It makes a loop. But I don’t tell… it’s just like, imagine the movie Titanic begins with the sinking. Okay, after five minutes, okay, we’re done, popcorn, forget about the popcorn.
Ilaria: Yeah, yeah.
*** End of part 2 ***

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I am greatly honored to host our first author interview.

This is the result of a Twitter love story (friendship love, not romantic love!). While I was training to become a librarian, I decided that I had to explore the new social networking sites, so I created a Twitter account. If I had known then what I know now about Twitter I probably never would have met the people I did meet. I didn’t know anyone who used Twitter at the time, so I just logged on to the public timeline. At any given instant there are at least tens of thousands of people writing a Tweet (as Twitter posts are called). If you refresh your page the landscape will change completely from one second to the next and you may never again see the people who were on that first screen.

Having said that, the first two people I met turned out to be two extraordinary and wonderful people who are now “real” friends and probably will be for the duration. I am half Italian and half American and have the good fortune of having two mother tongues. I was surprised to see some Italian tweets, and of course there were a bunch of other languages I did not speak. I ended up befriending a Dutch writer (who had just finished National Novel Writing Month – NaNoWriMo for short) and an Italian journalist who is an anchor on the news in Basilicata. The journalist and his newly married wife came to visit me on their honeymoon in September and Mario Kluser, the Dutch writer, was here for a week, from Nov. 2 to Nov. 9.

Mario on the Brooklyn Bridge

We were both embarking on internet ventures and we decided to pool our brains and collaborate for a few days in person in Brooklyn, and he came and stayed with me during election week. One of the highlights of his visit was that they let him come into the voting booth with me and we pulled the lever for Obama together. So he voted for Obama too!

I have divided the interview in three segments, and you can listen to the podcast of each segment, download the segments or the entire podcast to your computer or iPod, or download the PDF file to read during your subway commute. Enjoy!

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• mario-kluser-interview

Ilaria:   Hello, everybody. I’m here today with my friend Mario Kluser from Holland. He’s a writer and I’m going to interview him on the story of how he began to write and how he went from starting to write in his own living room to being published and distributed throughout Holland. So, welcome, good afternoon.
Mario: Welcome. Hello.
Ilaria:   First of all, I’d like to know what brought you to writing? How did you decide to start writing? Is it something you always wanted to do or is it something you discovered as you were older? How did it all start?
Mario: I always wanted to write a book. When I was a child I wanted to write a book, and I forgot about it for the rest of my life. And when I met my girlfriend and I saw that she was always reading books and she sat on top of the chair, I thought, now I can do this too. And so I began to write my first book, gave her the first chapter, and said to her, don’t lie to me. If it’s crap, just say it and I’ll stop. But she couldn’t stop. And at that time I was a member of a forum for stock exchanges and my first novel, my first thriller is situated partly on Wall Street. And I asked the people who were trading stocks what they thought about the story, and they all replied, they thought it was brilliant. So I moved on and I finished the book.
Ilaria:   That’s great, that’s a great story.
Mario: In fact, the story of my first book was… I had this plan, I always was thinking about how to trick, how you could trick the system if you had the right person in the right place. And I was thinking about it and it actually could work, what I had found out. And one day I awoke and I had the whole plot in my mind. The whole plot from beginning to end.
Ilaria:   And when you wrote the novel, did it… were you able to keep it that way or did it change as you wrote it?
Mario: It changed a little bit. You know, you have some blank spots that you have to fill up. You have to put subplot and something like that, and different characters have to feel something…
Ilaria:   Yes, they do. Okay, that’s very interesting. So tell me a little bit about where you live, because you are not originally from Holland. So you live in a town called…
Mario: Heerlen.
Ilaria:   And that’s spelled?
Mario: H-E-E-R-L-E-N.
Ilaria:   And that’s close to the German border, right?
Mario: It’s close to the German border, yes. Fifteen kilometers or something like that.
Ilaria:   So Dutch is not your first language, of course.
Mario: No, it’s not my first language.
Ilaria:   So you’re originally German.
Mario: Yeah.
Ilaria:   Your heritage is part German, part Dutch and part Italian, right?
Mario: Yes. My mother was half German and half Dutch, and my father was an Italian.
Ilaria:   Okay. So you grew up speaking German.
Mario: Yes.
Ilaria:   And you visited Holland often. You liked it and you decided to move there, and you learned Dutch this way.
Mario: And I learned Dutch.
Ilaria:   But you’re self-taught, right? You didn’t go to school, you learned it by yourself.
Mario: I learned it by myself, yes.
Ilaria:   So how did you decide to write your novel in Dutch rather than in German, which is your native language?
Mario: Because I felt more comfortable writing it in Dutch.
Ilaria:   You did?
Mario: Yeah, because I was at a point where you think in another language. I stopped translating in my head from German to Dutch, and that’s the point where you actually speak the language, where you can say, I speak the language.
Ilaria:   Yes, that’s great. And so, okay, so now you’ve written a novel and you have to decide how to get it published. Now, did you decide to self-publish from the get-go, or did you try to find a traditional publisher first?
Mario: At first I tried to find a traditional publisher. I decided to publish the novel before I wrote the first sentence, because I thought, I don’t write a novel, a couple of hundred pages, and then put them into a drawer. I was knowing that I was going for the whole thing. So it has to be published.
Ilaria:   One way or another.
Mario: One way or another. And I first contacted a publisher. I sent my manuscript on Friday, get it back on Thursday, a brief note that it doesn’t fit into their…
Ilaria:   It’s not the kind of thing that they publish, right.
Mario: Yeah. And then I went to a bigger publisher and it took, I think a month, and I didn’t hear anything. I called them and I just asked on which pile is it laying. And they said that they had to find out. And at some point I said, I don’t wait any longer. I didn’t contact them anymore. I just didn’t want to wait that long. In the meantime I already had informed how to publish, how to self-publish my book. I contacted the biggest printer in the Netherlands, so my books are made with the same machines that Michael Crichton and Lord of the Rings all roll out, with the same printer. So I had the warranty that I had a good quality.
Ilaria:   But you had to pay for it yourself.
Mario: I had to pay for it myself, yes.
Ilaria:   And how many copies did you decide to have printed?
Mario: A couple of hundred. Just a couple of hundred copies.
Ilaria:   Okay. Now, let’s go back one step. So when you get together with a big publisher, or a publisher, a traditional publisher, you also get an editor, who will go through the book with you and give you some suggestions of… you know, make this section longer, make this section shorter, this character is not developed enough, we want to know more about this person, we need some more back story on this… you know, things like that. And of course you didn’t have the benefit of an editor because you chose to self-publish. So how did you go about editing the book?
Mario: Editing in the way you described it, about the characters, I decided everything myself. When I had the feeling this character is described enough, then it was described enough, and so on. Of course, I needed the support of a native speaker. And my girlfriend just corrected all my errors.
Ilaria:   And did she make any recommendations of changing the style of the way some things were said, or shortening something or lengthening something else, or anything like that?
Mario: No.
Ilaria:   Okay, she just corrected typos or grammatical errors or whatever. Okay. So you printed a couple of hundred copies and at this point you had to distribute the novel.
Mario: Yes.
Ilaria:   So, how did you go about finding distribution?
Mario: I first sent two copies to a service. In the Netherlands there is one organization where you can send your books to, and where all publishers send books to, and then they decide if they put it in the catalog for the libraries. This catalog goes to the libraries and libraries decide what books they are going to order, and they ordered my book. So I got… most of my books that I had already printed were sold to the libraries.
Ilaria:   And so that was how you gained your first recognition.
Mario: Yes.
Ilaria:   And how was it that you were interviewed—you were interviewed by newspapers and radio, right?
Mario: Yeah.
Ilaria:   How did that happen?
Mario: The radio interview came half a year after publishing. I just got an e-mail because they read it… I had sent to one big newspaper in the town where I came from, or the region where I come from, and they wrote a review about the book. And after that I was contacted by a radio station.
Ilaria:   After the review came out.
Mario: Yeah. And then we talked about everything, publishing stuff and the book itself. It was pretty funny.
Ilaria:   That’s wonderful.
*** End of part 1 ***

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