Welcome to Writer Wednesdays!
Thank you for joining me on another Writer Wednesdays! Click here to read all the past author interviews.
I am very excited to introduce our next author interview with:
Rachel Manley!
Rachel is very special to me because she was one of my mentor teachers during my MFA (Masters of Fine Art) in Creative Writing at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Rachel read my intro submission before we even met and sent me back a handwritten note about my work. We have had a special bond since.
Rachel is a tell-it-like-it-is kind of person – and mentor. Her writing is wonderful and rich, reflecting her unique life. I am grateful to know her and call her a friend. She is generous beyond measure and was like my school mom while I was studying away from home. I distinctly remember one summer residency where I badly sprained my ankle and Rachel rushed out and bought me a tensor bandage. I have no idea if she remembers that, but I’ll never forget it.
Author Interview:
When did you know you wanted to be a writer?
Age 7
Who were the authors that influenced you as a youth, and in what ways?
George Campbell, M G Smith (Jamaican poets in our nascent writing movement). They gave me the excitement about using writing to determine culture and nationalism in the sense of self-realization and reflection of what is real to us, not colonial England.
William Blake, Songs of Innocence and Experience helped me to shape my young thoughts into poetry.
Chinua Achebe gave me the confidence to use my own speech patterns and to reflect the voices I heard around me.
Jane Eyre and Harding’s Tess showed me the wonder of the novel form.
Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso showed me how memoir can be cleverly enhanced by and cross bred with fiction.
How did it feel when you got to hold your very first advanced copy of your book?
For a few hours I had the illusion that I had cheated death.
What was the inspiration behind your book(s)?
My 3 poetry books were just my young embrace of life and beauty and my own truths, very young and meant to be enigmatic.
All my work is inspired by the dead.
The 3 memoirs, the work of my family building a young nation – my grandfather as the father of Jamaican independence, my father shaping that independence for the workers of Jamaica. My grandmother shaping a nascent art and writing movement. I lived with giants whose stories I pilfered.
All now dead.
My novels, the first was my relationship with a poet that I feel had a lot to do with my sticking to writing; Jamaica didn’t have writing schools and one needed a like spirit. He is now dead.
The other was the effect of being submerged as a writer in an organized community of scholars in a foreign American culture. An important theme of that book is a mysterious landlady I lived with for a year who taught me more about her country than anyone else, who, yes, is now dead.
What was your publishing journey like?
My first two poetry books were self-published. The third I was lucky to get Peepal Tree Press, a small English printing press who have been dedicated to Caribbean poetry and writing.
After about six months of frustrating approaches to Canadian and English publishers (they all wanted me to write my memoirs as novels!), I was very lucky that Knopf Canada was run by Graham Greene’s niece, Louise Dennys, who like her famous uncle was fascinated by the Caribbean. She published the first two memoirs.
After that, the fiction question came up again because they felt there would be no market for a third memoir – fair enough. Though it is always a threat to memoir this trying to get a true memoirist to write stories as fiction. I think if the people are real and their contributions are real and that is how the writer responds to the characters, fiction won’t work. It didn’t for me. I tried writing my grandmother’s story as a novel but it failed miserably. So I got an agent who told me to rewrite it as a memoir which I did – its half memoir half biography for I wasn’t alive for my grandmother’s youth. It was published by Key Porter Books but I always thought reading it was like driving a car with a twisted chaise – I could feel all the changes.
I found a new publisher for my novels – Cormorant Press. Honestly, I was lucky – he was a friend of a friend. Sometimes it’s like that. Publishing isn’t easy and it is getting more difficult as the internet has changed everything in this world. Self-publishing has become much more respectable and sometimes, if you find the write outfit, there are great editors and up-fronting the money isn’t necessarily a bad thing for it means more return. But you probably have to do your own marketing.
What advice do you have for aspiring young novelists?
Well, just write one page at a time. If you have a story, remember there are 365 days in a year and most books are under 300 pages, so a page a day isn’t that impossible! Don’t worry about publishing till you get to that bridge. It’s very distracting.
If you could have any superpower, which would you choose?
The one I have. The ability to write well.
Where is your favorite travel destination?
Barbados.
When you’re not writing, what are your favorite hobbies?
People
Where can people find you online?
About the Book:
Friends since attending university in Jamaica, Lethe and Daniel have long realized they would never be good for each other. But Lethe is Daniel’s muse, and theirs is a connection that proves unbreakable as they spend the next thirty years crisscrossing the Caribbean and travelling the world in search of work, love, and home. Now, Daniel has become an internationally renowned prize-winning poet, and Lethe aspires to be a writer in her own right. His invitation to her to join him at an isolated retreat, Peacock Island, gives them both a chance to reflect on the life they’ve shared.
The Countdown is on!
Join author Alexis Marie Chute as her new novel – Inside the Sun – quickly approaches its publication date.
Pre-order Inside the Sun by clicking here!
About Inside the Sun (book three in The 8th Island Trilogy):
All worlds are dying, and it’s up to one broken and dysfunctional family from Earth―the Wellsleys―to save the day.
Cancer-ridden Ella celebrates her fifteenth birthday beneath an enchanted mountain, but it is what lies even farther below―the mysterious Star in the sea―that demands she grow up quickly. While Ella grapples with the sacrifice she must make and the lies she is forced to tell, her mother, Tessa, is hell-bent on protecting her.
Through bizarre encounters, love-sick Tessa realizes that she is not the lonely orphan she believes. Her husband, Arden, and father-in-law, Archie, are not the only ones with magical bloodlines. This revelation changes everything.
As Archie chooses to embody his unexpected ancestry, he learns that leading the charge in the ultimate battle against evil won’t be as easy as he thought. He’ll need his family―and the strange allies he has gained―by his side to give Ella enough time to set things right.
Can they defeat the unstoppable Millia sands―and another unexpected foe―before everything they hold dear is destroyed? Or will their adventure tear them apart for good? The finale to The 8th Island Trilogy will hold you spellbound until the final page, and long after.
Thank you for joining me for Writer Wednesdays!
Catch you next week!
Happy writing,
– Alexis Marie Chute
