Leslie Connor

How did you become a writer?

This was a bit of a surprise. I always loved to write, but it was my degree in art and illustration that brought me to the children’s book field. I began to work on picture book texts. Then I discovered a well of ideas for longer works of fiction and gravitated toward stories for middle graders and teens. (I've never gone back to illustrating!)

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.).

Robert Louis Stevenson, Else Minarik, Christopher Paul Curtis, John Irving, Maya Angelou, Maurice Sendak, Alice Hoffman, Kimberly Newton Fusco, Gary Schmidt….I could go on a long, long while here! 

When and where do you write?

The laptop makes for a great portable office. Thus, I began my career in coffee shops, libraries, and curled up on borrowed sofas. Recently, we build a sweet little office shed on our back hill in woods and I love having that space to dream and write in. I’m not one to rise at the crack of dawn to work. I take a morning walk with the dogs then pour the tea and start. 

What are you working on now? 

I’m polishing the final draft of a middle grade novel about a grieving girl and a difficult dog who arrive to the same new home in a tiny New England town. Both arrive harboring secrets and mysteries, and neither seems to want much to do with the other—not at first.  

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? 

If I have, I cannot admit it because the concept terrifies me. There are definitely short periods when I simply not writing, but I am probably ruminating or letting the creative well fill. 

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received?

Shorten your sentences and cut your adverbs!

What’s your advice to new writers?

Shorten your sentences and cut your adverbs! (Sound familiar?) Practice "dedicated daydreaming." Seek to tell the truth about the world and the characters that have arrived into your heart for each story. 

As a kid, Leslie Connor was a daydreamer who loved to be upside down in odd places such as the middle of the stairway at her family home where she could look out the front door and watch the world from an unusual perspective. She studied visual art at the University of Connecticut where she earned a BFA. She is happily surprised to be writing today. Leslie is the genre-hopping author of several award-winning books for children including a picture book, Miss Bridie Chose a Shovel, the middle grade novels, Crunch, and Waiting for Normal, winner of the ALA Schneider Family Book Award, and All Rise for the Honorable Perry T. Cook, a finalist for the E.B. White Read Aloud Award.She has written two teen novels, Dead on Town Lineand The Things You Kiss Goodbye.Leslie’s newest title, The Truth as Told by Mason Buttle, also for middle grade readers, was a National Book Award Finalist in 2018. Leslie lives with her husband and rescue dogs in a little house in the Connecticut woods.

Susan Freinkel

How did you become a writer? 

I’ve always written as a way to make sense of the world, starting with my childhood diary. For me, there is some mysterious thing that happens when I sit down to put words on a paper: I find thoughts and feelings I didn’t know I had, discover things I had observed without noticing; see connections I hadn’t made before. But it wasn’t until I was in my twenties that I realized I could tap into that process for a living: by becoming a journalist. I started out as a daily newspaper reporter, (my first job was at the Wichita Eagle-Beacon), and gradually moved onto longer and longer forms of writing. In 2004, I came up with the idea for my first book, about the near-extinction and rejuvenation of the American chestnut tree. Doing that book I realized I’d found my groove as a writer. I like the time and space and editorial control of writing a book. Despite the economic insecurity and occasional loneliness, I only hope I get to do more.

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.). 

That’s a long list: I’m influenced by every good book that I read. For instance, I just finished Tara Westover’s astonishing memoir “Educated,” and liked the way she crafted each chapter as its own mini-story, each adding to the overall narrative arc. My second book, “Plastic: A Toxic Love Story” was partly inspired by what Eric Schlosser did in “Fast Food Nation”: showing how something as ubiquitous and banal as fast food actually shaped our world and the way we live in profound and surprising ways.

Probably the biggest influence on my writing is my incredible writing group, North 24th. I’ve had the great fortune to be part of this group of Bay Area women writers for the past 15 years. There are eight of us at present—including Allison Bartlett, Leslie Crawford, Jeanne Carstensen, Leslie Crawford, Frances Dinkelspiel, Gabrielle Selz, and Julia Flynn Siler—with a wide range of interests and writing styles. We meet twice a month to workshop one another’s work. Between us we’ve produced more than a dozen books and more essays, magazine and newspaper articles than I can count. Whether it’s my work being critiqued, or someone else’s, I always come away from our meetings having learned something more about the craft of writing and feeling inspired.

When and where do you write? 

For years I rented an office in the neighborhood. But now that my kids are grown, I finally have the luxury of an office at home. I tend to keep pretty regular hours. Lately I’ve been starting my day around 6AM and work for a few hours before taking a break for exercise and breakfast. I really like that early morning clarity and quiet. Unless I’m pressed by a deadline, I knock off around 5 or 6.

What are you working on now? 

I’m just starting a new project about a traveling theatre group that develops environmental-themed plays and then tours them on bicycles. It’s called Agile Rascal Bicycle Touring Theatre. Starting in February (2019) they will be touring Florida with a play about climate change and the end of fossil fuels. I’m planning to accompany them on the tour and see what it’s like for a group of artists to be raising environmental issues in one of the most environmentally imperiled parts of the country. I’m hoping it will yield a book.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? 

I don’t know if this is writers block, but I often hit points where I feel stuck: I can’t figure out a structure that works, or how to describe a certain event or capture what I want to say. I used to find this incredibly painful.  I would spend days beating my head against the wall, trying to force a way through the puzzle. Then several years ago I realized that getting stuck is just part of the writing process. My conscious mind may not know how to solve the puzzle, but somewhere in my brain, I’m working on it and a solution will eventually come bubbling up. Trusting that process doesn’t make the writing go any faster or easy, but it’s a lot less angst-ridden.

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received? 

Leave most of your reporting on the cutting-room floor. That advice came from Bruce Porter, one of my teachers at Columbia Journalism School and a great magazine writer. He said 90 percent of what you report will never make it into a story. For me, that’s come to mean two things: I have to do a ton of research and reporting to ensure I have a wealth of material. I should only use the quotes, characters, anecdotes and descriptions that will advance the story I want to tell. 

What’s your advice to new writers? 

I think Annie Lamott had the best advice: don’t be afraid of the shitty first draft. No one gets it right the first time, or the third or the fifteenth. Writing is revision. It’s really helpful to find people to share those early drafts with, provided – and this is critical -- they are kind and insightful readers. I think that’s critical these days. The bottomless hunger for content by online media has made it easier than ever to get published, but harder than ever to be edited well.

Susan Freinkel is a San Francisco-based writer who writes about science and the environment. She is the author of American Chestnut: The Life, Death and Rebirth of a Perfect Tree (2007), which won a 2008 National Outdoor Book Award and Plastic: A Toxic Love Story (2011). She has written for a variety of national publications including: The New York Times, the Washington Post, Discover, Smithsonian, OnEarth, Health and Reader’s Digest. 

Chris Cander

How did you become a writer?

The same way Mike Campbell in Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises went bankrupt: "gradually and then suddenly." As a child, I wrote poems. Stories in my teens and early twenties. Non-fiction during my thirties. When I started my first novel, at age 37, I realized that was where I wanted to focus my literary energy. Since then, I've written over a million words in various drafts, and have kept about a third of them. Now I'm 49 and releasing The Weight of a Piano--the fourth novel I've written and third I've published--and am working on a fifth. 

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.).

There are so many of each. My parents read to me, told me stories, took me to the library, let me live with my nose in a book. My sophomore English teacher, Mrs. Carol Blaine, recognized something in me and encouraged it--even though I never got higher than a B on any essay in her class. The novels I read in college, in particular The Decameron. The novels I've read since then. The writers I've admired, befriended, leaned on, learned from. Their names would fill a phone book. I'll start with the Brothers Grimm, John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, Charles Baxter, Annie Proulx, Nevil Shute, Harriet Doerr, Italo Calvino, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Isabel Allende, Leo Tolstoy, Virginia Woolf, Joan Didion, and a thousand others.

When and where do you write? 

In my upstairs home office at the hybrid art deco/midcentury modern desk I bought myself when I was 18 and plan to use until I'm dead. I'm surrounded by books, art, trinkets, and totems. To my left is a big picture window overlooking a crepe myrtle tree. A set of pentatonic windchimes hangs just outside; it's the only music I listen to when I write. I don't have a particular time of day, but I try to get my fairly modest goal of 350 or so words done before the kids get home from school.

What are you working on now? 

A novel about the unseen forces that affect and connect us. 

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? 

I don't believe in it. I also don't believe in inspiration. Muses can be mercurial, and "blocks" are usually the result of something else: fear, procrastination, hangovers, etc. My writing life is governed instead by determination. It’s scary sometimes, and I suffer the same crises of confidence that any writer has, but in the end, the only way to start is to calm down, sit down, and begin.

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received?

I don't know who--if anyone--gave me this advice, or if it was just something I figured out: never, ever give up. 

What’s your advice to new writers?

Try to be fearless when you confront a blank page. (I tell this every day to my third-grade Writers in the Schools students, and it works.) Don’t think—feel. Don’t critique each word as it lands. Give into that Dickinsonian “bolt of melody.” Even if it’s nonsense, write it down. Liberate your imagination on the page and you’ll discover something to pursue. And that critic inside your mind that’s tugging backward on your pen? Tell her to settle down—you’ll deal with her later, after you’re finished.

Chris Cander is the award-winning author of the novels WHISPER HOLLOW, 11 STORIES, and the children's picture book THE WORD BURGLAR. Her latest is THE WEIGHT OF A PIANO, forthcoming from Knopf in January 2019, which has already received starred reviews from Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, and Library Journal. For seven years she has been a writer-in-residence for Writers in the Schools, serves on the Inprint advisory board, and stewards several Little Free Libraries in her community. A former competitive bodybuilder, Chris currently holds a 3rd dan in taekwondo and is a certified women’s defensive tactics instructor.