Ask the Author: Cherise Wolas
Answered Questions (8)
Cherise Wolas
Thank you so much! Working away. But with The Family Tabor coming out in paperback next week, my focus is on that right now!
Cherise Wolas
Marghe GArdella, thank you so much for your beautiful response to The Resurrection of Joan Ashby! I'm so delighted you loved the excerpts of Joan Ashby's stories. So many readers have written saying they'd love if I turned various of the stories into novels, and I'm always thinking about it. With The Family Tabor just published, things have been busy, but I've been working on a new novel. . . that might feature characters from Joan Ashby, but I won't say anything more.
I hope reading The Family Tabor is another fabulous experience for you!
Thank you so much,
Cherise
I hope reading The Family Tabor is another fabulous experience for you!
Thank you so much,
Cherise
Cherise Wolas
Katherine, I'm so glad you found Joan's stories so intriguing! The Family Tabor, my second novel that will be published in July 2018 features Simon Tabor, and all of the Tabors, but it isn't the same as the story in The Resurrection of Joan Ashby. It's a very different book than Ashby, but I hope you'll love it. I am working on a novel about Paloma Rosen. And rolling around in my brain for the future are Silas and Abe, the twins, and Nurse Bettina!
Cherise Wolas
Dear Joan S - I am so delighted by your response, thank you!
Cherise Wolas
Their first target, an elderly lady named Ginny Sauvage, pink-fleshed and white-haired in her retirement community bed, looked innocent in old age, and she held out her hands when the twins introduced themselves, after slipping past the guards, evading the nurses roaming the floor. But with those hands, now crippled and clawed, Ginny Sauvage had once beaten every one of her children.
Cherise Wolas
Liz Laurin,
Thank you so much for writing and for loving my writing! I adore all the many emails and letters I've received about the book. They make every single day fantastic! And yours, tonight, made me so happy!
You asked how I found an entirely separate voice for another author, that other author being Joan Ashby. What I did was this:
I imagined I was her, the focused and determined writer with the unloving childhood, sitting at her old battered dining-room table in her East Village apartment, seeing the world through her particular lens, and out flowed the work she would write.
And yes, you can read more! My new novel is due in 2018, published sometime next summer, maybe July. It is very different than The Resurrection of Joan Ashby, but I so hope you'll be a reader of The Family Tabor!
So many thanks!
Cherise Wolas
Liz Laurin,
Thank you so much for writing and for loving my writing! I adore all the many emails and letters I've received about the book. They make every single day fantastic! And yours, tonight, made me so happy!
You asked how I found an entirely separate voice for another author, that other author being Joan Ashby. What I did was this:
I imagined I was her, the focused and determined writer with the unloving childhood, sitting at her old battered dining-room table in her East Village apartment, seeing the world through her particular lens, and out flowed the work she would write.
And yes, you can read more! My new novel is due in 2018, published sometime next summer, maybe July. It is very different than The Resurrection of Joan Ashby, but I so hope you'll be a reader of The Family Tabor!
So many thanks!
Cherise Wolas
Cherise Wolas
Hi Ilene Harris,
I’m so pleased you loved The Resurrection of Joan Ashby! And so pleased too that you loved Joan Ashby’s short stories. Ah, you want to know what happens to Silas and Abe, the twins abandoned at birth, lovingly fostered, and then sent away on their 18th birthdays. Maybe, one day, they will have their own book. And yes, I am writing more books and thrilled that I will have you as a reader!
Hi Ilene Harris,
I’m so pleased you loved The Resurrection of Joan Ashby! And so pleased too that you loved Joan Ashby’s short stories. Ah, you want to know what happens to Silas and Abe, the twins abandoned at birth, lovingly fostered, and then sent away on their 18th birthdays. Maybe, one day, they will have their own book. And yes, I am writing more books and thrilled that I will have you as a reader!
Cherise Wolas
Hi Jane!
Thank you for being my very first question here!
I think I was born with this particular superpower—to read voraciously and retain what I read, and I feel so lucky to have it.
Two books that have made a great impression on me in the last few years are 2666 by Roberto Bolano, his final book before he died, and The Sound of Things Falling by Juan Gabriel Vasquez. Both are South American writers. Bolano was Chilean, Vasquez is Colombian.
2666 is massive, 900 pages, with a title that remains elusive (though apparently explained in another novel). It is a five-part narrative, each comprised of different characters and stories. Each part is amazing, but it’s only at the end do you start to realize each is like the spoke of wheel, and you begin to see how the spokes unite, see that it is a wheel. It is a stylistically rich literary labyrinth that defies categorization, and yet, perhaps unbelievably, it is easy to read. It mesmerized me, and I plan to read it again.
The Sound of Things Falling by Vasquez, at 320 pages, seems like a novella in comparison. It is an exploration of the ways in which stories profoundly affect lives, and how the stories of others affect us. When I finished it, I promptly read all of Vasquez’s other novels and collections.
Neither of these marvelous novels influenced The Resurrection of Joan Ashby; I read them after writing it. But perhaps I’m so enamored with them (and am always recommending them) because their themes resonate intensely with me both as a reader and as a writer who explores narratives within narratives and the interrelationship of things. They are different but equally fabulous writers for whom the actual writing is as important as the plot, which it what I strive for too.
Thank you for being my very first question here!
I think I was born with this particular superpower—to read voraciously and retain what I read, and I feel so lucky to have it.
Two books that have made a great impression on me in the last few years are 2666 by Roberto Bolano, his final book before he died, and The Sound of Things Falling by Juan Gabriel Vasquez. Both are South American writers. Bolano was Chilean, Vasquez is Colombian.
2666 is massive, 900 pages, with a title that remains elusive (though apparently explained in another novel). It is a five-part narrative, each comprised of different characters and stories. Each part is amazing, but it’s only at the end do you start to realize each is like the spoke of wheel, and you begin to see how the spokes unite, see that it is a wheel. It is a stylistically rich literary labyrinth that defies categorization, and yet, perhaps unbelievably, it is easy to read. It mesmerized me, and I plan to read it again.
The Sound of Things Falling by Vasquez, at 320 pages, seems like a novella in comparison. It is an exploration of the ways in which stories profoundly affect lives, and how the stories of others affect us. When I finished it, I promptly read all of Vasquez’s other novels and collections.
Neither of these marvelous novels influenced The Resurrection of Joan Ashby; I read them after writing it. But perhaps I’m so enamored with them (and am always recommending them) because their themes resonate intensely with me both as a reader and as a writer who explores narratives within narratives and the interrelationship of things. They are different but equally fabulous writers for whom the actual writing is as important as the plot, which it what I strive for too.
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