Ask the Author: Jennifer Howard
Answered Questions (6)
Jennifer Howard
When I feel stuck, I go for a walk or a run or just get outside for a while if I can. Reading helps too. Anything to get me out of my own head for a while until I feel unstuck again.
Jennifer Howard
Having written. :)
Seriously, though, the best thing, for me, is that I get to learn about so many cool things—and imagine lives I'll never actually get to live.
Seriously, though, the best thing, for me, is that I get to learn about so many cool things—and imagine lives I'll never actually get to live.
Jennifer Howard
Taking notes for my next book and working on some fiction!
Jennifer Howard
Read! Read anything and everything. Read authors from different backgrounds and cultural traditions and eras. The more widely you read, the more your own writing will benefit, no matter what genre(s) you're working in.
Jennifer Howard
The inspiration for CLUTTER: AN UNTIDY HISTORY was a painful one: My mother suffered a health crisis, compounded by dementia, and could no longer live at home. I'm an only child, and it fell to me to clean 50 years' worth of hoarded stuff out of her house. It took me two years to get through it all. It was the most painful thing I've ever had to do. Friends started sharing their own personal stories of family hoarding and painful cleanouts with me, and I got to wondering how clutter got to be such a huge problem for so many of us. The book is my attempt to trace some of the history and origins of clutter and our relationship to it, from the Victorians to Marie Kondo and beyond. Most of all, I hope the book will help others feel a little better about their own personal struggles with stuff. We often treat clutter as a personal failing, but it is much more than that.
Jennifer Howard
Right now I'm reading "The Mirror and the Light," the final installment in Hilary Mantel's trilogy about the life and intrigues of Thomas Cromwell, right-hand man--fixer and consigliere--to King Henry VIII. Mantel does an astonishing job of recreating an era that's fascinated me since I learned that rhyme about Henry's wives (Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived) when I was a kid. Next on my TBR list is another final volume in a trilogy, this one fantasy: S.A. Chakraborty's "The Empire of Gold," which draws on Islamic folklore to create a magical world unlike anything I've encountered before. Plus there's a love triangle! What's not to love?
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