Ask the Author: Maud Newton
Answered Questions (6)
Maud Newton
Read continually, especially books you love, and keep moving closer to the true flame behind your impulse to write. Yes, we all have to understand the basics of grammar and composition, and it might (or might not) be helpful to have a little feedback or instruction from someone with experience. And, of course, a writer has to practice. Bad drafts are inevitable for most of us. Ultimately what will make your writing worth reading is the essential you-ness of it, the quality of the prose or poetry and the preoccupations and observations that no one else can bring to the page in exactly the way you can.
Maud Newton
I've always been interested in my own family, fascinated by the amazingly over-the-top stories on my mom's side, and troubled by my ancestors' involvement in slavery on my father's side. And I've always puzzled over what gets passed down in families, my family and others. Rather than dwindling over time, my interest kept growing over the years and eventually it reached an outpouring in this book, which is about my own ancestors and about my research and thinking and feeling on the significance of ancestors more broadly.
Maud Newton
I'm working on a novel now, and mulling some nonfiction book possibilities, too.
Maud Newton
The best books I read this summer and early fall were:
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’ The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois, an extraordinary novel, one of my very favorites of recent years, longlisted for the National Book Award (her poetry collection The Age of Phillis, also a marvel, was also a National Book Award contender last year).
Rebecca Donner’s painstakingly researched and captivatingly written All The Frequent Troubles of Our Days: The True Story of the American Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler, the story of her great-great aunt and a warning to us all.
Lauren Groff's poetic and propulsive latest novel, Matrix.
Kaitlyn Greenidge’s gorgeous second novel, Libertie.
Sarah Schulman’s Let the Record Show, a history of AIDS activism and ACT-UP, and also an important and inspiring blueprint for successful resistance and social change.
Ashley Ford’s compassionate, wrenching, gently triumphant memoir Somebody’s Daughter.
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’ The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois, an extraordinary novel, one of my very favorites of recent years, longlisted for the National Book Award (her poetry collection The Age of Phillis, also a marvel, was also a National Book Award contender last year).
Rebecca Donner’s painstakingly researched and captivatingly written All The Frequent Troubles of Our Days: The True Story of the American Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler, the story of her great-great aunt and a warning to us all.
Lauren Groff's poetic and propulsive latest novel, Matrix.
Kaitlyn Greenidge’s gorgeous second novel, Libertie.
Sarah Schulman’s Let the Record Show, a history of AIDS activism and ACT-UP, and also an important and inspiring blueprint for successful resistance and social change.
Ashley Ford’s compassionate, wrenching, gently triumphant memoir Somebody’s Daughter.
Maud Newton
I find that the unfortunate first step in dealing with writer's block has to be sitting down (or lying down, or standing) and putting a pen to paper or opening the document on my laptop. Beyond that, one of the best remedies I've found for this kind of confusion or lack of engagement is to connect to the excitement that led me to write something in the first place. If I find that I'm feeling weighed down by what I think I "have to" do next, I remember that there are no hard rules for writing and that I can write about the part that interests or excites me and dispense with the rest in a sentence or two.
Maud Newton
One of those mysteries—how my great-grandfather came to kill a man with a hay hook—turned out to be a different story from the one I expected. As I write in Ancestor Trouble, I imagined this ancestor of mine as a swashbuckling hothead, but the evidence I found suggested otherwise. Some of the other mysteries that motivated me to write the book are only partly solved. For example, my maternal grandfather was said to have married thirteen times. I didn't find that many marriages (though I found many marriages!) but even after all these years it's possible that there are some I haven't uncovered yet.
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