Often we pick up a book to escape. While the pages turn, the real world ceases to exist. But for Nina Sankovitch, books led her back to reality. After a devastating loss, Nina read a book a day for an entire year. Each story helped her navigate, and ultimately survive, her grief. Nina’s debut memoir, Tolstoy and the Purple Chair, will make you want to drop everything and read—not to run away from life, but to find a new way back in. We spoke to Nina about growing up with books, what prompted her to write, and her latest quest to celebrate the great art of letter writing.

This brief chat is an excerpt from an interview that Maria Gagliano and I conducted for issue 10 of Slice magazine. To read the full interview, you can purchase the magazine here.

*A QUICK SLICE is a weekly interview series with famous authors. Each interview is just seven questions long and easily consumed in one sitting.

  Maurice Sendak captured the power of a child’s imagination, to transport them into the wild recesses of dreams, in his most famous book, Where the Wild Things Are. We had the opportunity to chat on the phone with Maurice, who lives in Connecticut, a week before his eighty-second birthday. He took us back to the wildest place he ever went to, the place that inspired the adventures of his mischievous character named Max. It was his childhood home, located in Brooklyn, the same borough as Slice’s headquarters. So it turns out that the wild can take root in your backyard, or if you don’t have one—as is the case for many city kids—in the nooks and crannies of your apartment. For the full seven-question interview, click here.

*A Quick Slice is a weekly interview series with famous authors. Each interview is just seven questions long and easily consumed in one sitting.

Joshua Ferris’s novels, The Unnamed and Then We Came to an End share something in common: they focus on people who are pushed to an extreme. When we chatted with Ferris, he offered insight into this creative process and then took us back to his childhood and to the worlds of make-believe that helped shape his own views on writing. (This is an excerpt from an interview that appears in issue 8. For the full interview, you can purchase a copy of the magazine here.)

What is your writing process? Do you work from detailed outlines or let the story unfold as you write?

Always unfold.

Where is your favorite place to write?

My house upstate. It’s solitary and quiet and beautiful, especially this time of year, when fall is giving way to winter.

*A Quick Slice is a weekly interview series with famous authors. Each interview is just seven questions long and easily consumed in one sitting.

For the full seven-question interview, click here.

(Source: awordaboutwriting.com)

Time Out (New York) described Justin Taylor‘s gift as “illuminating the connections between the mundane and the grotesque.” He accomplished just that in his short story collection, Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever, and his debut novel, The Gospel of Anarchy.  He also has a wicked sense of humor, demonstrated in the following interview.

What is one of your favorite memories of reading during childhood?

Visiting New York City with my mom the summer I turned ten. (We lived in South Florida.) One day she took me to The Mysterious Bookshop. I doubt she had any pre-existing knowledge of the place, so we probably just happened by it on our way somewhere else (this was in 1992, when it was still in Midtown). I had never seen a store like it before: narrow and dim and with books everywhere, and this tight spiral staircase that led upstairs to another book-filled room. It’s such a powerful image in my mind I almost suspect it of being a screen memory, but I know it really happened because I left there with my first “grown-up” book: Stephen King’s Pet Sematary.

*A Quick Slice is a weekly interview series with famous authors. Each interview is just seven questions long and easily consumed in one sitting.

For the full seven-question interview, click here.

Julie Metz is a graphic designer, artist, and freelance writer whose essays have appeared in publications including Glamour and Hemispheres magazines, and the online story site mrbellersneighborhood.com. The recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship, she lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her daughter and partner. Her memoir, Perfection, is now available in paperback.

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You write about grief and lies with raw honesty in your memoir, Perfection. Have you been struck by the honesty of someone else’s writing? Or other forms of media?

A few recent memoirs that have really stayed with me are Sarah Manguso’s The Two Kinds of Decay and Meghan O’Rourke’s The Long Goodbye. Like so many readers, I was blown away when I first read Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club and Kathryn Harrison’s The Kiss. I don’t think I would have been able to write my book without these trailblazing women as guides. All these writers are poets and novelists and they bring an inspiring skill and sensibility to their non-fiction. In other media, the 2011 documentary film “Buck” offers an unvarnished view of one man’s journey to overcome his abusive childhood. The skillful editing allows the viewer to experience raw emotions without sentimentality.

For the full seven-question interview, click here.

*A Quick Slice is a weekly interview series with famous authors. Each interview is just seven questions long and easily consumed in one sitting.

In 2007, Jennifer Mascia wrote a Modern Love column about her father’s criminal past and her mother’s lifelong attempt to keep it a secret. The column, entitled “Never Tell Our Business to Strangers,” was expanded to a book (published in February 2010).

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Would you describe your memoir in just six words?

Gangster father; lying, loving mother; pasta.

Your book reveals the shocking truth of your father’s crimes. Did you find the process of writing this story unsettling or comforting? Or both?

When my parents died, I realized our past was all I had left of them. Unfortunately most of this past was scattered with half-truths, and in order to fully grieve and close the door on my childhood, I had to flush out all the lies. …

For the full seven-question interview, click here.

*A Quick Slice is a weekly interview series with famous authors. Each interview is just seven questions long and easily consumed in one sitting.

 
Lisa See is the New York Times bestselling author of Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, Peony in Love, and Shanghai Girls. Her latest novel, Dreams of Joy, is now available in paperback.

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Would you name three things that inspire you to write?

The desire to find out more about something that intrigues me, the desire to delve deeply into a single emotion (like love), and the desire to stay happy and busy.

What is one essential element of your writing process?

A thousand words a days, no matter what.

For the full seven-question interview, click here.

*A Quick Slice is a weekly interview series with famous authors. Each interview is just seven questions long and easily consumed in one sitting.