Interviewer: Good afternoon, everyone. And here we are in the studio talking to Alice Black, a young writer who has just published her first novel "Stars" and it has already become an international bestseller. Hello, Alice.
Alice: Good afternoon. It's such a pleasure being here. Thank you for inviting me.
Interviewer: Before we start to discuss your novel, will you please tell the listeners a bit about yourself?
Alice: Of course, I grew up in Michigan and received my BA in creative writing from the University of Michigan. In my freshman year, I won a Hopwood Award for my fiction. Then my short fiction appeared in various publications. I live in Washington, D.C., and I work for the National Geographic Society Library.
Interviewer: Some of our listeners might not know much about your novel "Stars". Could you please tell us about it in brief?
Alice: Well, the novel is written as a series of emails from the narrator, a botany professor and mother of two named Jessica, who was married to the chief of a space tourism company. When the novel opens, a tragic accident has just happened - one of the company's shuttles has exploded shortly after liftoff and everyone on board has been killed. So in her emails, Jessica narrates what follows the tragedy, the media frenzy that follows the accidents, aftermath, the impact on her marriage, the revelations about the company, and the fact that she doesn't know her husband, Liam, as well as she thought she did. The person she's emailing is a man named Arthur, her friend and colleague who was out of the country on sabbatical. But as the novel goes on, the reader slowly realizes that Jess and Arthur's relationship has its own complicated history.
Interviewer: The format of your novel is quite unusual. Was it your original plan to write the novel in this way?
Alice: Definitely not. It was never part of my plan to write an epistolary novel. When I started writing the novel, it was just Jessica's voice in my head and she was confiding to someone. I hadn't made a concrete decision about the form I was going to use. The idea to structure the story as a private email communication came later, but it seemed to fit the intimate tone perfectly.
Interviewer: Once the decision has been made to use the style, was it a challenge to maintain it or was it just something you adapted to?
Alice: There were certainly challenges. The biggest one is that you have to leave your readers enough clues so that they can figure out what's going on to follow what the letter or ,in this case - email, writers are referring to. But you also don't want to have the narrator overexplaining things. You need to maintain the illusion of eavesdropping on a conversation, which is one of the great appeals of the epistolary form.
Interviewer: I've always been very much interested in the writer's daily routine. What's a typical writing day for you?
Alice: I work a 9 to 5 job and I try to squeeze some writing time after work a couple of nights during the week. But the solid majority of my writing takes place at the weekend. I typically get up in the morning, drink an unhealthy amount of coffee and try to get to my desk before I get distracted by other things I have to do. I work until lunch and if I'm feeling motivated, I'll try to get another hour or two of writing in the afternoon.
Interviewer: Thank you, Alice. It has been very interesting talking with you.
Alice: Thank you. I'll be happy to come to your program once more, really.
