If you could spend time with a character from your book
who would it be? And what would you do during that day?
I’d like to spend time with Janis and just make fun of
everything.
Do your characters seem to hijack the story or do you feel
like you have the reigns of the story?
My characters are more clueless than I am. They’re just
entering adulthood and I’ve been here quite a while. Some of them do horrible
things and I wouldn’t want to invite them over, but they generally have enough
redeeming qualities I should be able to socialize with them at least for a
little while.
How did you come up with the name of this book?
It was an inspiration. Denied is the perfect word because
it’s both active and passive here – Sylvie is blocked, rejected, without,
blocked, disallowed, etc., and she’s the one doing the blocking and rejecting.
It speaks to the experiences of many of us.
Can you tell us a little bit about the characters in
“Sylvie Denied”?
You’ll meet diverse characters in different social spaces –
tenants, farmworkers, hippies, college students, middle-class women, young
parents, various ethnicities, and nationalities as Sylvie travels from place to
place.
How did you come up with the concept and characters for
the book?
I believe that our true self is our inner spirit – what we
think of as our conscience. As we go through life, we accumulate ideas, values,
personalities, identities from the culture around us as our spirit seeks its
purpose in life in its journey and as we accumulate experience and knowledge,
we might lose touch with that inner spirit. We might think our personality is
our true self but what we need to do is bring that inner spirit into our
consciousness. This is the basic concept underneath it all.
How long have you been writing?
In one way or another, since I was
in second grade, and wrote a ballad called “The Lonely Easter Bunny.” I was
irked when my teacher read it aloud to the class because she didn’t understand
the rhythm at the end. It’s funny to say, given that I’m big on media literacy,
but the poem ends with the line: This bunny was good, he / was like all bunnies should be. The teacher, though, just said it all
together like “This bunny was good. He was like all bunnies should be.” So it
bothered me that the class wouldn’t hear the rhyme. Anyway, I got lots of
attention for the ballad from my teacher, but especially my mother who said she
knew my grandfather would really like it. She also said that about the little
biography I wrote about Thomas Edison in third grade. She saved them both and
when I looked at them later, I could see why. I wrote several short stories –
one about pollution, one was, let’s say, based on both “The Picture of Dorian
Gray” and the Daphne DuMaurier story “The Blue Lenses.”
Do you read yourself and if so, what is your favorite
genre?
Yes, I read voraciously – literary
fiction and non-fiction social science, history, nature, books with spiritual
insight.
Thank you so much for featuring "Sylvie Denied." I appreciate it.
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