James J. Patterson

  • Croatian-born author, Cubrilo, is able to read and write in several languages. She recently sat down with James J. Patterson to compare languages and talk about her new geo-political thriller novel, “Dethroned.”

    Author, Branka Cubrilo

    The difference between a work being translated and a work written in a second language fascinates me because a translator, in English, might Anglicize or Americanize the prose, but a writer for whom English is a second language will retain subtle turns of phrase generic to his or her thinking. These days we are lucky to have many ways to experience an author’s perspective. Hearing Branka Cubrilo read snippets of her previous works gave me a hint as to the tenor and musicality of her thoughts, and made the reading experience of her current novel Dethroned just that much more colorful. —JJP

    JJP: I’m fascinated by, and a bit envious of, people who can write well in another language. How many languages do you speak, and when did you become proficient enough with English to write so creatively and with such confidence?

    BC: I grew up speaking Croatian and several languages of the former republics of ex-Yugoslavia, plus Italian. I came to Australia in the early nineties knowing English as I had studied it at school. In Sydney, I enrolled in various courses for advanced English, and after a few years I obtained a diploma for interpreting and translating. I worked at SBS, a big radio and TV corporation, as a radio producer, where there was a need for Croatian and English. I translated the news, feature stories, and interviews from one language to another. I had published my books in Croatia, but got disinterested in publishing in a small country with such a small readership. One day, I simply decided to write in English; I felt confident enough to write in other language. I have a friend who helps with editing all my books, and my daughter, who was born in Sydney, helps with the editing, too.

    JJP: Can you talk a bit about the books you were drawn to when you were young and the books that attract you now? Do you have a language that you prefer to read in?

    BC: When I was young I read the European classics — from Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky to Voltaire, Rousseau, Balzac, and of course, Shakespeare. I loved the French Existentialists, especially Sartre, and I loved Proust. I also loved poetry. I memorized many of Lorca’s poems, I loved Neruda, and Dante fascinated me as much as Petrarch.

    My taste hasn’t changed much, even though trends have. I like books that are beautifully written and philosophical, that have deep meaning and stir the soul, books that make me both feel and think. I don’t read “popular” literature; I don’t read about wizards, vampires, or zombies. I am interested in deep human emotions and relationships, and something that makes me wish to improve my own life or my own writing.

    To the second part of your question, the answer is, yes, I love reading in English. It is a rich language and I can easily relate to its images and its rhythm.

    JJP: Andalusia and Leonard Cohen appear in more than one of your books…coincidence?

    BC: It is not a coincidence. Andalusia has a very specific place in my heart and life. I lived in Cadiz for a good part of 2002, on a Writer in Residence scholarship from the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. I wrote my memoir, The Mosaic of the Broken Soul, there. Indeed, I had gone there pretty broken, and I met the most extraordinary people in that beautiful land. It’s a land of creativity, the home of Flamenco, of Lorca, a land of all sorts of art, especially the art of loving life itself. It gave me a lot, taught me a lot, and helped me to dig deep into my feelings, showing me who I was, of what material I was made. I still feel I owe Andalusia and its people a lot.

    Now, Leonard Cohen, my other love. I was about fifteen years old when I first heard the song “Suzanne.” Back then my English was pretty frail, but it didn’t’ matter —my heart and my soul stirred when I heard his voice. It was filled with some strange sadness and excitement, something dark and deep and longing. Leonard Cohen cracked open my creativity. I had been writing poems since I was almost a child, but when I understood his lyrics, I decided I wanted to write like him. I know I have never achieved that, but at least I can insert him in my stories, just as I do the Andalusian land, in order to thank him for being completely interwoven into the fabric of my life.

    I saw Cohen several times live, and though I know it sounds silly, I had the feeling each time that he was there just because of me, just to tell me his tales personally. I was heartbroken when he passed away. Such a mystic, such a deep soul.

    JJP: Your most recent book, Dethroned, is a geopolitical thriller of art, action, psycho-sexual turmoil, and shattered human relationships. In other words, it’s a big chewy novel with lots of characters, subplots, and twists and turns. I get the feeling there’s a lot of personal information woven into the plot of Dethroned: a society ruled by violent and stubborn men, fueled by ethnic pride, nationalist fervor, conniving priests, and the vulnerability of women who are forced to be merely the enablers of this patriarchic system. Might these frightening elements all be resonant in the author’s past?

    BCDethroned is not directly about my own past. It is a story of my country, about two wars —WWII and the War for Independence that happened two and half decades ago, as a continuation of WWII. What really inspired me to write that book was the injustice which has been done to my country: lies, falsified history, bad propaganda, mass hysteria, and the fact that these lies and this injustice haven’t been fixed yet.

    I tried to explain the causes of the war, what really happened in this part of the world, who was who, and how wars are continuations from previous ones, ones that have never really finished regardless of the passage of time. Despite propaganda, the Croatian War for Independence was all about destruction, turmoil, shattered human relations, displacement, hatred, revenge. It has now been almost 30 years since the war happened and nothing has been done to heal the wounds and repair the damages. Politicians have played the same card, nationalism, for the past 30 years and people still buy into it. I still can’t comprehend how easily manipulated people are by childish national pride. If it were a movie, it would be ridiculous — but it was real, and unbelievably painful for many generations, and it will be for many more to come.

    JJP: In Dethroned, the enigmatic Pia and the steady and sturdy Veronika, each just graduated from high school, must emerge from school fully grown-up in order to find their own way out of the labyrinths of tradition, family prejudices, and violence that threaten to bring down their entire society. How did you come to create these two powerful and intriguing women?

    BC: I often get asked if I am Pia. I am not Pia, exactly, but she is probably one of the strongest characters I have created and she really got under my skin. She penetrated so deeply into my psyche that on some days, I wasn’t sure where Pia ended and Branka started; we were shadows of one another. I lived her life for an entire year, but it isn’t the story of my life. I knew women like her — strong women, righteous, with sharp minds; creative women, warriors, free-thinkers. Those are my female characters, Pia and Veronika. When I go back to Rijeka, my home-town, and find my female friends from 30 years ago, nothing has changed. The women just got smarter and stronger. But almost nothing has happened in terms of changing things for the better. We still have, after 30 years, this appalling ultra-right government, and human rights are very shaky. Pia and Veronika are in some way me and my girlfriends. I knew them from my schools, from my street, and they made their mark.

    JJP: You have a lot to say about feminine beauty and the trouble it can cause the individual who possesses it. Pia Odak is a poet. She’s quiet, loyal only to her art, detached, and ambivalent to the continuous assault that her beauty inspires in the men around her. It doesn’t matter where she might flee to — from Croatia, to London, then Australia, everywhere she goes her unaffected detachment drives her would-be suitors crazy. She finds a half-dozen ways and instances to tell them, plainly, that she’s not interested, yet no one listens. It appears to me that women all around the globe these days are finding the voice, and the audience, to state their case to the male world. Do you think you and others like you might be breaking through? Or is it time to throw up your hands and let the rest of us catch up if we can?

    BC: Here I absolutely agree with you! When I was an adolescent girl I was expected to be obedient to men, not to confront them. It is a great, subtle practice that leads to the silence of women. If you were pretty, you had to pay a price for that. Everyone wanted a piece of a pretty woman, not necessarily to possess her sexually, but to be a part of her life. There is a big trap in beauty if there is no strong character. This character has to be built from an early age and by the right upbringing. I think a strong mother plays a crucial role.

    I remember when I was young, if I rejected dancing with a young, pushy man, he would ask me if I was “some sort of a feminist or a lesbian.” If they couldn’t get what they wanted, they attacked or insulted. And back then women were quiet, they feared they might be wrongly judged or labeled. The more outspoken girls and women, those who fought for their voices, their own way of living, their thoughts and rights, were immediately labeled witches or lesbians! I was lucky because I had an older brother, a very tall, athletic, and popular boy; everybody knew I was his sister, which gave me sound protection. Not only that, it gave me the right to protect other girls and speak on their behalf. I was fearless, and that was my nature. I raised on my own a daughter who is independent and kind, generous, intelligent, and beautiful, yet she is a strong, modern young woman who is outspoken and knows her own strength and importance. I always tried to speak for the equality of women, for our independence, for our voices being heard and respected.

    JJP: In Dethroned, the character Hugo, a boy with Downs Syndrome, inhabits the spiritual center of the narrative. Do you have personal experience with those affected by Downs Syndrome?

    BC: No, I never had anyone in my family or approximate vicinity with Down Syndrome. I have a friend with two autistic girls, who I have known and loved since they were born. And thanks to seeing their sweet souls grow, I developed a similar character who would spread love and innocence. He approached gently, softly, and I created him with a lot of gentleness. I love him so much. As with women, I am always prone to protect those who are subject to judgment or who are pushed aside by society or those whose rights are denied.

    JJP: Also, in Dethroned, the dead are ever present. Two notable characters die and return in the minds of those who are open to them. Can you say a little something about that?

    BC: Oh, I have to be very careful here (smile). It may be that I am still under the influence of Magical Realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, whose books I loved very much years ago. I think people who suffer a loss, particularly of someone incredibly close to them, might imagine that this person still exists on some level or plain. Sometimes, when one is in a lot of pain, one might search for the answer on the “other side,” wishing and wanting to connect with the other world. I don’t know whether this is possible to achieve, or even if that other world exists at all, but both of my characters, Pia and Veronika, found solace in the notion that their dearest are still around them, and could see them and somehow assist in their daily struggles.


    Branka

    At the age of eighteen Branka Cubrilo wrote her first novel I Knew Jane Eyre, which won the Young Writers Award in 1982. Soon after she wrote a sequel called Looking for Jane Eyre. In 1999 Branka published the book Fiume Corre – Rijeka Tece, a year later Requiem for Barbara, and in 2001, Little Lies – Big Lies. (These titles are available here in  Croatian)

    The Lonely Poet and Other Stories is Branka’s third book published in English by Speaking Volumes, following her earlier novels The Mosaic of the Broken Soul (2011) and Fiume – The Lost River (2014). Branka’s latest novel is Dethroned.

    Branka is fluent in three languages (English, Italian and Croatian) and she works as an interpreter and translator.

    Now she predominantly writes in English and translates her earlier works into English

  • Welcome to Good Books, Well Made

    We believe that there is no reason a small press can’t publish books that compete on the shelf with the best that the big houses have to offer.

    Welcome to Good Books, Well Made
    James J. Patterson, Co-Founder, ASP.

    key-west-jim

    I suppose the last straw for me was when Eric Foner’s masterpiece, Tom Paine, and Revolutionary America, fell apart in my hands mid-way through reading it.

    I say last straw because — and every voracious reader has suffered this — books have been falling apart on me for decades. I’ll confess, I’m a bit rough on my books. I break the spines, I scribble in the margins, I fold down corners, and I use a hard bookmark for making perfect underlines. I take books into the bathtub, I carry them in the rain, I sit for hours with them in pubs and bars, on public transportation, and yes, in the loo.

    But Foner’s book was out of print, so buying more copies of the same crappy edition made no sense. I got through it with rubber bands and paper clips holding it together when not in use and read it like an unbound manuscript until I was finished.

    So it came to pass that one fine day I found myself on a team founding a press and I determined to make damn sure these books would be keepsakes, able to survive many readings and a lot of wear and tear. There would be no yellowing and disintegration after a measly decade. (I recently pulled The Journal of Eugene Delacroix off my shelf of unread books, and since I always scribble the city or town I was in and the month and year I purchased it on the publication page, I was stunned to see I had bought the book in England eleven years before! It was like new. Thank you, Phaidon!) It is our belief at ASP that you should be able to lend a good book to a friend, who could lend it to another friend, and, should it ever be returned, you should bloody well be able to read it yet again.

    As a consequence, when we published Mark Pritchard’s brilliant fantasy, Billy Christmas, James Clark, a former Sunday Times reporter wrote, “This is a book destined to be battered, much thumbed, read again and again until its pages come loose. It will graduate into the packing crate going off to college, then to the shelves at home.” This was music to our ears and, Mr. Clark, I can assure you, those pages aren’t coming loose!

    And another thing. A book shouldn’t be ugly. I want a book I’m proud to put on the table. The highest compliment a stranger can pay me is to stop me and say, “That looks interesting, what are you reading?” That most certainly would NOT be a flimsy newsprint mass market thing with a photo-shopped bird cage on the cover.

    Grrr!

    Oh, and while I’m at it, whatever happened to editing and copy-editing? I’m looking at you Large Press America.

    Sure editors, good editors, cost a little more, but pushing that expense onto the starving writer is a cruel and unusual punishment to both reader and writer. I’ve known more than a few writers who found a mistake on the first page of their newly published book. Imagine the crushing disappointment after so much work and sacrifice. Just writing about it is getting me hot around the collar!

    So, when my wife and I (the lovely and talented Rose Solari, a dream of an editor, whose credits include working with Al Gore, Mary Catherine Bateson, Robert Bly, and Margot Adler, to name a few) decided we’d like to give this old-school publishing thing a whirl, we decided that if it meant publishing fewer books a year to get them as close to perfect as humanly possible, then so be it. The author deserves it and so does the reader. And getting it right is just so gratifying.

    We believe that there is no reason a small press can’t publish books that compete on the shelf with the best that the big houses have to offer.

    So pick up one of our books, enjoy a great read, and experience the pleasure of holding a well-made book in your hands again. And please lend it to a friend or a soul in need. You’ll want to make sure they give it back!

    JJP
    4/’17

  • Influences and Ambitions

    On Writing Roughnecks

    Roughnecks low resolution cover download.I grew up at a time when something called “The Great American Novel” was still revered, aspired to, attempted. Steinbeck, Melville, Fitzgerald, Hemmingway, Harper Lee, and poets like Whitman, Dickenson, Sandberg, and Frost had taken their art into the heart of America and told us something about ourselves. They certainly were following in the footsteps of certain European authors who took the broad view and dove deep, from macrocosm to microcosm and back again: Dickens, Balzac, the Brontes, and Dostoevsky, to name some of the heavy hitters, pointed the way. So, naturally, when my old grade-school chum, Quinn O’Connell, Jr, came to me with his Roughneck adventure in the oil fields of North Dakota and Montana, I thought, “Great American Novel” baby!

    Roughnecks and Moby Dick

    Marty in the Tower
    © 2014 Jack Brougham

    I read and re-read Moby Dick a half dozen times at least during the writing of Roughnecks. I had taken a full semester course on the book in college, way back when. (My favorite is the Modern Library edition featuring the marvelous illustrations by Rockwell Kent. For Roughnecks we used the British artist Jack Brougham, whose woodcut-like images captured truly the rough-hewn tone of the adventure) So Moby Dick was always at my elbow during the writing. At times when I was frustrated, I would open the book to a random page and give a dramatic reading out loud to the walls and windows of my work space. A rolling sea will sport waves of approximately the same height and power in all directions, much like, I observed, the static yet rolling landscape in our story of the oil patch, with hills of the same shape and size as far as the eye can see. So the driller on oil rig No. 34 of the Bomac Drilling Co. has moments such as this:

    Sometimes in early evening or along about dawn, when the prairie breezes came up breath-like over his menial sanguine form, he would stand upon the rig’s quarterdeck, gazing across the rolling turbulent landscape of the Williston Basin and imagine the rig an old but hardy steamer bounding over the waves. In a way, the rig was like a ship, self-sufficient, with its own power source and crews, its own mission to perform. He was its captain. He would look up through the girders on the tower and view the huge mountainous clouds rolling overhead, or the movement of the stars as the earth turned beneath them, and for a fleeting moment he could stir within himself the sensation of that movement, and he would hold to his brake handle as though it were the rudder of the world. (RN pgs 184-5)

    The Zachary Harper character in Roughnecks is modelled on Quinn, of course, but only partly. I leaned heavily on Ishmael from Moby Dick. Ishmael, whom playwright David Catlin has called “The original outcast – the unborn bastard son of Abraham…unconnected, unmoored and rudderless.”

    The night that Zak and OK Wellman spend together on Bear Butte near the end of the book mirrors slightly a scene in the beginning of Moby Dick where Ishmael is obliged to share a bed with the pagan cannibal priest Queequeg, the harpooner, at the Spouter Inn. A soliloquy Wellman has about getting restless in civilized society takes a hint from a reverie Ishmael has also at the beginning of Moby Dick regarding his impatience toward city dwellers and civilization at large. There are many many other parallels, perhaps some even I am not aware of.

    Roughnecks and Dostoevsky’s The Idiot

    As Quinn and I were preparing a research mission to The Williston Basin, Quinn’s descriptions of the prairie, the harsh winter, the grueling dangerous work, all said Russian novel to me, so I grabbed a copy of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot before setting out. Why The Idiot? It was one I hadn’t read, and the only Russian novel the bookstore had in stock at the time. Plus, isn’t there something illogical (read idiotic) about chucking your life and dashing out into a world of unknown dangers? But on the long ride out from Washington, DC, to the Montana hell-and-gone I got the feeling that there was a link between Zak Harper and Prince Mishkin from Dostoevsky’s book. Mishkin has been away and he returns a changed man, quiet, reserved. His old friends project onto him definitions as to where he’s been and what he’s been up to, and what he has or hasn’t morphed into in the interim. Unknown to them, he was hiding out at a sanitorium, getting himself “sorted” as my British friends might say. The prince’s circumstance reminded me of another man who might just want to remain quiet about his origins, movements, and motivations.

    Roughnecks and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road

    Sal Paradise, the narrator of Kerouac’s On the Road is another model for Zak Harper, I always loved Kerouac’s affection for his characters – I think it’s what sets him apart – and I hope that affection is front and center in Roughnecks. For Kerouac, those miscreants, lost souls, and fellow wanderers are all “angels” of one type or another, and what Zak Harper lacks in familiarity and shared background with those he encounters on his adventure, he attempts to make up for with comity, empathy, and service. And it doesn’t go unnoticed or unappreciated. The character Simone, a muse-like love-interest of Zak’s, when comparing their previous lives, refers to some of the passionate characters from her own past as “beautiful idiots.” I like that. One of the joyful things about working with Quinn was his ability to self-mythologize, meaning that he saw the people around him as rather Homeric in the quiet courage and sacrifice they evinced in the total obscurity of their position and place. Read any journalism about the “oil patch” and you’ll hear about the danger, the death, the illiteracy, the loose morals, the poverty, and the boom times, but you’ll have a hard time finding a trace of humanity. Quinn’s cup overflows with it, and I hope I was able to catch that as well.

    Roughnecks and Stranger in a Strange Land

    Rain Tower
    © 2014 Jack Brougham

    One of my favorite moments in Heinlein’s masterpiece was a scene at the beginning where the Stranger, an alien from another planet, wakes up on a table or gurney, and he doesn’t know what he’s lying on, doesn’t know what a window is. Every single thing he’s sees, things we take for granted, is utterly strange. Frank Herbert’s Dune shares that bewildering strangeness. Some might find an almost science fiction-like quality in tone at the beginning of Roughnecks. I felt that the opening scene should put the reader in this world and let he or she sort it out, as would happen to most of us in the same situation. The scene is full of strange jargon, incomprehensible objects, and danger. Although I hope the reader is aware that the events being realized in its “Prelude” are somehow of consequence, he or she has no way of knowing what those consequences are.

    During an outrageous storm a man walks off the job; therefore a job has come open. In Chapter One, another man wakes up, sleeping under his jeep, and it has rained.

    Other Influences

    Antler Woman
    © 2014 Jack Brougham

    Finding a female presence in this story was a challenge until I realized that in Native American mysticism, especially deep in this part of the country, most nature deities are feminine, and once I dived into that aspect, a path opened for me. Certain women I encountered on my journeys stepped forward and their stories are in the book as well.

    I read recently where most Americans have never seen the Milky Way. Can you imagine? In this part of the world it’s practically on top of you, so I added astronomy to the mix of atmosphere and tone. I came to consider the sun, the moon, and the stars to be important characters in the drama.

    All told, Roughnecks took more than seven years to write end to end. But who has seven years to devote to writing a book, much less provide for his or herself while that is going on? I didn’t and neither did Quinn. I spent almost two years just transcribing interviews, which was difficult because these folks don’t speak in complete sentences. I hired a transcriber to help with just one small batch of interviews, but she charged me more money than I needed to live on for six weeks, and she corrected their language, and cleaned up their sentences and jargon rendering the interviews almost useless. I had to do it over. Then fifteen years on the road as a musician, and another ten years as a sports writer intervened. In between, I worked on the book some more, taking trips out to the patch on my own, sitting alone along the Little Missouri River, writing descriptions. I came close to getting killed three times that I’m aware of.

    So Roughnecks takes a few dozen pages to get into, to get the lay of the land so to speak, but the rewards I think are plenty and gratifying. I hope you find the reading worth the effort. It was a hard book to let go of. It’s yours now. Take care of it for me.

    -JJP 12/16

     

  • ASP Titles Now on UK Amazon!

    Bermuda Shorts and That Paris Year, Now On Amazon UK!

    Bermuda Shorts, The Indy Best Seller in Essays and Lit Crit, by James J. Patterson, and That Paris Year, by Joanna Biggar, are now available on UK Amazon and Kindle!

    BS:  http://www.amazon.co.uk/Bermuda-Shorts-ebook/dp/B004BSGFH4/

    TPY:  http://www.amazon.co.uk/That-Paris-Year-ebook/dp/B004BSGFHE

     

    Check’m out!

  • A Secret Woman Launch UK

    Book Launch Party! Thursday, June 14, The Old Bank Hotel, Oxford, England

    Chris Andrews Publications, Ltd., of Oxford, England, announces it’s 30th Anniversary of continuous publishing, with the unveiling of A Secret Woman, by Rose Solari, and a display of Chris Andrew’s Photography! At The Old Bank Hotel, 92-94 High Street, Oxford England, Thursday, June 14, 2012. 7PM for 7:30!

    (more…)

  • Art Jericho, The Back Room Poets, And Me

    Poet Rose Solari, and writer James J. Patterson, recently went to a poetry reading in the Jericho neighborhood of Oxford, England, and an art exhibit broke out! This is why we love this town! Cheers…

    Art Jericho is a groovy little gallery nestled in among some old buildings just off trendy Walton Street in the Jericho section of Oxford, England. The current show by a young painter named William Cotterill is a captivating step through a dimensional seam where the ancient landscape shows the brief scratches and misty remnants of human passage. Each one of these two dozen or so pieces wants to tell you that something happened here – not something necessarily bad or good, or even pleasant, but something. Railway ties in the dusky damp, a cluster of trees too sturdy to succumb, buildings obscured by the very atmosphere of place. Maybe it was the wintery night itself, but something about these paintings made me glad to be wearing a cozy sweater, a woolen overcoat, a hat.

    But it wasn’t William Cotterill’s show, aptly titled, “A Tangle Of Matter & Ghost” that brought Rose Solari and I to the Art Jericho Gallery recently. It was a gathering of talented writers who call themselves The Back Room Poets who were celebrating the publication of several new chapbooks by some of their members that had us crunching through the Oxford snow, temporarily bypassing the many fabulous pubs that dot the neighborhood of Jericho, to hear these voices, mirthful, intrepid, and real.

    You can’t swing a dead cat in this burgh without hitting a poet or writer of some sorts,” I laughed with a small band of renegade geniuses from the reading who had adjourned to the Harcourt Arms Pub after the reading.

    A couple of weeks earlier we had attended a different kind of poetry event at the Kellogg College of Oxford University, where former Poet Laureate Andrew Motion had gently and elegantly put two students through their paces, critiquing their work publicly before a very discerning gathering of heavy hitters, that included, among others, Clare Morgan, Phillip Pullman, Jane Draycott, and Jon Stallworthy. Yikes! I was glad it wasn’t me up there, but it was sure fun watching someone else running the gauntlet!

    But at the Art Jericho gallery, the Backroom Poets were displaying their wares, as lovely and thought-provoking as Cotterill’s paintings on the white brick walls. Mark Leech read from his new work called Chang’ an Poems, all of a sequence. These reminded me somewhat of Henry Miller’s concept of “Walking Up And Down In China,” where the artist creates an imaginary landscape wherein to house his or her very real impressions and illuminations felt and imprinted on his or her tender and oh so vulnerable soul.

    David Olson, a local maven for the poetically inclined, read from his New World Elegies, still able to find a sublime humor in his loving lamentations.

    At the Harcourt Arms we were joined by Andrew Smardon, another poet who had been lurking about at the reading and proved an amiable pint-sipping addition to our little gaggle of poetry enthusiasts. I like hanging out with poets. They have the capacity for slipping between the worlds of the sublime and the ridiculous mid-sentence, and, of course, tipping back the pints and wine in shameless celebration of it all!

    Cheers!
    Jimmy