Leah Weiss Biography, Books, and Similar Authors

Interview

Leah Weiss discusses her novels, All the Little Hopes and If the Creek Don't Rise, and offers profound advice for aspiring writers.

All the Little Hopes

Eastern North Carolina comes alive throughout the book. How do you give the landscape a voice?

I was born in the land where this book is set, and lived there until I was ten years old. Then we moved five hours north to Virginia to be with my daddy's people. In those early years, I was surrounded by Mama's sprawling family of fifteen siblings, my aunts and uncles who begat cousins. They were a kind and hard-working lot who stayed close to their roots. Only Mama moved away. I remember featherbeds, the outhouse, the ice box, the hand-cranked ice cream, and "putting in tobacco." Dinner was at noon, supper was at six, and everybody had well-tended gardens. Recreating the book's setting was as natural as breathing.

What inspired this book?

Before Mama died in 2005, I had begun "interviewing" her about her childhood years. My first published stories were about her memories. But, specifically, it was her comment about German POWs helping at tobacco markets in '44 that planted the seed for All the Little Hopes. I learned that between 1942 and 1946, forty-five states had POWs working farms, fertilizer plants, and in timber and canneries. Wikipedia estimates half a million prisoners were shipped to camps and governed by...