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Cara Wall is a graduate of the Iowa Writer's Workshop and Stanford University. While at Iowa, Cara taught fiction writing in the undergraduate creative writing department as well as at the Iowa Young Writer's Studio in her capacity of founder and inaugural director. She went on to teach middle school English and history and has been published by Glamour, Salon, and the San Francisco Chronicle. She lives in New York City with her family and The Dearly Beloved is her first novel.
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Congratulations on publishing your debut novel, The Dearly Beloved. You've told us that you started this novel when your daughter was born, and she's now fourteen years old. What was it like to work on this project for almost fifteen years? What, if any, challenges did that pose? What opportunities did it present?
I didn't work on the book continuously for fifteen years! I worked off and on, in between long stretches where I put my energy into teaching and parenting—sometimes because I wanted to, and sometimes because it was absolutely necessary for me to earn a living or be fully present for my daughter. Often, I felt quite a bit of shame about not writing faster, or not having enough discipline to write for three hours a day, every day, as we were told was the key to success at Iowa. There were many people in my life who had no idea I was writing a book because, at some point, I completely stopped talking about it—I decided that if I wasn't actually, physically writing, I couldn't call myself a writer.
It's always agonizingly difficult for me to sit down, open a notebook to a blank page, and put pen to paper. Something about that moment terrifies me. I can spend days wandering around the house doing all the ...
Bo Caldwell is the author of the national bestseller The Distant Land of My Father. Her short fiction has been published in Ploughshares, Story, Epoch, and other literary journals. A former Stegner Fellow in Creative Writing ... (more)
If you enjoyed:
The Dearly Beloved
Try:
City of Tranquil Light
by Bo Caldwell
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein grew up in White Plains, New York, and graduated summa cum laude from Barnard College, receiving the Montague Prize for Excellence in Philosophy and immediately went on to graduate work at ... (more)
If you enjoyed:
The Dearly Beloved
Try:
36 Arguments for the Existence of God
by Rebecca Goldstein
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