INTERVIEW
Introduce yourself and tell me about what you do.
I am a native Californian but have not lived there since I went away to college at age 17. Currently, I live in the Great Lakes region of the Upper Midwest, which I first discovered when I began graduate school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I love the region for several reasons, including the change of seasons, which mimic the natural cycles of life in ways California generally does not. The downside is the extremely cold winters, which California also does not have. It took me a while to learn to drive in snow, and I’ve never adjusted to all the weight of all the clothes necessary to keep warm.
I earned a PhD from the University of Wisconsin and went on to an academic career as a research professor of social welfare and public policy, focusing on poverty issues, especially for women. Poverty is an unnecessary consequence of the profit-motive capitalist economic system underpinning the US economy and the levels of poverty in the most affluent nation on earth are shameful, and fixable, if there is the political will to do it, but so far, there has not been. During this time, I became widely published in the social sciences.
I left academia after 26 years because I was very discouraged about the direction higher education was moving toward, and that the problem I’d dedicated my career to solving was proving unsolvable in the richest nation on earth. Because I believe life’s most important purpose is to work to make the world better, ultimately, I had a hard time accepting the deeply disturbing reality that America needs a poverty class in order to maintain its capitalist philosophy, and is unwilling to craft the social policies necessary to allow the poor an even minimally decent standard of living.
After a year off, I took a part time, hobby job working for a small, semi-rural newspaper syndicate, writing feature stories, editorials and a column advocating for women’s issues. I had been a journalism major as an undergraduate, and had an internship lined up on the Kansas City Star when I got mono and lost the opportunity. I changed majors to enable me to graduate on time, and the part-time newspaper job allowed me to return to something I was originally interested in – and I loved it! Academia is a very insular life and being a journalist allowed me to discover that there are a lot of crazy-interesting, and just plain crazy people in the world!!
As jobs go, the newspaper job was the most fun I’d ever had and I did it for 8 years, until an academic publisher approached me about writing a book about women and poverty in 21st century America, and the opportunity was too good to pass up. I ended up writing 4 non-fiction books for that publisher. I also returned to academia to become part of a research team at the University of Wisconsin. At some point during this time, I decided I wanted to try my hand at fiction.
Having grown up Catholic, which was never a good fit, in adulthood I confirmed that I am a heritage Jew, which I am extremely proud of and long suspected. I have really enjoyed discovering the nuances of this heritage, including the history, culture, traditions, religious beliefs, and rituals. This said, I have been unable to uncover very much about my Jewish ancestry because all of the family records end in the Holocaust data bases. However, the pseudonym Avery Michael that I chose to differentiate my fiction from non-fiction writing honors my Jewish great grandmother, Bertha Michael who emigrated to the US from Germany, passing through Ellis Island late in the 19th century, before the rise of the Nazis.
I’m married to a retired Milwaukee trial attorney who is also an award-winning short story writer. We live with our brilliant and loving dog in a semi-rural area surrounded by beautiful, inspiring scenery.
Tell me more about your journey as an author, including the writing processes.
My first writing success was winning a poetry contest in 6th grade. It was the last poem I ever wrote! This said, I think my ability as a writer began to evolve in Catholic school, when we had to learn Latin, the official language of the Catholic Church. This taught me the structure of language and word origins. I also grew up speaking colloquial, every-day Spanish, which was good practice in paying attention to phrasing and nuance. I discovered I’m somewhat adept at language generally and am fairly quick to pick up a foreign one if I am immersed in it and have no other choice.
I personally believe it is impossible to survive graduate school without the ability to at least write a clear and proper English sentence, and was fortunate to be able to do this out of the gate. A requirement of earning a PhD degree is writing a publishable doctoral dissertation, which is a very valuable writing experience. A successful career in the upper levels of academia requires the ability to coherently write and publish scientific papers and research reports, w/out the benefit of a line editor.
While the ability to write good science is extremely valuable, it is also very, very different from non-fiction writing, and bears almost no relationship whatever to fiction writing…and the journey from writing social science research reports to where I am now has taken time, and a lot of practice! The newspaper job helped me grasp writing for the general public, but my default is still a scientific writing style, and I have to constantly guard against this.
At one point in this process, I decided taking some writing courses might help me, so while I was writing the women in poverty book, I signed up for one. The result was I was told I couldn’t write and should look for something else to do with my life. Fortunately, I ignored this opinion and that book, plus one other, both won the Council for Wisconsin Writers Non-fiction Book of the Year awards in 2012 and 2016, respectively. Women and Poverty became a standard sociology reader for both upper level undergraduate and graduate sociology programs and libraries nation-wide and in Europe.
I moved into fiction to reach a wider audience and because I believe fiction can be a powerful vehicle for conveying important social messages. My first serious try, which is out of print and is the earlier version of Outrage, won several nice awards and received great reviews. Since my first experience, I’ve generally avoided writing courses and if asked, would say that, especially pertaining to my fiction writing, I’m self-taught.
At the beginning, I often thrash out ideas with my husband and once I have a draft, I corral him to read it. He’s generous with his time in this regard, and a very harsh critic, which is the only feedback I appreciate and find helpful in making the work better. He’s been willing to read a manuscript several times and really stepped up when I was essayist and lead editor for We Rise to Resist: Voices from a New Era in Women’s Political Action. He gave up a whole summer of golf to help get that book, which was pushback against the Trump presidency, finished up as quickly as possible. On occasion I lean on former colleagues to read a draft for me also.
I view writing as thinking out loud and talking to myself, which I really enjoy doing. As a result, I write every day, usually in the afternoons, in a large window office overlooking a serene landscape that encourages contemplative thinking. If I go too long without having a writing project to work on, I find myself pretty far out of sorts. It’s fair to say that while it is hard work, writing is something I am compelled to do and basically can’t help myself.
If I get stuck or shut down, which doesn’t often happen, my solution generally is to work in my Zen garden, knit, read spy novels and legal thrillers, or watch stupid sitcoms on television. The treadmill is also enormously helpful in jarring ideas loose.
I am a classic introvert and need a lot of dead time in my life, which is reserved for whenever my imagination invites me along on its journey down whatever road it has decided to take. Once I have encountered my characters and they have revealed themselves to me in greater depth, I become the instrument through which they speak their truths. At this point I am no longer in control of the story; it belongs to the characters and my job is to get out of their way and let them tell it however they want it told. Often, it’s a wild ride!
Tell me about your Book
The original idea for OUTRAGE arose from my experiences as a poverty researcher, when I met many nuns fighting in the trenches of poverty and to a person found them to be tough, no-nonsense individuals who took the Church on their terms and marched to their own drummer. They became the inspiration for Sister Molly Cleary.
Having grown up the eldest of seven motherless children in a southside Chicago Irish-Catholic family, Molly Cleary had only two life choices: marriage and inevitably bearing more children than she wants or can possibly care for or entering the convent. She decides on religious life, but never forgets her roots, or that her mother died in childbirth – the consequence of too many pregnancies and life as a hostage in a religious culture that views women as servant wives and baby machines.
As the Church’s Vatican II reforms and the wider women’s liberation movement take hold, Molly realizes that without control over their reproductive lives, women have no control over their lives at all and that by forbidding divorce, declaring birth control a mortal sin, and labeling abortion as murder the patriarchal Catholic Church she has dedicated her life to serving severely endangers women’s lives. Outraged and recognizing she cannot remain silent in the face of what she views as institutionalized abuse and imprisonment of women designed to bend them to the will of men, Molly decides that no matter the personal cost, in either emotional or practical terms, she is compelled to take up the fight for women’s reproductive rights within the wealthiest, most powerful institution in the world, ruled by a cabal of middle-aged men with no accountability to the women whose lives they demand to control.
Some label her a heretic and others call her a saint, but everyone agrees Sister Molly Cleary is fearless in her determination to transform the patriarchal Catholic Church into a more just and equitable religious institution that recognizes women’s right to make their own reproductive decisions.
Inspired by a true story, OUTRAGE chronicles one passionately committed nun’s fight for women’s reproductive autonomy within the wealthiest, most powerful patriarchy in the world – the Catholic Church.
Any message for our readers
Jodi Picoult is an author I admire who does this very well.
I hope Sister Molly Cleary’s story will inspire readers to take up take up the cause for women’s rights and fight for them, because in this era of DEI initiatives going down, women are going to suffer significant social and personal opportunity losses. In addition to reproductive rights, which are disappearing state by state, women are facing issues with childcare subsidies, equal wages, EOAA, affordable housing and healthcare access, living wages…the list is endless. Women have to step up and fight these battles for themselves, b/c no one is going to do it for them. Molly is a role model for one way to go about doing this.
I hope women readers will grasp the important message that they have to claim their power, because power is never handed over voluntarily. Gaining power always involves a fight.
I also hope readers will understand that while organized religion does a lot of good in the world, it is also, by its very nature, a patriarchal institution and patriarchies never serve women’s best interests. Women have to commit to confronting this problem and then changing it.
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