Interview
What is the hardest part of writing your books?
Where I start with the BakerMischief series is in observing some sort of dysfunction or disconnection between what we Americans believe ought to be happening and then what’s actually going on. In Wednesday, After the American president has adopted an “America First” agenda that is, at one level, entirely understandable. He makes some policy choices, and then something happens that takes matters out of his hands. And that happens in the first three days of his presidency, on the Wednesday after the Monday inauguration in January 2025.
That’s the easy part.
The hard parts are putting that “problem” into a context that my characters can do something about and then watching them find whatever solution can make a difference.
My wife would say that the hardest part of my writing is keeping ahead of what’s actually happening in the world. When I wrote Mondays, Mondays, focusing on political influence at the Supreme Court, I’d write a couple of chapters and then three weeks later it would turn out that what I created as fiction had in fact already happened, and we hadn’t known about it.
What are your most played songs?
I’m a Boomer. I loved the Beatles, and I recognized awhile ago that their songs were mostly misogynistic or trivial. I removed their Sirius XM channel from my car. I loved Crosby, Stills, and Nash. I discovered Warren Zevon some years ago, and songs like “Reconsider Me,” “Lawyers, Guns, and Money,” and “Searching for a Heart” are on the playlist. “Morning Morgantown” and “For Free” by Joni Mitchell. “Jazzman” by Carole King. “Before this World” and “Snowtime” by James Taylor. “Sunny Came Home” by Shawn Colvin. “Anti-hero” by Taylor Swift. “Building a Mystery” by Sarah McLachlan. Fernando Ortega, “Anita’s Heart,” “The Breaking of the Dawn,” and “Angel Fire.” Chet Atkins, “Alisha” and “The Homecoming Anthem.” And….Jimi Hendrix, “All Along the Watchtower.”
Every June, when Margie and I make strawberry jam, we play Georg Philipp Telemann until we’re done: structured, complex, mysterious, formal—great for doing the “kitchen dance” with two people moving hot jam, crushed strawberries, and sterilized jars around, while making sure no one gets burned from a misstep or pouring hot jam into jars and missing your target.
Do you have critique partners or beta readers?
I’ve asked my brothers for a quick read, from time to time. Each of them represents a different political perspective. My best reader is my wife, Marjorie Mathison Hance. We write very different sorts of books—she’s murder mysteries, on the cozy side. She’s thoughtful, sympathetic, and a straight arrow on critique. If she raises an issue, I pay attention.
What book are you reading now?
Careless People is the most recent. But that’s for fun, so far. The climate of Silicon Valley might find its way into a novel. I read very frivolous things, science fiction and military fiction and thrillers, as much for a sense of the structure, characterization, and dialogue as for the story. When you start life as an English professor, you’ve already read a lot, and taught a lot of it. And yet I don’t read a lot of modern fiction. A favorite recently was Anxious People, by Frederik Backman.
How did you start your writing career?
I started of all things, as a facebook poster. My first wife, Candy, developed Primary Progressive Aphasia (Bruce Willis’ disease), which became a long downhill run into dementia until her death in 2018. I would write about how we were doing, because many of my former students knew her from her own teaching. That work, with much more, became The Long Run, a book about marriage and caregiving.
After Candy’s death, I met Margie as she was finishing her first book, Murder at Pelican Lake. I watched her work through the tasks of editing and publication. And then as we came up to the midterm elections in 2022, I figured I had had enough of political crazies, and decided to write something about it.
Tell us about your next release.
I’ve just finished Wednesday, After, which goes from December 2024 through early November 2025, so I’m actually a little ahead of myself. The next in line—I’m flailing about with it right now—is Thursday, Far to Go. One of my brothers wants me to write a book about local bureaucracy, and call it Friday Afternoons Off, and it’s possible. It would take Ed and Melody Baker off the national stage, and give me a new direction.
But I started off three years ago on a book called Upstream which addresses intractable contemporary social landmines. Those are the kinds of problems that we find extraordinarily hard to resolve. We tend to see social problems way “downstream,” after they’ve gotten complicated, because we haven’t faced into their root causes. The causes are often deeply rooted in the way we think and how we’re influenced by others. So I’d like to work on that, but I think I will need to buy body armor first. The people who like simple solutions are out there, and don’t like to face how complicated people and culture really are. And no one likes to be responsible for creating our current social confusion, which probably means we are all responsible.
Posts
