How would you describe WORLD OF PIES in twenty-five words or less?
Roxanne’s summers in a small Texas town teach her everything about the power of family love and the comfort and joy of pies, baseball, and lingerie.
Was there any particular incident that motivated you to write WORLD OF PIES?
The first piece I wrote was the chapter that I call “Your Mail Lady.” The stimulus for this was seeing a very tall, slender woman delivering mail in the neighborhood. I had never seen her before, and I thought about how when I was a girl it would have been so exotic to see see a mail lady delivering our mail. I thought then about how young girls sometimes idolize women they admire to a kind of feverish pitch that is like a crush. Once I had the place - a small town - and the starting time - early 60’s, it was easy for me to plumb my own small town childhood memories for jumping off places for the book.
Do any of the events in WORLD OF PIES parallel things that happened to you while growing up?
The sense of being very treasured and protected in the heart of my family and in the lap of the small town I lived in when I was very young are things that inform the book very much. The actual events in the book are not very similar to my own life, but I do have sisters and one is seven years younger than me (half the age difference between the sisters in WORLD OF PIES), so there are some things there. Roxanne was a tomboy and I never was. I would say that my mom has strong political views and though nothing happened like what happens at the pie fair in the first chapter, I could see my mom taking the action Christina does. We did seem to eat a lot of homemade, delicious food when I was a child. My dad was a small town minister, so there were church suppers and dinners at friends’ houses. It was a delicious time, before we knew about fat grams and such.
Where did you find all the scrumptious pie recipes that you included in the book?
Most of the recipes in the book are ones my mother baked often when I was growing up. She taught me how to bake when I was very young, probably around eight or nine. I loved baking and I still do.
Is it safe to say that you have a sweet tooth yourself?
Yes, sweets are my downfall. I can make brownies in my sleep, nearly. In the book Roxanne talks about all the batter she’s licked off mixer beaters over the years. That’s me. I use sweets as a comfort and a reward. Special occasions are never really special without a pie or a cake!
What do you want readers to take away with them after reading your book?
Two things. I would like my readers to remember the treasures of their own childhood by experiencing Roxanne’s. I want them to remember when the world was about Eskimo pies on a blanket on the lawn, little dogs who capture the hamburger that falls off the grill, the cold thrill of jumping into the swimming pool on a very hot day. I want them also to experience the power of family love; we hear so much about family dysfunction nowadays, and I want people to remember that families can be our comfort and strength too.
Do you have any plans for a second novel?
I am working on a new novel, working title Fanny and Sue. Fanny and Sue are identical twin girls who are growing up in St. Louis, starting from the early 1920’s. I have always been fascinated by the intimacy of the identical twin relationship. I want to explore their twists and turns over many decades. This book is requiring a lot of historical research, but some of it has been a lot of fun for me, because I have interviewed my father and my aunt who lived in St. Louis during these times. I have picked up lots of wonderful details from them; some I’ll transform into fiction, and the rest I will just treasure as family history.
What path has your writing career taken?
I sold my first short story my last semester at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. I met up with the woman who is still my agent today, and she sold the other stories I had written at Iowa. But I felt helpless before the idea of writing a novel. I worked on one many years then abandoned it. A divorce and the need to go back to work full-time when my son was young made my writing life all but disappear, but eventually I joined a small writing group. We have been together for nine years, and I credit this group with revitalizing my career. I saw that the stories I had been writing about a girl named Roxanne could become a book, and slowly but surely my book grew. I had a very long period between the early sales of the stories I wrote at Iowa and the sale of my book WORLD OF PIES. It was important to me, always, whether I was writing or not, or selling or not, to believe that one day I would sell a book. That belief took me great places.