Novelist Donna Levin is chatting with me about her new women’s fiction, The Talking Stick.
Bio:
Donna Levin is an almost-San Francisco native, since she was born in Oakland. She’s the author of four previous novels (Extraordinary Means, California Street, There’s More Than One Way Home, and He Could Be Another Bill Gates), as well as two books on the craft of writing, Get That Novel Started and Get That Novel Written. Her papers are part of the Howard Gotlieb Research Center at Boston University, and the California State Library’s collection of California novels. On April 23, 2024, Skyhorse Publishing released her latest novel, The Talking Stick.
Welcome, Donna. Please tell us about your current release.
The Talking Stick is about four women who come together through a series of events that seem random: First, our heroine, Hunter, meets an eccentric woman at a flea market who gives her an ancient talking stick; later, an unexpected rainstorm brings her in contact with the other three. The women form a group that’s supposed to focus on improving their health, and Hunter uses the talking stick to keep order. But strange things happen to whichever woman is holding this particular talking stick: She has memories that force her to admit how she herself created her current problems.
What inspired you to write this book?
A long time ago, a novelist friend and I talked about how we’d each like to write a book about some kind of magical object, say, a device that would make someone fall in love with you (his idea), or an object that would enable the holder to read minds (my idea). My friend went back to writing his detective novels, and I went back to writing what became There’s More Than One Way Home. Meanwhile, though, I had joined a new writing group—a group of women who together comprised the best writing group I’ve ever been in (and I’ve been in more than a few), because of how supportive, but also honest, they were. My daughter said once, “You should write a novel about a group like that,” and eventually, I combined the possibly-magic talking stick with the story of the four women of The Talking Stick. The characters in my novel aren’t based on real people, but it was real people who inspired me to write about the healing power of women’s friendships.
Excerpt from The Talking Stick:
A hangover must be God’s way of warning sinners that Hell is for real.
That was Hunter’s second thought upon awakening Monday morning. Her first thought, after a mental bucket of ice water landed on her head, was oh my God he left me.
A real bucket of ice water might have been welcome. She was on the couch, where she had fallen asleep. (Passed out was more accurate, but she wasn’t ready to confront that.) When she’d returned home the night before she’d gone through both bottles of the Dom Perignon that she and Peter had been saving. She barely remembered consuming them, but she did remember thinking, when she popped the first cork, Now I don’t have to share.
After all, supposedly champagne was now off-limits to Peter.
The ceiling had grown higher overnight; the whole house yawned around her. She was living alone already: Peter had gone home with Angelica after they came down off the mountain.
Hunter twisted to her left side, sending an invisible stream of pebbles rolling down the inside of her forehead. They should put warning labels on wine bottles. She had half of the symptoms that drug companies added to commercials for their newest treatments: nausea, dry mouth, headache, blurred vision. As for decreased sexual desire, that was a preexisting condition.
How the hell had this happened? Two nights earlier they’d been planning their next party. When she was going through the guest list, was he already thinking about his escape?
And what was this about Peter being an alcoholic? Ridiculous! Now that she was sober, Angelica saw alcoholism everywhere.
True, at their parties he drank. A lot. But so did some others. So did she.
True, of late he’d been drinking at home when there were no parties. She’d shoo him to bed and spend an hour or two scrolling down her Facebook feed. Like! Love! Care!
She’d thought then, all he needs is one good deal to get back on top . . .
Hunter massaged her temples. It made the headache worse.
And when the doorbell rang, it sounded like Quasimodo was back at Notre Dame. Who…? Hunter’s Mill Valley neighborhood was not a place where Jehovah’s Witnesses canvassed: it was too long a walk between houses to make salvation efficient.
Peter. It was Peter, coming back! He’d be on the other side of that door, begging forgiveness, maybe shouting “trick or treat”! No, wait, April Fools!
She ran to answer it, though each thump of her foot against the floor caused a corresponding thump in her head.
“Well, hello!” It was a woman with short black hair, cut in an asymmetrical bob. She wore a black pantsuit, and carried a bulky tan leather briefcase with more buckles than a straitjacket. “Is this a good time?” The woman didn’t wait for an answer. “These are the Sharps. Chad and Bentley.” The Sharps, who stood beside pantsuited woman, were stunningly blonde and healthy. “And they aren’t looky-loos. They’re seriously in the market.”
Finally Hunter made enough sense of what the pantsuited woman was saying to ask, “In the market for what?”
“Oh, haha, that’s a good one,” the pantsuited woman said. She jabbed Hunter with her business card. The letters were wobbly, but Hunter read:
Taylor Green-Coopersmith
Shangri-la Realty
“My house isn’t for sale,” Hunter said.
“Oh, but it is!” Taylor Green-Coopersmith tapped on an iPad. “See?” She shoved it close to Hunter’s face. The sun reflecting off the screen made the image faint, but Hunter did recognize it as her house.
“It’s a mistake.”
“No, it’s not!” Taylor said brightly. She took the iPad away to do some more tapping, then thrust it even closer than before. “See? Your husband listed it.”
“My—my husband?” He left. “He doesn’t live here anymore.”
What exciting project are you working on next?
I’ve started a book about a woman with DID. That’s Dissociative Identity Disorder, which used to be called Multiple Personality Disorder. Readers love murder mysteries, so this starts with a murder. Then a few more murders. But M. Night Shyamalan’s movie Split is exploitive and inaccurate; people with DID aren’t dangerous. For me, it’s a way of looking at how different parts of us compete. For example, sometimes you’re the woman who wants romance, and sometimes you’re the woman who wants stability. If you have DID, those parts become alters, who each has their own distinct personalities. It’s a little bit like the way a writer creates fictional characters and they begin to seem so real that they tell the author what they want to do. There’s still only one “real” author.
When did you first consider yourself a writer?
In one sense, I always considered myself a writer. I started keeping a diary when I was thirteen, and in high school and college I wrote a couple of short novels. (I cringe to think of them now.) I’ve written essays, plays and a few short stories, but I always wanted to write novels, since that’s the form I most enjoy reading.
In another sense, I first considered myself a writer when I had the courage to tell people that I was a writer, even though I was then unpublished.
Do you write full-time? If so, what’s your workday like? If not, what do you do other than write and how do you find time to write?
It’s changed over the years. Before I had kids, I had a solid schedule: get up, swim, then write a few hours, and that was seven days a week, with rare exception. But after that, I could do whatever I wanted!
That all changed after I had my first baby. I kept writing, but it became much more difficult to find the time, and to stay focused when I found it. Now my four kids are grown, and I have the luxury of writing fulltime. I’ve never been good for more than a few hours of fiction-writing a day, but that feels like enough.
And the extra time, paradoxically, can become a trap. Before Google, I had to make three phone calls or trek to the library to answer the kind of small questions that arise on almost every page of a novel, like, what are the most common weeds in Northern California, or who played Sam Spade in the original film adaptation of The Maltese Falcon? I mean, what do I look like, an encyclopedia? But click, click – there it is. The downside, of course, is that the same “click, click” can plunge me into Internet Quicksand.
So I need a deadline. I still have the wonderful writing group. I do my most intensive writing in the last few days before our biweekly meetings.
What would you say is your interesting writing quirk?
I like to download exotic fonts and switch among them. With respect, I find Calibri so boring to look at! Narkisim is a current favorite, but I’ll get tired of that and want something new.
As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
I wanted to be an actress. In fact, I majored in theater arts at UC Berkeley, and I was in my share of plays. But I’m not sorry to have left that behind. It’s hard life, where you’re constantly judged on your looks. Also, I suspect I wasn’t really that talented.
However, being Berkeley, it was a very academic program, and we read a lot of plays. I wrote several plays back then, and had some produced on the radio. To this day my writing is very “play-like” (we could say “dramatic”), that is, I write mostly in scenes, and my dialogue is a strong point. I don’t write very much backstory or summary.
Anything additional you want to share with the readers?
I had a painful experience at the first writer’s conference I attended. The conference director was a professor who delighted in humiliating the participants, including people who’d shown up with manuscripts they’d poured their hearts into. He said of one woman’s writing, “They cut down trees to make paper,” as a way of saying that her work was worthless.
Even though I wasn’t the direct victim of such unnecessary cruelty, it shut me down completely. It was only several years later that I was blessed to find a mentor, Leonard Bishop, who ran a novel-writing workshop in Berkeley. His feedback was blunt, but he also sent all of us the message, “yes, you can do it, just keep going.” It was after that that I formed the ambition to become a teacher of fiction-writing myself, so as to pass on the gift, the message that someone believes in you. I’ve been facilitating writing workshops for many years now. Post-pandemic, it’s all online, but that’s okay, because I have students from all over the world.
Links:
Website | Amazon | Facebook | Goodreads | Twitter | Instagram
Great interview!!
Thank you, Lucie!