Radical Gratitude - An interview with Mary Akers!

I'm so excited to bring an interview with friend and author Mary Akers to "Swimming in the Trees!" (To learn the reason for the name of this blog, wait until next spring - it's in my book.)

Mary is a friend from the MFA program at Queens University of Charlotte. Her first book, "Radical Gratitude: and other life lessons learned in Siberia" was released earlier this year by Allen & Unwin. Mary co-authored the book with Andrew Bienkowski (the Andy in conversation below) whose story she helped shape.

Here's Mary's blog with a link on the site for easy purchase of the book. Siberia, life lessons, practical advice, history, photographs, family drama... you want to read this!

Here's Mary - and me - in a conversation about the creative process, the reward to the reader and the writer, cover art, day jobs, and making the move from one genre to another.

JAH: How did you get involved with the project? MA: A woman in my Buffalo [New York] writing group named Joy Herrick has attended the same gym as Andy for years. They see each other every day and eventually life stories unfold. Andy mentioned to Joy that he wanted to write a book, that he had started one years before and put it away. Joy told him that she knew a writer who might be able to help him. I was that writer. She described Andy’s book idea to me and asked if I’d like to meet him to consider editing and organizing what he had written so far. The idea intrigued me, so I agreed to meet him and we hit it off right away.

JAH: As a co-author of Radical Gratitude, what was your working method with Andrew Bienkowski? Did you work together each day, did he send you tapes, did you send pages to one another? MA: We met about once a month, talked on the phone a lot, and passed work back and forth through the mail. Andy doesn’t do computers, so what he sent me was mostly hand-written, except for several chapters that a woman named Bard Dadey (also from the gym) had helped Andy to type up. Initially we agreed that I would charge him by the hour to edit and refine what he already had. But: a) it turns out I’m not very good at charging by the hour for writing, as a lot of writing occurs when I’m not at the keyboard and b) I was starting to feel a lot of excitement for the project. So I told him I would work on the book for free, and if it turned out we couldn’t sell it, he wouldn’t owe me anything, but if we did sell it, would he give me a percentage? He agreed without hesitation.

So I started working on a forward for the book that would be written in Andy’s voice, and that would tell readers about his grandfather’s sacrifice. (The family stories were not a part of what Andy had so far assembled.) The more I worked on the forward, the more I thought about his grandfather and how important his story was to the messages in the book. I began to ask Andy for more details about how they got to Siberia, how they managed to survive and escape, and the more stories he told me, the more convinced I became that the stories would be the heartbeat of the rest of the book. They would contain the message in story form, and they would establish his credibility to give advice on topics such as perseverance, hope and faith. All I had to do was convince Andy to let me put the stories in there, which took some doing, because he’s modest and he was adamant that the book not be all about him. What I had to show him was that the stories and his experience were linked and the one was essential to the other. As with a parable or fable, we absorb the lesson more easily when there is a story attached to it.


JAH: I notice that within chapters the text alternates between third person, telling Andy’s family’s story, and first person, Andy the adult commenting on the lesson learned. What was the narrative reason for making this distinction? MA: Well, it didn’t start out as a conscious decision, but I knew we needed the stories, and I had to figure out the best way to work them into the text. As a fiction writer, I had a good handle on writing a compelling scene, so I tried putting them in the form of scenes, told omnisciently, and we both liked the result. I also thought that if we really worked at it, we could come up with enough family stories that would tie into the chapters he had already blocked out. It turns out we couldn’t match them up perfectly, but we tweaked some of the chapter titles (and added others) so that they more closely matched the stories that he remembered his grandmother telling for all those years, and the few memories that he recalled independent of his grandmother’s tales. It’s not a perfect fit across the board, but I think we did a pretty good job of matching them up. And only near the end when the publisher wanted to tweak the title again did I get the idea to call each chapter a lesson, rather than a chapter, and then we tweaked them even more so that each one took on the feel of a life lesson. Since Radical Gratitude was the first lesson of the book, and the seminal lesson to boot, it made sense to title it Radical Gratitude and other life lessons learned in Siberia. Voila!

JAH: What were the most satisfying and/or challenging aspects of writing this particular book? MA: I think it would have to be the aforementioned organizing of stories with corresponding lessons, and also writing the proposal. Definitely the proposal! I think it was almost as hard to write as the book. And it is sooo not the way my brain works. I had to list existing popular books that ours was similar to, and why, but also state why ours was better, or would sell better. I had to polish three chapters and give a detailed outline of all the rest of the chapters. I had to write a hook and a teaser that would sell it. Brr. I really hate proposals, but a nonfiction book doesn’t sell without one, so I buckled down and did it, cursing like a sailor the whole time.

JAH: In your author’s notes, you mention the “steely eyed gaze: of Andrew’s grandfather compelling you to “get it right'." That photo caught me, too, he seems to be imploring us from across time. You’re predominantly a fiction writer—was there a creative or emotional divide for you to cross, writing about real people whose photos you could examine? MA: Yes! It was terribly stressful for me to re-imagine the lives of real people who had lived and loved and died and to do it for the descendant of them to read about. I was nervous every time I had to show Andy his family interacting in a scene. But he was very gracious and would always tell me when I got it wrong and gently steer me back to rights. But I sweated a lot. How much do I assume? How much can I create without taking too many liberties? And the minor characters haunted me, too. The Commissar, the Russian woman in the barn, the soldier, Fendrick. They had become one-dimensional caricatures in his grandmother’s stories, but I was always conscious that they were real people, and I had to give them names and make them real again knowing very, very little about them. I have no way of knowing if I did them justice in their lives or used them like characters simply to advance the story; they are long dead and can’t complain. But I do worry. I tried always to be as fair and as accurate as I could be.

JAH: Andy is the only surviving member of his immediate family; his grandfather deliberately starved to death in Siberia so that the women and children in his family would have more to eat; Andy’s parents and brother died, over time, after emigrating to the US, and his grandmother chose to return to Poland in her old age. What resources besides Andy’s memories and family photos did you work with in writing the book? MA: Not too many. I wanted it to be his particular story as told by him. That said, I did study up a bit about World War II and the events that led up to it. I learned a lot about the awful plight of the Polish people under Stalin—something we don’t hear about much in this country. As Andy has said, Hitler killed people right out, but Stalin banished them to Siberia and let them slowly starve or freeze to death. I did look at pictures of Polish refugees who came out of Siberia, and they were horrifying, especially the pictures of children. They were skin-covered skeletons, with heads that looked too big for their bodies, arms and legs that were impossibly long, and bloated bellies that protruded beneath prominent ribs. It gave me good insight not only into what Andy endured as a child, but also what his mother and grandmother must have had to witness on a daily basis: the helpless wasting away of their children. What a terrible thing for a mother to endure—the forced inability to nurture her children.

JAH: What do you say to readers who might assume that a story about a family’s exile in Stalinist Siberia is a tough go, something they’d pass over for a lighter book? MA: I’d say they should probably go and read a lighter book if that’s what they want. Life is short, after all. But really, the heart of this book isn’t heavy. It’s a timeless story about love and family and faith and hope and compassion and overcoming suffering and giving back to others. Most of us are drawn to such stories and we relate to them on a very elemental level. After reading them we come away feeling richer or kinder or more tolerant of others. Why would we want to shy away from that?

JAH: What is the strongest message in Radical Gratitude to you, personally? MA: Hope, by far. It was one that didn’t exist in the first draft, but I knew it had to be in there. Hope is so important and we are short on hope in this country. It’s an exclusively human trait (and gift) that we all have the ability to nurture and yet we seldom do. We’d rather be pessimistic and jaded and say ‘I told you so’ when things go wrong. But hope is one of the things that literally saved Andy’s family’s life. And I think it could save our country, too, if we’ll let it.

JAH: I love the way the snowflakes glitter on the cover; as an author, what role did you have in cover design? MA: Very little. That’s not to say I couldn’t have been involved, they ran the design by me (my publisher, Maggie Hamilton, and editor Clare Emery, were amazing—they kept me so involved and always wanted my input). But when Allen and Unwin sent me the cover and asked me what I thought of it I was so utterly blown away that I had no suggestions at all. I think they created a beautiful, evocative cover that manages to convey both a sense of hopefulness and bleakness. I couldn’t imagine a better cover for the book. The snowflakes were added at the last minute—a sort of ‘we really believe in this book, so we’re going the extra mile for it’ surprise. I am so grateful every time I hold it in my hands.

JAH: Radical Gratitude is your first book; what other writing is in the works? MA: Thanks for asking, Jessica. I’m finishing up a collection of short stories that all revolve around the ocean (in my day job I work for a marine ecology school in the Caribbean) and doing final edits on a novel also set in the Caribbean. It’s tentatively titled “In a Common Sea” from an Anne Morrow Lindbergh quote: “I believe we are all islands—in a common sea.” After those are ready to shop around to potential agents (I’m not currently represented for my fiction) I’ll be starting on an historical novel about Elbert Hubbard and the Roycrofters. Hubbard was the American version of William Morris in the Arts and Crafts movement of the late 1800s and he created a campus in East Aurora, New York to celebrate and recreate handcrafted books and furniture and metalwork. I started my professional life as a potter and also worked as a bookbinder in Colonial Williamsburg, so I’m really looking forward to entering the world of these characters. I also love the 1880s, a post-industrial-revolution-time of foment, longing, and unrest not so different from what I believe our own post-technological-revolution will be like.