Category Archives: Interviews

From AuthorLink: “Evensong Deals With the Many Challenges of Aging”

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To read a Stewart O’Nan novel is to be immersed in a particular subculture with its own rules and limitations, and to watch the people in that group as they connect with each other and seek to make their way in a challenging world.

His latest novel, Evensong, focuses on the Humpty Dumpty Club, a group of older women in Pittsburgh who care for each other and help members of the community. Told in alternating viewpoints, the trials of Joan, Kitzi, Emily and Arlene as they age are handled with dignity and grace.  The women’s participation in the Anglican church’s evensong serves as an anchor and a respite to their challenges.

AUTHORLINK: Tell me about your apprenticeship as a creative writer. Did you have a mentor who offered advice that you can share with us?

O’NAN: I started writing on my own, in my basement after work, using John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction as my guide.  His explanations of point of view, psychic distance and sentence variation were revelations.  I was also reading as much as I could, taking out the O. Henry and Best American Short Stories collections, trying to figure out how stories worked.

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The Talks: “It’s not just dots on a page.”

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Here’s something neat for Throwback Thursday, an interview Stewart did for The Talks back around when the German edition of The Odds was published. You can listen to snippets of the conversation, too. The lineup of interviews is stellar — in film, the likes of Alicia Vikander, Anthony Hopkins, and Antonio Banderas, and those are just the A’s! LeBron James, Mick Jagger, there’s no shortage of star power on this site.

The Day: Stewart O’Nan’s new novel ‘Ocean State’ explores small-town Rhody

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Regarding the murder that lies at the heart of “Ocean State,” the new Stewart O’Nan novel, the “whodunit” aspect lasts exactly 9 words into the book.

The first sentence of a story that takes place predominantly in Ashaway, Rhode Island, in 2009, reads: “When I was in eighth grade, my sister helped kill another girl.”

It’s a hell of an authorial gamble, and that O’Nan did so suggests he relished the challenge to shoulder significant weight in terms of developing characters and sustaining tension throughout the book after that opening detonation.

To that end, “Ocean State” isn’t a typical thriller — if indeed it IS one. Two high school girls are infatuated with the same boy, a wealthy senior named Myles who, both women know (on some level), will graduate and head off to an elite college without a glance back. He casually and deceptively ping pongs between his beautiful longtime girlfriend Angel and relative newcomer Birdy, who has her own boyfriend but is willing to leave him for even a remote shot at Myles.

O’Nan, a New York Times bestselling writer whose other novels include “Last Night at the Lobster,” “City of Secrets,” “Henry, Himself,” “The Good Wife” and “The Night Country,” will read from and discuss “Ocean State” Thursday in Westerly’s Savoy Bookshop & Cafe.

https://www.theday.com/article/20220405/ENT02/220409761