December 2023
An interview with Alex Kenna, the scandals of professional wrestling, and my gratitude
What’s new
Welcome to the last newsletter issue of the year! Thank you for being here, and looking forward to bringing you more interviews with inspiring writers, and enough open tabs to permanently overwhelm your browser.
Alex Kenna, who I met at a Noir at the Bar event earlier this year when I listened to her read from her fantastic debut novel, What Meets the Eye, featured my query for my debut novel, The Lady Upstairs, on her blog! Alex’s blog is a tremendous resource for anyone aspiring to query agents, or anyone already in the query trenches (I see you, and I feel for you).
Nick Havey at the Washington Independent Review of Books had some very nice things to say about The Hurricane Blonde!
As did June Lorraine Roberts over at Murder in Common!
Thank you again, and I’ll see you in the new year! Happy holidays!
Alex Kenna is a prosecutor, writer, and amateur painter. Before law school, Alex studied painting and art history at Penn. She also worked as a freelance art critic and culture writer. Originally from Washington DC, Alex lives in Los Angeles with her husband, son, and giant schnauzer, Zelda. When she’s not writing, Alex can be found nerding out in art museums, exploring flea markets, and playing string instruments badly. Alex’s debut novel, What Meets the Eye, was nominated for a Shamus Award for best first PI novel.
What tabs do you currently have open on your computer? Feel free to share as many or as few as you like.
Oh man, this is where I should lie and say I’m Christmas shopping and browsing the news like a normal person. Honestly, ukulele chords for old-time country songs, Redfin for a city I’m not moving to, a website about illegal horse doping, NPR, and a reality TV show about plastic surgery gone wrong. Only some of these things I can blame on writing.
Where do you go to refill your creative well?
Art museums. I grew up in an artsy family in Washington DC. I was very lucky because I had the Smithsonian at my fingertips, and it was free. I’d go to the art museum every week if I could, but I’m still trying to convince my toddler that he wants to look at paintings instead of cars.
What was the last piece of art—book, show, movie, whatever—that made you want to create something?
At the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, they have this tiny German expressionist painting by Emil Nolde of a boat at night on a rocky sea. It’s very, very simple but still beautiful and scary and angsty. A good reminder about how much a person can do artistically with very little.
The best craft advice you’ve ever received? and/or a craft technique you’re dying to try out in a future project?
The best thing I got out of art school was learning how to look at a “finished” creative work and analyze what improvements it still needed. I also learned how to work up a canvas as a whole, instead of obsessing about tiny little parts of the picture while other portions stayed white canvas.
As a writer, I spent years overworking the same couple chapters on novels that never got finished. Then one day, I started forcing myself to think about writing like I think about painting and just storm through the darn thing. Suddenly, things made sense and started falling into place. [Ed. note: Jotting down this excellent advice for drafting in 2024!]
Tell me about the last internet rabbit hole you went down.
Around Thanksgiving, I saw a photograph of an alive turkey and realized that they’re hideous and terrifying in the best way. I started google image searching turkeys and thinking about making giant, scary, close-up paintings of the heads of birds of prey. Then I started researching ornithological taxidermy collections in Southern California…before remembering that I work full time and write and have a kid, so going on a hunt for dead birds to paint is not on the agenda.
[Ed. note: In searching for terrifying turkey images to link, I found this insane article—caution, it does include animal mistreatment.]
What factors have to come together for you to feel your most creative?
A babysitter or a sleeping child. Bonus points if I get a glass of champagne. But there are also random moments when I come across a new place and it just feels like the perfect setting for a story. I love being able to walk around by myself in a potential book setting, just scribbling notes like a loon.
What’s a book or movie or piece of art or other you wish you’d created?
The show Severance. It’s phenomenal. Or maybe the movie The Menu with Ralph Fiennes. It would be a work that created a whole macabre world out of nothing and still maintained its dark humor.
What backlist book (which I’m defining as published at least two years ago) would you like to recommend?
Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels – all four. They’re beautiful, and tragic, and angry, and alive.
And not even a little bit sentimental.
What would you like to shamelessly plug?
Trader Joe’s oven-baked cheese bites. You will eat the entire bag.
What do you think people would be most surprised to discover you’re obsessed with?
Estate sales. My dad sold first editions of books when I was kid. I used to go with him to estate sales on the weekend and buy something random, like a grandma broach or a ratty, fifty-year-old mink hat. Flash forward a couple decades, and I furnished my whole house from estate sales. My husband and I still fantasize about discovering some treasure and paying our mortgage with it, but it hasn’t happened yet.
What are you craving to see (or see more of) in books, movies, tv, or other art?
Funny women – particularly in an unglamorous, ungirly way. And evil female villains.
When do you know when an idea has enough juice to become a novel, rather than a shorter piece?
I’m not an outliner, but I have to be able to envision where the story is going to end up. I also need a lot of content and plot for my books. I am really in awe of writers who can construct a whole addictive mystery around two tormented people circling each other as the tension builds. I love those books, but I don’t know if I could write one.
Which book would you most like to live inside?
Lol, I read some pretty dark stuff. Now I’m trying to remember the last time I read a happy one.
I’m going to have to stick with reality.
Backlist beauties
Recommending: The Confidence Game: Why We Fall for It…Every Time by Maria Konnikova
Year published: 2017
I read this book as research for an upcoming project, but I was truly blown away by the breakdown of con artistry (and all the various ways it impacts our lives—for example, did you know that the biggest scams that occur every year are weight loss scams??). This book offers a full breakdown of all the formal parts of a con; anecdotes about cons throughout history, only some of which I’d already heard of; and a lesson in empathy.
After reading this book, I came away believing, truly, any one of us are susceptible to cons, given the right confluence of life circumstances—but that also, the fact that we aren’t all being conned at any given moment is a testament to the fact that most human beings aren’t heartless schemers.
Stay vigilant, friends.
My open tabs:
Dying to dive into this 2016 Vanity Fair article about whether the infamous Maltese Falcon prop was itself a real-life McGuffin.
Maybe she’s an ancient mummified Persian princess, maybe she’s actually a murder victim from the 1990s!
I was lucky enough to get an early read of Duane Swierczynski’s upcoming book, California Bear, which comes out in January. I highly recommend grabbing it now. Here’s my best attempt to convince you: Elmore Leonard + more heart + I’ll Be Gone in the Dark + Hollywood is terrible but fascinating. Matilda is my new favorite gumshoe, and I’m keeping all my fingers crossed to read more books with her! (Don’t believe moi? James Patterson and thee Michael Connelly also had smashing reviews of it.)
Someone once told me to follow your strange little interests as a writer because you never know where that might take you, and might provide the future creative fodder for a project you don’t even know you’re thinking about yet. Currently, it’s taking me on a deep dive into professional wrestling (have I ever watched actual professional wrestling? No. Do I understand why I’m now obsessed with it? Also mostly no, but my artist brain is always tickled by professions/callings where someone creates an artificial self…only to become that self) via the Vice tv series Dark Side of the Ring.1 Truly, soap opera both inside and outside the ring.
Totally absorbed in this (probably now never to be fully solved) mystery of why two hikers wound up dead in South America—and how the recent discovery of one of the hiker’s cameras only deepens the mystery.
And if you want something light, please enjoy this video of Harrison Ford and Ryan Gosling unable to keep a straight face while being interviewed by Alison Hammond, who I found to be an absolute delight on this season of GBBO.
I think there’s a lot of legitimate critiques to be made here both about wrestling and the series (for just one example, the Von Erich family tragedy episode doesn’t go particularly deep into what factors might have led three of six sons to commit suicide, and while the upcoming film The Iron Claw might take an artistic approach, I can’t see that being quite the deep dive I was hoping for; this is all before we even get into the Chris Benoit of it all)—but somehow I still find myself transfixed.