This installment features one of my closest personal friends ever, Amber Jerome~Norrgard.

A Brief Introduction

Amber and I met through Twitter when she read one of my books, and she was so moved by it that she felt the need to tell me. I, in return, was moved by the depth, honesty, and fearlessness of her own work. 

Amber's writing has covered everything from the sensual to the painful. What holds me to her words is the deep sense of humanity. Her characters are real, flesh-and-blood people who exist in a tangible world of their own. Her poetry is often dangerously honest, and her passion for writing can't be summed up in mere words. Amber not writing is like Isaac Stern not playing his violin. It is her love, her engine, her air. If you're not familiar with her work, please become so.

She is a bestselling author and poet and also is the co-host, with Dionne Lister, of the weekly podcast, Tweep Nation. I've been a guest thrice, and they're always a hoot. Listen here.

7 Questions for . . . Amber Jerome~Norrgard

You've been on a tear recently -- two new books and two re-releases in the past month or two ---- What's been driving you to be so prolific?

I just have to write. I’ve had a life-long, passionate love affair with the written word.  A majority of my closest friends are writers as well, and they fuel the addiction. There is this overwhelming need to put what is in my head down on paper, and to be honest, I’m surprised by all the work I’ve been cranking out lately.  But I’m not fighting it, I’m just letting it happen, and I’m enjoying every moment of it. 

You're dabbling in print-on-demand through Create Space. What's been your impression of the process?

I went into this print-on-demand experience with the wrong impression: that it would take a few minutes and I’d be good to go since the books in question have already been published electronically.  And while I like it, it is a vastly different experience from e-publishing. When my proof copy of The Color of Dawn arrived, I actually sat down and cried for a few moments in excitement at actually holding physical proof of my writing in my hands. 

How it differs from the first go-round is that I’ve had the benefit of other’s experience, as well as the benefit of an editor (or two) showing me how to make my work better than it was when I finished the first or second drafts.  My advice to anyone new trying POD out?  Grab your favorite drink, take your shoes off, and take your time.  Don’t rush the process.

TweepNation is going strong, and has in fact just hit a milestone, it's 6-month anniversary -- How has doing the show helped your writing, and how do you see it helping other writers?

Ah, TweepNation, my baby! I have met some incredibly talented people on the show, and if I had to pick one thing that has been a surprise bonus, it would be the friendships that I’ve formed with our guests.  As for helping my writing? There have been opportunities to guest blog with the writers we’ve had on the show, passing work back and forth to get opinions, suggestions, thoughts, and just learning from someone new, from what they’ve learned from their own experiences. 

And I like to believe that even though our show is based loosely on writing and twitter, we still offer an hour a week where you can get a good look at other writers and what they’re like, what their story is, how they came into writing.  One thing I am completely in love with about the indie writing community is the fact that it is a community. Everyone helps one another out. Dionne [Lister] and I try to give back in a small way by asking Indie Authors to come on our show so we can give them more exposure.

Your most recent release, In the Gloaming, is an undeniably personal work. Tell us how it came together?

In the Gloaming started to form in my mind after I published The Color of Dawn in January 2012. The gloaming is undoubtedly my favorite time of the day, and I thought that if I ever did another poetry collection, I’d call it In the Gloaming for that reason.  One thing I’ve noticed from comments and reviews of my work is that the pieces that resonated the most with readers were those I was open and honest in my experiences, either in my poetry or essays. While I’ve written about personal things in the past either on my blog or in a book, I’ve done it from a distance. So when I began writing Gloaming in early June 2012, I opened myself completely, and rather from a distance, I wrote about experiences with love, loss, heartbreak, health issues, renewal and hope standing in the middle of all those experiences and emotions. 

At the end of each piece, I’d cry, either from joy or from pain, but putting the book together was a healing process for me.  I took a few moments after everything was loaded on Kindle Direct, and just breathed and let myself enjoy the fact that I did not hide from what I was feeling and felt every thing, good or bad, fully. It was a euphoric feeling when it went live, and the euphoria keeps going on when I hear from readers that it touched them in some way.

Your fiction shows a tremendous maturity and a real eye for human connection -- particularly in its characterizations and the emotional gravity of their relationships. Is this a conscious effort or more subconscious?

My published fictions all have one thing in common: they started out one way, and then ran off on their own, which surprised me every time.  The biggest surprise of all for me is that I never intended to write fiction; poetry and autobiographical essays are more my natural genre.  As for my characters, I’d say it’s both a conscious and a subconscious effort on my part.  I have a general idea who they are, what they look like, what personality quirks they have. But when I write them, their exchanges and the relationships they already have or build, I’m writing them for the reader, and I want the story to play like a movie.  They have to be real to the reader, or I’m not doing my job properly.

Who are the biggest influences on your writing?

Shel Silverstein, Stephen King, Robert Frost, E.E. Cummings, Catherine Newman and Frank Herbert are all authors I’ve read over my life that I’ve sat back and said, “This is what I want to do”.  But the non-writer influence, the one that will remain with me always is my ninth grade English teacher, Mrs. Lux.  On the last day of school, she pulled me to the side and handed me a new composition notebook, and gave me the greatest advice I’ve received in regards to writing: “You have a gift. Write every day, even if it’s only to say you have no idea what to write.”

What can we expect from you next?

“6:29 p.m.,” which will be a short story fiction collection, a to-be-named poetry collection, and finally, after almost thirteen years of writing, “Searching for Ellen”, which is an autobiographical account of being adopted and searching for my biological mother. There are plans for a few other pieces of work, but they’re still in the early stages, and I have no idea what they’ll end up becoming.

Connect with Amber & Her Work:

Twitter: @AmberNorrgard

AmazonAuthor Page: Click Here

Amber's Website: Life As Amber Knows It

7 Questions for . . . is an occasional offering from WriteHook with the blatant intention of getting you to know and read authors and books you might otherwise miss out there in the ever-expanding universe of fiction and creative nonfiction.

This installment features Travis Laurence Naught, a poet whose physical diabilities belie a good-natured guy with an unapologetic audacity that I just love (even if he is not always comfortable with it himself).

A Brief Introduction

When I talk about writing for the jugualr, this is what I mean. Travis' new book, The Virgin Journals (ASD Publishing), is a collection of poems that look at his life as a quadriplegic, and all the hopes, frustrations, and exegesis that comes with it.

I wouldn't say Travis' work is for the squeamish. But there is beauty in its brutal intensity. You can catch it on video on YouTube, where Travis has a series of videos of his live readings. Buckle up and check it out.

7 Questions for . . . Travis Laurence Naught

 The Virgin Journals ($9.99) is on sale through:

ASD Publishing 

Barnes & Noble

Amazon

This installment features Carey Parrish, a one-time nurse who found his writing muse when he decided to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative. Check out his bio, check out his seven answers, and, of course, check out his latest novel, Big Business, the long-awaited sequel to Marengo.

A Brief Introduction

Carey Parrish is an American writer with credits on both sides of the Atlantic. He began writing professionally in his late thirties when he founded Web Digest Weekly e-magazine, which ran until March 2010. He also wrote for British based reFRESH magazine as well as Crime Rant, Entertainment Weekly, and other publications both online and in print. He is the other of the books Into The Light: Experimentations in Poetry and Prose, the short story anthology The Moving Finger Writes, and the novels Marengo and Big Business. He lives in Northern Georgia.

7 Questions for...Carey Parrish

1) Big Business is a sequel to Marengo. So what are the ups and downs of writing a sequel with serial characters?  

Writing a sequel was really more difficult than doing the first one because it had been a while since I wrote about these characters. Getting back into their “minds” if you will was something of a challenge. It was much easier to introduce the new characters and make them flow with the older ones. I didn’t really plan on Marengo being the first in a series but the reactions of readers to the cast was awesome and even after nearly two years I was still getting emails asking for more of them. Big Business is my answer to readers’ devotion.

2) You have lots of major characters. How did you develop so many distinct characters and what must a writer keep in mind about tying all the characters' stories together?

Having a cast of characters is a delight because I get to tell more than one story during the course of writing a book like this. The common thread of the apartment building and the family feeling among them binds them to one another in spite of their different subplots and it allows me to weave the stories together so that the ending will mesh and everything will be resolved, because ultimately they’re all working toward the same goal. By keeping everyone relative in this sense you don’t run the risk of leaving something hanging.

You also need at least four proofreaders/editors to help you avoid any plot holes that having more than one storyline going simultaneously might present.

3) You attribute your success to "taking all the things that were wrong in my life and replacing them with things that were right." Could you explain this for us?

Until I was 35 years old my life almost exclusively revolved around my family, both immediate and extended. When my grandmother died, I didn’t have anything to fill the void left by her absence. We were very close and I’d taken care of her in her last years, so I had to redefine myself. I realized I hadn’t made any of my youthful dreams come true and I felt like it was finally time for me to have a life of my own.

So I reevaluated everything in my existence and set my sights on becoming a professional writer, something I’d wanted since I was a teenager. Anything, material or otherwise, that wasn’t healthy or wasn’t working, I chucked. I made the choices that were necessary to build the life that I wanted for myself, and some of these decisions were difficult to make indeed. But my own personal happiness was more important to me.

I cultivated relationships with like minded people. I involved myself with those who share my interests. I learned from those who’d already made their lives what they wanted. I pretty much just went for it and so far the results have been exactly what I hoped they would be. I got rid of the “wrong” so that the “right” could be a permanent part of my life.

I also wasn’t a very healthy person in my younger life and I now believe that a lot of the negative energy created by the unhealthy situations I’d gotten stuck in were contributing to my physical deficiencies, as most of these issues have vanished in the last nine years. I don’t let negative people into my life anymore because they suck the energy right out of you. I focus only on the positive and the possible.

4) Your writing style is very "cozy British" in some ways, yet has also been described as something akin to an '80s prime time soap, like Dallas or Fantasy Island. What would be the experience you most hope readers have when they check out Big Business?

Whenever I write, my main goal is to tell a good story and I hope that readers can say they enjoyed my work once they finish the book. Setting Big Business, and formerly Marengo, in London came from my own love of the city and how at home I feel in England.

Writing in an “episodic” manner, as Dallas, Knots Landing, and the daytime soaps did, gives me the chance to have more than one or two characters’ stories to tell, and I can take ordinary personas and place them in extraordinary circumstances in much the same way as the nighttime, and daytime, dramas always did. It’s a formula, if you will, that I think involves my audience much more effectively. There’s something for everyone.

I also inject doses of humor here and there because life is often funny and you can’t make the two dimensional world of a novel seem real unless you mirror the world inside it.

5) You began as a nurse before deciding to see the world and then to write. How did your experiences in medicine and around the world influence and build the writer-you?

Working with the public gives you the chance to meet all kinds of people. If you’re willing to observe and learn from them, you’ll get a great perspective on what makes different people tick. Some you’ll like; some you won’t. Being a nurse, I got to do this in an arena that involves a lot of human drama and you see why some become heroes, some become jerks, and some never learn how to be anything more than average.

Traveling to other parts of the world is a dream I always had, from childhood on, and I tell everyone to get out there and see this planet we live on. It’s a big place filled with lots of people, cultures, beliefs, and experiences. Learn about and from these differing societies. Tolerance and respect come from understanding and if you don’t open yourself up to those we share this world with then you’ll never have the vision to see that everyone is equal, everyone is entitled to his own way of life, and no one is superior to another.

6) What other books have you written besides Marengo and Big Business?

My first book was a short volume of poetry and essays called Into The Light, which I think presented a picture of the path I took from the me I was before my grandmother died toward the me that I am now. My second book was an anthology of short stories called The Moving Finger Writes. It displays a couple of different genres I dabbled with prior to Marengo; namely there are a few paranormal tales contained therein.

7) What are you working on now (and when we can expect Part 3).

My current project is called Writer’s Block and it is a stand-alone novel. It’s about an attorney in Manhattan named Jon Aaronson who has to start a new life after his wife asks him for a divorce. He moves into an apartment in one of those sprawling old brownstones on Central Park South, called Burton Heights, that was left to him by a deceased aunt and his next door neighbor is JR Walden, a bestselling novelist suffering from a severe bout of writer’s block. The relationship these two men develop is complex and ultimately dangerous. I hope to have this one out in the spring.

Part 3 of the Number 56 Kensington Street series is in the outline stage of development. The core characters are all back, of course, and the new supporting cast revolves around a country estate which houses a priceless art collection that will be the catalyst for the adventure I’m plotting. Maybe it will be ready by late fall or early 2013.

Where To Go from Here:

Big Business by Carey Parrish. Click image to buy.Don't be one of those people who reads and runs. Get to know more about Carey Parrish here:

Website: www.careyparrish.com

Be sure to drop him a line or leave some feedback about this interview, and help get the word out. 

Authors interested in answering 7 Questions for . . . can drop a line here. WriteHook reserves the right to not publish any and all interviews with authors, their agents, their families, hired goons, or anyone else.

This installment features Frank J. Edwards, an emergency care doctor who writes uncommonly philosophical medical fiction and poetry. Check out his bio, check out his seven answers, and, of course, check out his latest novel, Final Mercy.

A Brief Introduction:

Frank J. Edwards was born and raised in western New York.

Immediately after leaving high school, Frank became an Army warrant officer helicopter pilot in Vietnam, and afterwards went on to study English and Chemistry at UNC Chapel Hill.

Deciding on a medical career, he went on to receive an M.D. from the University of Rochester, in addition to maintaining his writing interests.  He later went on to complete the MFA program in Writing at Warren Wilson College in North Carolina.

Dr. Frank Edwards served as an active faculty member in the Department of Emergency Medicine at the University of Rochester Medical Center in the 1990′s. He served for a period as acting Chairman of the Department as well. He retains on his faculty appointment with the University, although he no longer actively in the Emergency Department.

Dr. Edwards left academic medicine to start a regional emergency medicine group, now called Delphi Emergency Physicians, where he continues to serve as the medical director, as well as working clinically in several emergency departments in the Rochester/Finger Lakes Region.

In 1994 he started the first writing workshop for medical students at the U of R, though the university’s Division of Medical Humanities and taught in this program for fifteen years.

Dr. Edwards now devotes most of his free time to his own writing projects. He is the author of several books, including the medical thriller Final Mercy, a collection of poetry and short stories called It’ll Ease The Pain, and two books of nonfiction on medical issues, Medical Malpractice and The M&M Files, available through Amazon.com.

He continues to write, teach and practice emergency medicine, as well as maintain a private practice in nearby Sodus, New York.

He and his beloved wife Mary Ann live on the shore of Lake Ontario.

7 Questions for . . . Frank J. Edwards

1) You started your first writing workshop for University of Rochester medical students in 1994.  What was the motivation/reason behind doing that, and do you still do those?

First off, many thanks for the interview.  Regarding the writing workshop, I think my original motivation, to be honest, was revenge.  I’d been writing since my teenage years, but the urge grew irresistible for some reason during my second year of medical school.  I’m not complaining, but it’s hard to imagine a lousier environment wherein to nurture literary ambitions.  Don’t get me wrong—the material is there.  It’s just hard to let your spirit soar when your mind is caged in by the need to study.  It boiled down to choices like this:  do I let my mind spread its wings this evening, or do I continue stuffing my cortex full of pathophysiology for tomorrow morning’s test?  John Keats said to hell with delayed gratification and walked out of medical school just before his qualifying exams.  He knew that if he took the safe path, he might never achieve the greatness he felt roiling inside.  But my model was William Carlos Williams, so I stuck it out, and actually managed to get a few things published before I graduated (they weren’t very long).

About a dozen years after graduating I found myself as a teacher back at the same school, which in the meantime had created a division of Medical Humanities.  Remembering my own frustrations, I straight-away proposed they let me slip a creative writing workshop for med students into the curriculum.  I had picked up an MFA in writing along the way and that gave me some academic creds.  And I argued (truthfully) that the practice of both medicine and creative writing have points of contact: a good bedside manner involves sensitivity to the nuance of language—the ability to artfully craft your words and tone.   They said, “Hmmm, okay.”

We began offering it as an elective for first year students and the program was so well received we added it to the second year schedule.  Before long we started gathering student pieces in a literary magazine and conducted readings.  After doing it for a decade and a half, the demands on my time burgeoned and I passed the torch a couple of years ago.  But what pleasure it was!   I’d also been a flight instructor in college after getting out of the army and the same thing was true with that endeavor—the rewards of teaching are the learning you yourself receive, along with watching people stretch and succeed.   

2) Your work, particularly your poetry, transcends mere experience and gets into a kind of philosophical interpretation of moments and happenings. Do you consciously seek to interpret your experiences more universally? And does writing about your experiences (even if re-imagined) provide you with a form of catharsis or perspective that you otherwise would not find?

The process of creative writing is so multifaceted that it’s hard to define without using metaphor.  But I think you hit the nail on the head.  In the act of re-imagining things, we discover something new and greater truths.  I often think of T.S. Eliot’s comment about the way bad writing is conscious when it should be unconscious, and vice versa.  When our writing is going along well—when we are creating images and events that will resonate with readers—we are somehow to one extent or another swimming in the collective unconscious of our species.   I think we can easily miss the mark of creating something great if we try too hard to make it universally appealing.  Good writing lives in the particular and the individual.  To wildly paraphrase William Blake, we can best call up a vision of the universe by carefully describing the grain of sand on our fingertip.  I think when you succeed at describing your own experience, you can somehow feel it radiating outwards and touching everything and everyone else, which is both cathartic and elevating.

3) How has writing your non-fiction books helped you in writing your fiction/poetic works, and vice versa?

Writing non-fiction has been very helpful in learning how to manage voice and pacing.  In the kind of medical writing I’ve done I’ve tried to keep it as interesting as possible by striking a brisk, friendly attitude, varying the sentence structure, avoiding passive construction, using strong verbs, being stingy with modifiers, and keeping the prose as crystal-clear as I can.  I also go light on the esoteric jargon when I don’t specifically need it.  It’s great exercise and doesn’t have the same number of frustrating moments you encounter during the writing of fiction and poetry, where you’re literally grabbing your subjects out of thin air or waiting for things to bubble up.  

4) What do you think is missing in much of the medical fiction on the market today? Or, perhaps better asked, is there anything you hope to see more of in the genre?

I think Tess Gerritsen is getting close, but the modern medical fiction genre doesn’t yet have a Graham Green, a John LeCarre or a Robert Harris.  We’ve got some slam-dunk wonderful storytellers now who can do miracles with the doctor-discovers-conspiracy-and-saves the day formula, no doubt about it.  I’d love to see another Walker Percy come along and bridge the gap between medical suspense and literary fiction.

5) Can you give us the details about how Final Mercy came about: when and why you decided it was time to write a novel, how long it too you to do it, and any challenges in terms of time management or distraction management that you overcame?

Like most of us, I’ve got a big brown box in the attic full of half-baked novels.  Since internship I’d probably started six or seven that never crawled beyond the rough draft stage.  My ambition was to write a literary story, you see, but all my efforts drifted into being mysteries, and that didn’t jive with what I believed to be my quest.   Then one day about six years ago I looked in the mirror and said “What’s wrong with mysteries?  Life’s a mystery.  People like to read mysteries, including you. You are apparently drawn to the writing of mysteries.  So, finish the damn thing.  Just try and make it a good one.” 

As an emergency doctor, I’m usually able to carve out at least a few hours of a few days a week for writing, and when the juice is flowing, I’ll write in spare minutes or take a couple of weeks off and write for a good stretch.   It took about two years to get a marketable draft of Final Mercy finished.  I was then blessed with a wonderful editor, Liz Burton, at Zumaya Publications.  It required about two months of polishing, a type of final editing that I found a pure pleasure—watching the story finally gel. 

6) Jack Forester: Who is he? (as in, who is he based on, is he an amalgam of people you know, is he representative of someone you would like to be or would like more doctors to be?

Jack is my more attractive, interesting, charismatic, lucky and socially adept alter ego.  (But I can play guitar better than he can).  The story grew out of my experience working in the emergency department at the University of Rochester, though I threw a lot more problems at Jack than I ever encountered.  He catches the ball pretty well.  He’s not perfect, but he’s at least as good a physician as I am. 

7) What are you working on now as a writer?

I have just finished the rough draft of a sequel to Final Mercy with the working title  Bedside.  A new and somewhat shady medical device is about to be introduced at the medical center and it has attracted the attention of a domestic terrorist.  I’m planning a third book in the series, called The Shaman Only Rings Twice.   Jack becomes dean of the medical center and is embroiled in a scandal.  I’m also working on a new collection of poems.  

I would finish this, if I might, by mentioning some writers who inspired and influenced me.  Antoine De Sainte-Exupery.  Hemingway.  Vonnegut.  Tolstoy.  Chekhov.   Dickens.  Williams Carlos Williams.  Billy Collins.  

Where To Go from Here:

Final Mercy by Frank J. Edwards. Click image to buy.Don't be one of those people who reads and runs. Get to know more about Frank J. Edwards on his website, You can read excerpts from Final Mercy, learn about his works of poetry, and order copies. Be sure to drop him a line or leave some feedback about this interview, and help get the word out.

Authors interested in answering 7 Questions for . . . can drop a line here. WriteHook reserves the right to not publish any and all interviews with authors, their agents, their families, hired goons, or anyone else.