178. Time Slippage, Reincarnation, and History: An Interview with Susanna Kearsley

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Sarah Wendell:  Hello, and welcome to episode number 178 of the DBSA podcast.  I’m Sarah Wendell from Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, and with me today is author Susanna Kearsley.  We talk about her next book, which involves all of the genres that she writes in, which is kind of all of them at the same time.  We talk about genetic memory, ghost hunting, indigenous history, research, and her upcoming book.  

At about twenty-four and a half minutes in to the podcast, Susanna talks about a historical court case focusing on a rape.  I want to give you warning about that particular section.  The audio is from 24:30 until about 26:00, so if this is something that you would find unpleasant or triggering, you can skip that two and a half minute segment if you’d like.  If this warning doesn’t help you or doesn’t work and there’s a way that I could do this better, please email me at [email protected] and let me know, because I want you to feel safe.

This podcast is sponsored by Renee Ahdieh, publisher of The Wrath & the Dawn, published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons Books for Young Readers, available in print and eBook.  Each dawn brings death, but can love change the story?  This intoxicating retelling of A Thousand and One Nights will leave you begging for book two, The Rose & the Dagger, coming Summer 2016.

Our podcast transcripts this month are sponsored by Kensington, publishers of Mercury Striking by New York Times bestselling author Rebecca Zanetti.  The first in a thrilling new apocalyptic series, Rebecca Zanetti brings her trademark high-octane action and sizzling sensuality to the mean streets of a chillingly believable L.A. devastated by a deadly bacterium.  Part romantic suspense, part medical thriller, and part apocalypse drama, don’t miss this thrill ride through post-pandemic society, where the survival of mankind hangs in the balance and where love blooms even under the most dire of circumstances.  On sale January 29th, 2016.

Our music is provided by Sassy Outwater.  I will have information at the end of the podcast as to who this is and where you can purchase this for your very own, but in the meantime, on to the podcast!

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Sarah:  Would you be so kind as to introduce yourself to the lovely people who are probably on the treadmill right now?

Susanna Kearsley:  Hey, I’m Susanna Kearsley, and I write romance that usually involves modern-day people dealing with mysteries that come out of the past, so there’s a little bit of everything in it.  There’s adventure, there’s history, there’s mystery, there’s usually one if not two romances, and a bit of paranormal mixed into that, almost all the time.

Sarah:  So, your, your books are pretty much all the genres.

Susanna:  I, yeah, I call myself, like, the Cockapoo of –

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Susanna:  – of the romance world.  It, it, actually, I’m, I’m probably one level up from that.  It’s whatever you get when you cross a Cockapoo with a Schnoodle and, and, you know, just everything is in there.

Sarah:  Cockapoo-Schnoodoodle?

Susanna:  Yeah.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Susanna:  Which makes it really difficult when, you know, when you have to figure out where to put it for the RITA awards these days, because you’re, you’re sort of crossing all the categories, but –

Sarah:  Though it worked out for you to put your book in paranormal.

Susanna:  It did.  That was my readers, actually, ‘cause I, I had no idea after RWA changed the, the rules and got rid of the Strong Romantic Elements thing, which – I mean, I write romance, but it was the easiest place to put it, because it, it didn’t fit neatly into any of the other categories, so I had no idea where to put it after that, and I just put it up on my blog and let the readers pick, and they had this awesome conversation going on in the comments about what it was, and, and one of them argued to everybody else that, well, it’s, it’s all these other things, but it’s paranormal all the way through, so I thought, okay, well, you know, you’re, you’re right.  So the mo-, most people voted for paranormal, and that’s where I put it.

Sarah:  That’s a really –

Susanna:  – worked out well, yeah.

Sarah:  That’s a really good argument.  They’re totally right.

Susanna:  [Laughs] Yeah.

Sarah:  Because that sort of otherworldly, paranormal, time-slippage connection goes from the beginning to the end.

Susanna:  In The Firebird it does, yeah.

Sarah:  Yeah.

Susanna:  Not so much in the one I published this year, in A Desperate – or last year, I guess, now – A Desperate Fortune.  There is no paranormal, which I’ve only done with a couple of books, but, so that was a, that was a tricky one to figure out where to put.

Sarah:  I, I have to say, I really miss the RWA Strong Romantic Elements category.

Susanna:  Me too, me too.

Sarah:  I discovered amazing books and writers specifically in that category, and I, I feel bad that they got rid of it.  I wish they had not.

Susanna:  Well, I did actually put a proposal through, a private proposal to the board of directors a couple of years ago when they brought, when they took it out.  I put a whole proposal together based on that whole Cockapoo thing, the idea that if you write these novels that cross a lot of subgenres, which a number of us do – it’s not just me; there’s a whole pile of people that do this –

Sarah:  Oh, it’s true.

Susanna:  – and, and up and coming writers, too, the unpublished, the ones entering the Golden Hearts, those are the ones I felt worst for, because this is what you want to write, and you want to, you know, you want to get your, your chance with the Golden Heart, and it was kind of taken away, so I put a proposal through that they change it to Romance With Other Elements.

Sarah:  Oh, that is a very good idea.  I wish that had happened!

Susanna:  But it didn’t, it didn’t, so unfortunately no, but I thought that would allow them to kind of keep the, the Elements chapter as well –

Sarah:  Yeah.

Susanna:  – which was a very thriving chapter, and then, but keep the focus on romance, because that was their main argument, was that everything had to be a romance, which is fine, that’s cool, that’s, you know, that’s what I write, so I had no issue with that.  Everything should be judged on whether or not it is a romance, whether it fits into those, those broader genre –

Sarah:  Expectations.

Susanna:  – expectations and rules, yeah.

Sarah:  Yeah.

Susanna:  When your reader picks up a book, they don’t want to get to the end and find out that everybody dies on the last page.  That’s not fair; that’s not what your readers want, so –

Sarah:  [Laughs] No, we, we, we don’t handle that very well.

Susanna:  No.

Sarah:  That’s not a favorable thing for us.

Susanna:  No, so maybe, it’s a new board, so maybe if anybody’s listening out there, that was my, my option, was that they should change it to Romance With Other Elements, which would allow it to, to take in those people that write with a very strong mystery element or, or cross a bunch of them like me.  Where you really can’t, you can’t put it in, your dog doesn’t have a place in the show.  You can’t judge it against the best poodle; you can’t judge it against the best Cocker Spaniel; it’s right in the middle, so.

Sarah:  Yep.  But how do you describe your books when someone who has just met you asks what do you write?  Do you sort of go, well, here come a lot of words?

Susanna:  Pretty much.  I –

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Susanna:  – I usually start by saying exactly what I did:  it’s people in the modern day dealing with mysteries that come out of the past.

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Susanna:  But then you have to throw everything else in the soup.  It’s, it’s, you know, there’s history, there’s mystery, there’s romance, there’s all this other stuff.  My husband once described it to somebody as, they’re kind of like old Hitchcock movies, and I thought –

Sarah:  Oh, that is a good description.

Susanna:  – that’s kind of interesting, ‘cause he said, well, there’s, like, there’s something paranormal, there’s a little bit of woo-woo, but it’s not really too woo-woo, and you know, there’s a, a mystery, but it’s not always a body in the library.  There’s romance, but it’s not always taking the, the mainline of every single moment of the book, so –

Sarah:  Yes.

Susanna:  – he, he, I, I think kind of, if you think The Birds maybe?  That’s similar, but, but some of my books have that more gothic overtone, and some of them don’t have the more gothic overtone.  Some of them are more adventurous.  It’s kind of like how would you describe Meljean, right?  How would you describe Meljean Brook’s writing?  It’s, it’s adventure, it’s romance, it’s, it’s like a grand matinee movie when I think of Meljean’s steampunk books.

Sarah:  Yep.

Susanna:  It’s like sitting into one of those awesome Saturday afternoon movies, and you know, I just love going along for the ride of her books, but how do you describe what Meljean does, right?  So I, I think you just have to say it’s a story, and this is what it’s like.  If you like this type of book, you’d probably like mine.  If you – but people just have to – I know some people find my books very slow going at the beginning, and you have to be, it’s not for everybody.  Some people, they, they want to hop right into a really fast story, and I’m kind of more like Sense and Sensibility speed –

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Susanna:  – at the beginning, because it’s – which was the movie, by the way, that used to automatically put my children to sleep when they were babies.  I watched it probably every night for four months with my, my first child, ‘cause it was the only thing that would settle them down.

Sarah:  So British people in Empire waists and bonnets puts them right out?

Susanna:  Alan Rickman, I think it was Alan Rickman’s voice, so –

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Susanna:  – I start them young, right?  But the, the –

Sarah:  You should find some audio books that he’s narrated, see if it still works.

Susanna:  Just let it go, yeah.

Sarah:  Yeah.

Susanna:  But it, it, it was, I, I start slow.  I kind of start with the, I, I have a lot of pieces to put on the board and a lot of things to, to put in place, and I, I start the book with that, so a lot of people, that can put them off, ‘cause it, it’s not a common way to write these days, but that’s how I do it.

Sarah:  I want to talk about your books for a little bit, because –

Susanna:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  – for anyone who hasn’t been introduced to your books, I really like them and you should read them, so thanks very much for being my guest, Susanna; we can go home now.

Susanna:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  I know you released A Desperate Fortune in 2015 – it’s 2016 now, so that was last year.

Susanna:  It’s, yeah.  Yes, it was.

Sarah:  Do you have a book coming out this year that you’re working on?

Susanna:  I don’t do a book a year.  I do a book sort of like every year and a half to two years, and Sourcebooks has been, both Sourcebooks and Simon & Schuster Canada, who are my publishers, have been just awesome about it.  I remember I was at RT this past spring, and Dominique, who’s my, the CEO of Sourcebooks, who’s just awesome – Dom and Deb, my editor, are both awesome with me – I was just kind of joking that, yeah, I really should write faster, and Dom actually came over and gave me this big hug and said, no, no, you don’t need to write faster; you need to write the speed the book needs to be.  And that is such an amazing gift to be given as a writer, that your publishers and editors allow you this space, because my books are kind of sprawl-y in the writing, as well.  I, I do a lot of research, I’m very research-heavy, and the research feeds the writing, which feeds the research, which feeds the writing, so I never know when I get into a book how, whether it’s going to be a quick write or a slow write.  Usually slow.  Julie James and I talk about this all the time; we’re very slow writers.  But the, the book I’m writing right now, I’m handing it in late this spring, but then it’ll take Sourcebooks and Simon & Schuster probably nine months to a year to bring it out, so we’re looking at maybe bringing it out very early in 2017?

Sarah:  Ah, it’s not that far away.

Susanna: Not that far away, and I do try to, I realize readers want to feel involved in the writing of it, so I do play along with the One Line Wednesday that –

Sarah:  Yeah.

Susanna:  – I love the One Line Wednesday; it’s very motivational for me – that RWA Kiss of Death chapter does every Wednesday on Twitter.  You have to tweet –

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Susanna:  – a line of your work in progress on a different theme, and it’s, it’s kind of fun, and it allows me to then put up lines on Facebook, more lines on Facebook, that readers can kind of read along and get connected to the characters I’m writing now.  The one I’m writing now is actually the very first time I’ve ever set a book entirely in the States, and it’s, it’s a whole new thing for me, but it’s based on my own family history on Long Island.  I have ancestors who were living on Long Island in the – well, I had ancestors that came over on the Mayflower and just kind of settled in that area and, and eventually found their way out to, to Canada, half of them, as loyalists, but in the 1750s in Long Island in the middle of the French and Indian War, one of my ancestors took in two French officers who had been captured, who were paroled.  So, they would take the officers and put them on their parole of honor –

Sarah:  Right.

Susanna:  – because in those days it meant something if you just held up your hand and said, no, I’m not going to fight you anymore.  And the officers were actually allowed to live in people’s homes and walk around with their swords and, and walk around the streets of New York, and I thought this was just an amazing thing, so knowing that my ancestors actually took two of these guys in gave me the idea to kind of use that as a starting place.  And then this was also a time when it, you’re, you’re coming up to about ten years from, then the Revolution is really going to start gaining steam, and a lot of people are already starting to have that break with Britain, and there’s a lot of tension already between the British and, and the Americans, or the, you know, the colonials, the provincials as they would call us, the British called them, and you can –

Sarah:  Provincials.

Susanna:  – you can really see the –

Sarah:  Bless their hearts.  [Laughs]

Susanna:  I know, I know.  Isn’t it, it’s, well, we had that in Canada too, so they, the – but you can really see in the letters of the day, you can see the tensions, and especially in New York where so much of the economy depended on them trading to the French West Indies.  They were essentially trading with the enemy, but then so were the British.  The British just arranged things so that their ships could trade with the French West Indies, but the Americans couldn’t, so it, it’s an interesting time, and I’ve, so I put my, my French officers into a home where the family is actually trading with the French, doing privateering back and forth, so you’ve got people that have promised not to fight the British being billeted in the home of the family that is aiding the French, and it’s, there’s a lot of interesting tension and a romance, and, and my present-day character is actually a museum curator, which is my past, and I’ve never made a character that before.  So it’s kind of fun, ‘cause I’m able to put a lot of my own experience in, you know, what I remember doing as, as that job, a few years ago now.  It was back in the, the late ‘80s, early ‘90s when I worked in museums, and so.  Surprisingly little has changed?  I’ve touched base –

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Susanna:  – I’ve touched base with the director of the Raynham Hall Museum in Oyster Bay, Long Island.  Oyster Bay is just over from where I’m setting my book, and she’s been awesome, and, and I was up in her office looking at her desk, thinking, yeah, that’s exactly what my desk used to look like, and her board of directors sounds exactly like what my board of directors was like, so not very different at all, but it’s kind of fun to bring that in, and this is going to be probably, I hope, my most diverse book.  I’m really trying to be very aware of that, and New York seemed like a, a wonderful opportunity to bring in as many different voices and people as I possibly could, ‘cause you cannot write a book set in New York and have it be completely white middle class people; it’s just not going to happen.

Sarah:  Well, I mean, you, you, you can –

Susanna:  Well –

Sarah:  – a lot of people have.

[Laughter]

Sarah:  It doesn’t mean it’s accurate.

Susanna:  It’s not, it’s not very realistic.

Sarah:  Right.

Susanna:  You know, it’s not realistic to my life, it’s not realistic to the world.

Sarah:  One of the things I really like about your books is the, the amount of realism.

Susanna:  Oh, thank you!

Sarah:  I mean, eve-, I, one of the things that sticks with me for, for The Winter Sea is that, the idea that there are scientific expirations, or excuse me, there are scientific potential explanations for ideas –

Susanna:  Yep.

Sarah:  – like time travel or reincarnation, not time travel, but the –

Susanna:  Genetic memory.

Sarah:  Genetic memory, right, thank you.  I was trying to remember exactly the term that you use.

Susanna:  Right.

Sarah:  How did you discover that?

Susanna:  Well, whenever I do anything paranormal, the first thing I do is I, I look for university studies on whatever it is that I’m doing.  So there are always universities with parapsychology departments where this research is actually ongoing, and, and for something like genetic memory, they were doing an awful lot of research with genetic memory and autistic savants –

Sarah:  Ah!

Susanna:  – starting several years ago, because people are born with knowledge that they, nobody knows how they have that knowledge.  How do you get that knowledge?  How do you know instantly how do this, and, and if you start looking at the nature, just nature, monarch butterflies fly the same route every single year.  They’re a butterfly.  How do they know?  Nobody teaches them; it’s not like there’s a little butterfly school that they, you know, where they get maps and everything, and this is where you have to go in Mexico.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Susanna:  They, they just know this.  Sea turtles are born alone on a beach, and they know what to do as sea turtles.  So obviously there are things that are encoded in the memories and the genetic material that those animals receive, so if that’s the case, then it’s not a great leap for scientists to imagine that we have some of this material in ourselves, and, and how it gets passed along.  And they’re doing some amazingly fascinating work with rats right now, where they, they will make one generation of rats afraid of something, and then they find that that fear passes down to the next generation and the one beyond that, and that to me is just –

Sarah:  Ohhh.

Susanna:  – it’s cool!  We, we understand this tiny little bit of what our brain is capable of doing –

Sarah:  Yes.

Susanna:  – so to me it’s fascinating to get into these labs where people are doing all this work.  And I have to ground it in reality, and I also try to make my heroine, if I can, try to make her the biggest skeptic of all of them, because if I can convince the heroine that such a thing is possible, then I can usually convince the reader along with the heroine, if the reader trusts the heroine.

Sarah:  Right.

Susanna:  The, the only time I couldn’t really do that was in The Firebird with Nicola, because Nicola is psychic –

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Susanna:  – so you had to kind of trust in her right off the bat.  But in the book I’m currently writing, in Bellewether, which is the, the American Long Island one, there is a ghost involved, so right now the ghost and my, my heroine are just starting to kind of interact, so she is a complete skeptic.  She doesn’t believe this is possible, and I’m in the process of trying to convince her otherwise, and, and the research for that was very fun.  I ended up, for The Firebird, I had a lot of help from the Rhine Research Center down in Durham, North Carolina –

Sarah:  Hmm!

Susanna:  – which is attached to the, the university down there, and they had a, they proofread a couple of my things about psychometry and about some of the testing that they do with that.  So for this one, I contacted them and ended up taking an online ghost-hunting course, which was really, really fascinating.

Sarah:  Okay, seriously, that’s cool.  How do you hunt ghosts online?

Susanna:  Well, you don’t actually hunt them online, but you learn about the, you learn about the entire scope of ghost hunting as a, as a real endeavor by, by serious academics, as opposed to the people that go on TV and run around with their equipment.  So it, it, it was just fascinating, and they have everything categorized as to whether it’s a haunting, whether it’s a, you know, an actual entity, which is a different thing.  A haunting in the academic sense is something that, where the same thing just keeps repeating over and over again.  Their, their way of looking at it is, is it real or is it Memorex?  Is it just a, an imprint that has been left where, you know, Anne Boleyn will walk down this hallway every night at the same time type thing, and it’s really, you’re just watching a movie over and over again that’s just something –

Sarah:  Right.

Susanna:  – it’s an image that’s been left.  Or is it something that’s actually interacting with you?  And it, it’s, it was really fun to take that.  It was a lot of work, but it was, it was neat, so having gone through that, it allows me to, you know, create realistic paranormal investigators if I want to put them in the book, because there is a paranormal investigative group on Long Island, so I can create my own.  And also to have, have the, the ghost, when I bring them in, acting in a way that people who do this kind of research would say, yeah, that’s exactly what that would be.  That’s exactly how that would act.  That’s within the parameters of what we scientifically understand.  So I, I like that.  I like to ground it in, in something that’s kind of real.

Sarah:  Yeah, because that, it, like you said, if you can convince the skeptical character, you can convince the skeptical reader.

Susanna:  Hopefully.  At least, even for the, the period of that book.

Sarah:  Like, I accept that these people in this place at this time –

Susanna:  Right.

Sarah:  – believe that this is true.

Susanna:  Right.  You, that’s, that’s really all you have to do is, is convince the reader for the space of time that they’re in your world that this is a possibility, and you know, you realize that a lot of readers in their daily lives are not going to be as open to, to paranormal things, but if they’re really not open to it, they’re probably not reading my books in the first place, so.

Sarah:  Right, they’re, they’re going to, they’re going to nope right out when it gets to –

Susanna:  Right, yeah.

Sarah:  – past interacting with the present.

Susanna:  And a lot of people do.  If you look on Goodreads, there are a lot of people who are like, nope, nope, nope, nope, and, like, a little squid walking away.  You know, it’s just –

Sarah:  Yeah, nope, nope, nope, nope.

Susanna:  – they, they can’t do it.  Nope, nope, nope.

Sarah:  They just nope on out.

Susanna:  And that’s fine.  You know, that, that’s – but it’s a facet of, I, I find the world a very fascinating and interesting place, and I love the fact that there’re things we can’t explain in it.  I love the fact that, you know, I, that’s what keeps us human.  That’s what keeps us searching for these explanations, and I have a feeling that, you know, give us another hundred years of development and a lot of the things that we consider paranormal now or going to have been explained by science anyway, so.  It’s been going on since ancient times.  You can’t have –

Sarah:  Oh, yeah.

Susanna:  – you can’t have things like psychics existing since ancient times to now without realizing that it is some kind of phenomenon that we should probably be exploring.

Sarah:  I know Carrie did an interview with Connie Willis –

Susanna:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  – the science fiction writer who –

Susanna:  Right.

Sarah:  – wrote one of Carrie’s very favorite holiday stories, All Seated on the Ground –

Susanna:  – on the Ground.

Sarah:  – and Ms. Willis was talking about how, despite the fact that there really isn’t hard scientific evidence of something happening to us after we die, of a place that we go or a thing that happens, that, that any life continues beyond the physical end of our bodies functioning, every culture at every time has had some story, and many of them match, so that we have this belief system that transcends time and culture, that things happen after we die, despite a lack of actual hard, concrete evidence proving that it’s true.

Susanna:  Right.

Sarah:  So that in itself functions as a kind of proof –

Susanna:  Sure.

Sarah:  – and so when you, when you look at adding science to paranormal, it makes it much more, much more compelling for me as a reader –

Susanna:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  – because it is so very possible.

Susanna:  Well, so then what you do with that if you’re writing it is you take, you take that cross-cultural belief in, in the possibility of life after death –

Sarah:  Yep.

Susanna:  – and then you go looking at the scientific research.  You go looking at the universities where they might be – ‘cause there are universities right now that are doing studies on past-life experiences when people die and are brought back and that sort of thing, and what, you look for the commonalities.  You look for what everybody is saying, and then you, you ground it in that.  When I did my very first, what I consider my very first big book, Mariana, I was dealing with reincarnation, and I went in, again, to the university studies, and everybody was reporting that when they were regressing they heard a ringing in their ears, so that went into the book.  So you, you kind of ground it in what you can to make it real for people.

Sarah:  Wow.

Susanna:  So.

Sarah:  The other thing that’s fascinating to me is the, the sort of – I don’t want to call it hubris or the ego, but there’s this, often there’s, there’s an attitude that I encounter in var-, in various situations that we who are alive right now are the only ones who have ever dealt with this with the level of sophistication that we have, and it’s like, no, people have had this problem over and over and over, and you can see echoes of the same issues transformed through history.

Susanna:  All through time.

Sarah:  Yes.  Like, we have all been deal-, dealing with this.  It’s actually, for me, especially when I have no idea what to do with a situation like, I don’t know, like parenting or –

Susanna:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  – we’re moving, and I don’t know how to put my stuff in this room, I always tell myself, someone has had this problem before, and they –

Susanna:  Some Roman woman was looking and thinking –

Sarah:  Yes!

Susanna:  – where’s this couch going to go?  Exactly.  You know.

Sarah:  Exactly.  Someone has had this problem before, and someone has found a solution, so you’re not alone, and if you’re really lucky, somebody way back in the day wrote about it, maybe on a GeoCities website?  Maybe in the library!  Maybe somewhere someone has had this problem –

Susanna:  Yep.

Sarah:  – and that connection through time is actually very reassuring.

Susanna:  It is an extreme-, I, well, I find, too, I’m a very political person, and, and I get very caught up in what’s going on in different places and, and very upset by certain tacks our cultures are taking and, and that sort of thing, but all I have to do is go back and spend half an hour with a cup of coffee going through the Old Bailey Online, and if you go on the Old Bailey Online you can read back to the, the court cases, actual transcripts of the court cases that were going on in the 1700s, the 1600s, and it’s the same stuff.  It’s our newspaper transported back 400 years, and –

Sarah:  Yep!

Susanna:  – you have exactly the same things happening, exactly the same type of people, the good people, the bad people, the same crimes.  You have stabbings, you have shootings, you have rapes, you have child molestation, you have all kinds of stuff, and that, I’ve found there’s a, there’s a judge, Judge Jeffreys, who has been painted by history as a, a horrible person, mostly because he was associated with James II, or James VII of, of Scotland, however you want to call him.  The first Jacobite king.

Sarah:  Right.

Susanna:  Judge Jeffreys was overseeing a rape case in which a little girl, I think she was about seven or eight, had been raped by a man, and he was denying it, and his denial was simply that, you know, it’s her word against my word, and Judge Jeffreys wrote this, this ama-, or gave this amazing judgment in which he said something that I wish half our judges today would listen to, was that, well, sir, in, in cases like this, you only have two voices.  You have, you know, they were both there, no, there were no witnesses, you have one choice that is the, the victim and one choice that is the, the perpetrator, and in those cases I tend to go for the voice that, you know, doesn’t really have an agenda in, in being listened to, and, and there’s no reason for a child not to tell me the truth.  And he, he found in judgment for the child, and I thought, wow.  I mean, there’re so many judges today that need to go back and read that –

Sarah:  Yep.

Susanna:  – that little bit of thing, but it gives you this – you do, you connect, and you realize that people in those days, some mother took her child in to a judge and said, this horrible thing has been done to my child, and, and it’s the same people doing the same things that we are doing today, and that’s what I try to, to bring across too, in the books, when I’m going back and forth between the historical and the – you, you look for that common ground.  You look for the commonalities.  Yes, their lives were different than ours, but their, their hopes, their fears, their aspirations were very, very much the same, and we tend to buy into all these, people will say things like, oh, well, you know, they lost so many children those days.  You, your children died so young that you, they didn’t care.  They didn’t care about it the same way that we would care about it, and –

Sarah:  Nnnnooo.

Susanna:  – and all – exactly.  You have to read, like, a man’s poem from the 1500s about the death of his baby daughter –

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Susanna:  – and you realize that – and not just British, but you can go into Chinese poetry; you can go into Indian poetry; you can go into all kinds of things, and these, these emotions are universal, and we don’t change.  The, the place we’re going through and the systems we’re going through change, but we essentially, as humans, don’t change.  We’re the same animal going through all of it, so if you can connect a modern reader to the past that way, I think it can be a really powerful thing, and it can let people realize – it, it’s, I find it kind of calming and soothing to realize that we’re not the only people that have faced issues like the systemic racism or war or, you know, how to deal with returning veterans, or, everybody has had these problems for centuries, and –

Sarah:  Yep.

Susanna:  – it’s just our turn.

Sarah:  And it’s not necessarily outside the realm of the possible, then, to think that what remains of a person is repeating a particular moment as an appearance in the contemporary world, that, that, we get stuck in the same patterns –

Susanna:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  – so it’s not so far out of the possible that the remnants of a person could get stuck in a repeating pattern that we can witness.

Susanna:  It’s kind of, it – there’re so many cool things that could be going on that we don’t understand yet.

Sarah:  One of the things that I do, really enjoyed about the books of yours that I’ve read is that there are moments where the heroine or, or the hero will, or – you’ve got more than a heroine or hero – a protagonist will encounter a thing or a place –

Susanna:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  – and it will resonate with them.

Susanna:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  Like, whoa, whoooaaa.

Susanna:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  I’ve been here before.  And I remember, I think I sent you a podcast from Rick Steves’ Travel where –

Susann:  Yes.

Sarah:  – he took callers from people who had traveled to places that they’d never been before and walked in and knew the place:  how it was supposed to have looked, who lived there, what they did, and how the, how the building would function, or how a place would work.  And, and it, it fascinates me, because that’s, that’s an experience, I think, that people really do have.  You, you meet a thing, and you think, oh.  Oh, this is, this is important.  Like, I can remember way back when I was a kid, when computers were first happening –

Susanna:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  – and it was, it was becoming possible for individual families to buy a computer –

Susanna:  Right.

Sarah:  – so this is probably, like, the ‘80s.

Susanna:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  I have a thing for Alpha-Bits cereal, it’s one of my favorites –

Susanna:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  – and I remember Alpha-Bits was giving away a computer, and the cereal box had been designed so that you could fold down the back of the cereal box, and then inside was a pretend printed computer –

Susanna:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  – and I was Ob.  Sessed with it.  I was like, this is my thing.  I need one of these!  This –

Susanna:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  – is going to be my thing.  And it has become my thing.  [Laughs]

Susanna:  Mm-hmm.  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  Like, I knew that that was something that I –

Susanna:  That was your thing.

Sarah:  That was my thing.  I have discovered my jam, and I just need it to be real and not a cardboard box.

Susanna:  Well, see, and that’s a premonition, then, so that’s a whole different area, which is a –

Sarah:  Yeah, it’s a whole other thing.  It’s like the –

Susanna:  – whole different thing.

Sarah:  – resonation with premonition combined.  Like, what, whoa!  Okay!

Susanna:  Which they’re also studying, so, you know, it’s, it’s,  I mean, ‘cause there are recorded facts of, you know, people who are very rational in every other way, people deciding, no, I’m not going to get on that boat, or I’m not going to get on that plane, and something happens to that boat or that plane.  So that’s being studied as well.

Sarah:  With your current book –

Susanna:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  – with the museum curation and the mixed loyalties right before the Revolution –

Susanna:  Right.

Sarah:  – what are some of the things that you’ve learned in your research that have –

Susanna:  Oh, my goodness.

Sarah:  – really just, like, made you want to, like, jump and start screaming at people, have you heard this amazing thing?  Oh, my gosh!

Susanna:  Well, one of the things that I find so fascinating is what, what we don’t get taught in history.

Sarah:  Ohhh –

Susanna:  I, you know, what, what, it’s –

Sarah:  – oh, yes!  [Laughs]

Susanna:  – it, it bothers me tremendously, and as a Canadian – and I know this is, probably isn’t going to resonate with anybody in the States, but as Canadian, we are always taught that, that the, the war, the French and Indian War ended with the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, which happened in the fall of 1759, and in my reading I found that, no, not so.  I mean, it continued on –

Sarah:  No.

Susanna:  – the fighting continued on for quite a while.

Sarah:  Word did not spread quick enough.  [Laughs]

Susanna:  No, and, and they were –

Sarah:  They didn’t have Twitter.  We’re done!  Yo, guys, #warsover.

Susanna:  There were other battles being fought, and, and even after the, the supposed end of the war, I mean, then you still had to send people out to the outlying forts, because they hadn’t heard the news, so it, it kept going on and on and on and on, and, and so I, I always want to stand up and tell whoever’s putting the history curriculum together to please get it right.  I also, I’ve become a huge, I’ve become hugely invested in indigenous history through the, the writing of this book.  The, the hero of the present day thread, Sam, is Kanien’kehá:ka, he’s Mohawk, and I did that on purpose.  I was born on what is traditionally Haudenosaunee land in Brantford, Ontario, near what is now called the Six Nations Reserve.  So there are actually seven nations on the Six Nations Reserve.  There’s – let’s see if I can get these – Mohawk, Onondaga, Oneida, Seneca, Cayuga, Tuscarora, and Delaware live on the Six Nations.

Sarah:  I am never going against you on Jeopardy!

Susanna:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  Ever.  [Laughs]

Susanna:  I should, you know, you should know.  When you, when you should, you should know whose land you live on, and you should know what treaty it was that took that land from them, and, and – because there are a lot of promises that were broken, and it’s easy for people to fall into that sort of colonial way of saying, oh, well –

Sarah:  We’ve always been here.

Susanna:  Yeah, and, and talk about pioneers, when in fact you’re not really a pioneer.  I mean, you’re –

Sarah:  No.

Susanna:  – you’re a squatter –

[Laughter]

Susanna:  – on someone else’s land.  And it’s different, so I, I, we have this big thing that just happened up here in Canada.  It’s been going on for a while.

Sarah:  The Truth and Reconciliation Committee?

Susanna:  Truth and Reconciliation, completely –

Sarah:  The fact that you put those words – okay, so here’s Canada with the Truth and Reconciliation Committee, like, those four words together alone blow my mind.

Susanna:  But we’re only, like, it’s a tiny part of the, of the journey that we all have to do as Canadians.  Like, we’re, it’s going to take several generations.  This, right near where I was born was one of the worst residential schools, called the Mush –

Sarah:  Oh!

Susanna:  – the Mush Hole.  Brantford, the Mohawk Institute in Brantford, and they want to preserve it as a museum, and I’m actually, I want to help that, so I’m hoping to, when this book gets published, I’m hoping to do some kind of thing that’ll help raise money for that.  One of the gentlemen that’s helping me with getting Sam’s voice right and Sam’s history right is a Delaware.  He’s half Delaware, half Mohawk from Six Nations, and his family is involved in both the museum and the, the Mush Hole endeavor and the library there, so I’m hoping that I can get him to help me do some stuff.  But the, this was going on in my generation.  People, people in my generation were taken away from their families and put in this school, and we did that.  You know, and, and we ruined at least, at least seven generations of people, and you know, you take little children away from their family and you put them in a school where they’re being abused, and that cycle continues for generations, and it can’t be broken very easily, so one of the things that Justice Murray Sinclair, who was leading the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, asked of all Canadians, there are, I, there are a lot of recommendations that, that thankfully our new government has just accepted and will hopefully start –

Sarah:  Could you just stop with the awesomeness?  I mean, my God.

Susanna:  I’m sorry.  We, well –

Sarah:  Could you just stop?  Stop it, Canada!  Just knock it off.

Susanna:  We try.  We’re, we’re not perfect.

Sarah:  [Laughs] No, seriously, it’s incredible.

Susanna:  But we’re, no, but we’re not perfect, and we, and, and you don’t want to sit on your laurels as Canadians, either, because, you know, we had slavery.  We, we treated and continue to treat our indigenous people terribly.  We have a long way to go as well.  We’re not a perfect country, but you have to have the dialogue.  You have to open up the conversation.  But one of the things that Justice Sinclair threw out to Canadians was just find one thing on that list, find one thing on that list of Truth and Reconciliation that resonates with you, and one of the things he said was, one of the suggestions was, you know, was this aspect of teaching proper history.  Because when the settlers came in, and you know, like, I had five ancestors on the Mayflower, so we, we romanticize that, but in reality one of the first things my ancestors did was go around in canoes and, and grave rob and, and steal the food stores of the, the indigenous people that were living there.  They dug up their corn and walked off with it, and it wasn’t like the natives came out of the, the woods and handed you a basket of corn.  They dug it up and took it.

Sarah:  But that’s totally the picture we are, we see.

Susanna:  Exactly.

Sarah:  Your Thanksgiving and our Thanksgiving have that same sort of iconography of, hey!  Yeah!  Welcome!  Potluck!

Susanna:  Very romantic, and, and –

Sarah:  Yes.

Susanna:  – it’ll be interesting, because I, I, I like Sam’s voice in this book, so he’s going to be able to, to explain a lot of things, like Columbus Day and Thanksgiving, from a different perspective.  I, I think there’s a lot you can do, so I, I purposely put Sam, my, my Kanien’kehá:ka character, I put him in the present as an urban Mohawk with short hair, and he’s a construction worker, he’s a contractor.  I didn’t put him in the past because so often that’s where you find an indigenous character.  They’re in the past, as if they’re something that no longer exists, and they’re very much not.  They’re, they’re still, you know –

Sarah:  No, they’re very much present.

Susanna:  – it’s, it’s a thriving, you know – and, and it’s fascinating and wonderful to see so many of the nations in North America getting back to, to their own languages and teaching their own languages and – so that’s, it’s, it’s, I, I want to bring all that in.  And I’m also dealing – because, you know, I just wanted to take on everything – I’m dealing with the issue of slavery, which again, our mythology is that there was no slavery in the north.  There was very much a lot of slavery in north, especially in New York, so –

Sarah:  There was totally slavery in the north.  Anybody who goes too far back on Ancestry.com will find that there is a census record of their family, and if they are white and they have been middle class for a long time, there will be a census record of them owning people.

Susanna:  Yep.  Yep.  And, and that’s something that, that’s part of the reconciliation part for me, right?  For me, it, it’s kind of like – and I always relate everything to movies.  I have a, a really good friend, Rachel Hollis, who’s also a writer, who, who always says that eventually I will always bring everything back around to Romancing the Stone, and it’s usually true, but, but in this case it goes back to the Avengers movie, where Black Widow says, you know, I’ve got red on my ledger.

Sarah:  Yep.

Susanna:  I’ve got – and that’s the way I feel all the way through history.

Sarah:  I’ve got red on my ledger.  Yep.

Susanna:  I’ve got red on my ledger, and my way of writing these characters is, is, and giving voices to people whose voices my ancestors may have silenced, is, is just my way of erasing that, that red as much as I can, and then hopefully my children will continue that, and, and eventually you hope that your society gets to a place where the ledger is balanced a little more.

Sarah:  Yes.  And you also have the ability to appreciate where you are more.

Susanna:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  And so I remember when I traveled to Australia, it is a very common custom at the start of any event in Australia to acknowledge the land that you’re standing on.

Susanna:  The Welcome to Country, yeah.

Sarah:  Yes.

Susanna:  We, we do that, we do that in Canada as well.  We’re starting to do it more and more.  We certainly do it in Ontario, and I have started doing it since working on Bellewether, since working on this book and becoming more aware of the issues, I’ve started doing it at the start of every speech or every, you know, engagement that I do.  So it catches a few people off, off guard, but it also is interesting because it makes you, I like to, to acknowledge the specific nation, as opposed to just, you know, the general acknowledgement, so it makes you learn the nation that, that are the caretakers of the land that you are meeting on, and, and I go a lot of different places around North America, and I’ve learned a lot of different nation names, and I try to learn it in their language, as opposed to the, the, you know, like, the, the ones I rattled off, they’re from the Six Nations, that’s our words for them.  That’s not what they call themselves, you know.  The –

Sarah:  Right.

Susanna:  – the Mohawk are, they’re the Kanien’kehá:ka.  The, their language is Kanien’kéha.  You know, it’s, it’s, the, the whole thing is not the Iroquois –

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Susanna:  – they’re the Haudenosaunee, so language matters.  The words –

Sarah:  Oh, yes.

Susanna:  – the words you use matter, so –

Sarah:  And especially when you live in a place, like, for example, we just moved from New Jersey to Maryland, but in New Jersey there are a staggering number of indigenous or Native American place names.

Susanna:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  Like, most of northern Jersey, like Weehawken, Ho-Ho-Kus, Hoboken, those are all native – Watchung –

Susanna:  Yep.

Sarah:  There’s a –

Susanna:  All the way through.

Sarah:  All over northern and southern Jersey, the place names –

Susanna:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  – belong to different tribes.  I think the most common is the Lenape, but I could be getting that wrong.

Susanna:  Yes.  Yeah.  No, you’re absolutely right.

Sarah:  So it’s, it’s not as if these things are not outside consciousness.  They’re place names.

Susanna:  Right.

Sarah:  So with your, with your research –

Susanna:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  – this isn’t a, a paranormal.  This is parallel time and past and present?  Am I right about this?

Susanna:  It’s, it’s parallel time, past and present, with a ghost.  So, yeah, there is paranormal in there. 

Sarah:  There’s a ghost!  I was going to say!  You can’t have, you can’t have a Kearsley book without the slightly –

Susanna:  Well, every now and then a story, like, there was no place for the paranormal –

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Susanna:  – in A Desperate Fortune.  It was, the thing linking them was the journal, was this, this coded journal, but, but in this one, there was a perfect place for a ghost, so I put one in.

Sarah:  Well, there you go.  Is it ghost ex machina?  Does the ghost do things?  [Laughs]

Susanna:  The ghost, well, see, my books, the thing is I, I toss all my characters on the page, and I, I kind of plan out the scenes I think are going to happen, and then once they get on the page they just take off, so – the ghost is just doing what the ghost wants to do, and we’ll see if it, you know, if it gets edited out or ties in neatly at the end.

Sarah:  Right.

Susanna:  So I, I never really know ‘til I get to the end of the book, but, yeah, the ghost is, the ghost has an agenda.  The ghost is trying to accomplish something.

Sarah:  It’s not just repeating a pattern; it has a presence and a –

Susanna:  No.  No, it isn’t.

Sarah:  – and a reason for being there.

Susanna:  No, it is not a haunting, it is an actual, you know, apparition.  It’s an entity, it’s a, it’s something that is interacting with the heroine, so it’s kind of fun.

Sarah:  So with the ghost research that you did and the online ghost-hunting course – I kind of want to take this now –

Susanna:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  – there’s, there’re hauntings –

Susanna:  Yes.

Sarah:  And then what other kinds of presences are there?

Susanna:  Oh, my goodness.  Well, there’s, there’re hauntings, poltergeists, and then I completely forget, because I didn’t prep for this.  I completely forget the – but I just know it’s, it’s the, the entity that you interact with, and it’s, that’s neither haunting nor –

Sarah:  Social media ghost?  [Laughs]

Susanna:  Yeah, social media ghost.  Very, very active ghost.  The, the, like, it’s an entity –

Sarah:  Right.

Susanna:  – as opposed to a, a haunt, a resid-, there’s residual haunting and then – and poltergeist, which is a completely different thing.

Sarah:  Right.

Susanna:  And then you have the, the actual apparition that you, the ghost that you interact with, the one that sort of walks up to the room and, you know, pings you on the back of the head and says, hey, pay attention, I want to tell you something.  So the, that’s the, what we’re dealing with, is the –

Sarah:  Hey.

Susanna:  – the ghost that, that actually interacts with you.

Sarah:  The, those are the stories like, you know, I put the laundry on this bed, and I came in, and it was moved, or –

Susanna:  Yes.

Sarah:  – things are moving around, or I hear things moving.

Susanna:  Yeah.

Sarah:  We, we lived in a very old house in Jersey City, and at the time, my cats and the dog would all stare at the same spot down the hall –

Susanna:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  – and watch this one sort of spot, and they would all look at it, so we kind of knew something was there?

Susanna:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  But it only really, was only noticed really by them.  I never, I didn’t –

Susanna:  Right.

Sarah:  – I don’t think that I encountered anything.  It was mostly the pets going, oh, hey, it’s that thing again!

Susanna:  And pets are, you know, very much, this is something you hear again and again and again, in, in any kind of study is that pets are very sensitive to the presence of, of anything.

Sarah:  Yes.

Susanna:  Yeah, I got to use that in The Shadowy Horses.  I, I had the dog be aware of the, the ghost in The Shadowy Horses.  Before anybody else was, the dog was actually interacting with it, which gave me a good excuse to put a dog in the book, too, ‘cause, you know –

Sarah:  Oh, yeah, well.

Susanna:  – you always have to have a dog in the book, or a cat or –

Sarah:  Hey, you put a dog in the book and a dog on the cover –

Susanna:  Yeah.

Sarah:  – you are gold.

Susanna:  That’s true.  We never put the dogs on the cover, but I, I, actually I got this wonderful email.  My readers are just the coolest people.  I got a wonderful email yesterday from a, a reader whose boyfriend had given her, he actually got in touch with me before Christmas and asked if, if I would sign a little something in the front of her book –

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Susanna:  – because she was also a writer, and I love to encourage people that are, that are just finding their voices that way, so, I, yeah, I wrote a thing, and she got back in touch personally, and, and she said that she was, she turned out to be a wild animal vet, and among the other things she told me was that she had rescued this little Schnauzer mix who was abandoned outside a, a post office just a few weeks ago, and she had rescued him.

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Susanna:  She was fostering him, he was going to go to his forever home, and she sent me a little picture of him, and she had named him –

Sarah:  Aw!

Susanna:  – she had named him Frisk after the dog in A Desperate Fortune, so – I was fine until I got to that point, and then I kind of got all teary-eyed.  I’m like, oh, there’s a little dog on the planet that is, like, named for a character in one of my books.  That’s really awesome.  So.

Sarah:  You must get, because you, not only are you dealing with the, you know, the expected emotions and, and vulnerabilities that are inherent in writing about romance and, and history and –

Susanna:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  – the people who lived history, as opposed to the events that happened –

Susanna:  Right.

Sarah:  – you, you must get a lot of really interesting reader interaction, ‘cause I know when I’ve seen you at, at, at Surrey, which is the, the greatest –

Susanna:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  – writers’ conference in the universe –

Susanna:  It is the greatest writers’ conference.

Sarah:  It is not an exaggeration.

Susanna:  No.

Sarah:  So, I, I know at the Surrey International Writers Conference, you’ve had readers who’ve driven hours and hours to come and get a book signed for you.

Susanna:  Oh.  Our best one –

Sarah:  You must have really, really good reader stories.

Susanna:  Were you there the year that – you were there two years ago when the guy, the Czech –

Sarah:  Yes.

Susanna:  – Czech-Canadian guy drove in the rain five hours.  This is a man – this is a romantic story; I love this romantic story – for his wife who was a fan of mine and one other person, and he had come to get one specific book for his wife, and we, they didn’t have that book for sale, and he arrived, like, he was a very tall, handsome guy, he arrived dripping wet and came up to our table and, and wanted this one book –

Sarah:  I remember.  We were all kind of like, whoa!  Who is that?  Hello!  [Laughs]

Susanna:  I know.  Whose husband is that that drove in the rain, and can I have him too?  And they – so anyway, I, you know, you, you have to reward romance like that, so I, I sent him not only a signed copy of Mariana, which was the one he was after for his wife, but I also had a Czech copy of Mariana that he could read himself, so I sent him that.

Sarah:  Oh!

Susanna:  I sent them both of that, plus my, my latest one, ‘cause it’s like, you know, he drove in the rain.  It was a horrible night.

Sarah:  I remember; it was miserable.

Susanna:  It was stormy.  But, yeah, I, I get some, readers are wonderful, wonderful people, and I am just, I don’t know, I’m, I’m so appreciative of the fact that anybody, there are so many books out there for people to choose.  The fact that someone picks up one of mine and reads it is a wonderful thing.  The fact that they would then sit down and take time out of their day, because everybody has these ridiculously busy days now, and –

Sarah:  Yes.

Susanna:  – they, they’ve taken time out of their day to get in touch with me and tell me that they enjoyed the book, and that means an awful lot to me, and they never know they, that can hit me at just the right moment, ‘cause I always go through these, these valleys in the middle of writing my books where I, I –

Sarah:  This is the worst project ever!  This sucks!

Susanna:  Oh, exactly.

Sarah:  Yeah.

Susanna:  It, it’s a common thing; we all do it, and my friend Julie Cohen has a, you know, a blog post that she has up where she, you know, talks about this book sucks big parts of a donkey’s anatomy that probably aren’t, you know, safe for work to mention, but the, we, we just keep a link now to that post of Julie’s, and every time she gets in the middle of a book we just send her –

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Susanna:  – a link to her own blog post about it.  It’s like – because she was –

Sarah:  Which is just infuriating.

Susanna:  Well, you do, you want to throw the whole book in the garbage.  You’re – nobody’s ever going to read me again; my career is over –

Sarah:  This sucks!

Susanna:  – the publishers are going to stop buying me; this is terrible.  Every single book, and I’m on my thirteenth now.  Every single book.  So if a reader’s email reaches me at that particular moment, it can completely make my day.  And it also keeps your perspective, because you realize that on the other side of what you’re doing is a person who needs that story.

Sarah:  Yes.

Susanna:  And I, I find readers keep you in perspective a lot of ways, because if you get too puffed up, if you start reading, like, ooh, look at these five-star reviews –

Sarah:  Yep.

Susanna:  – then you’ll read these glorious reviews that are, like, one star, which is like, this was a big book that went nowhere, and it was about nothing, you know, and you’re going to kind of, like, okay –

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Susanna:  – that’s, that’s fair, too, you know, and, and everybody is allowed their own opinion.  So I’m a very, I’m a very pro-reader person.  The book is the reader’s.  Once it leaves me, it belongs to the reader, and the reader fills in the other half of it, and I know, you’ve probably heard me say this before, but there’s a, a great quote by Samuel Johnson, which is, the writer only begins a story, and the reader finishes it.

Sarah:  Yes.

Susanna:  And it’s, it’s exactly that.  The, I can give a book to four readers, and they’re all going to read a different book, because they’re bringing their own life, their own vision, their own experience and everything into that book.  They’re drawing different things out of it than what I intended to be there, and that’s the cool part about reading is you don’t read the same book.  So I, once the book is over, I, you know, I let the reader just take it and, and the only time that, that it’s hard for a writer when people are discussing something, and I do sit on my hands all the time, but the only time I, that you’re tempted to, to hop into a conversation is when people start talking about, I wonder why the, the writer chose to put that in here.  I wonder what they were thinking when they wrote that, and it’s kind of like, I know!

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Susanna:  I, I, I know!

Sarah:  I have it on very good authority.  [Laughs]

Susanna:  Pick me, pick me, pick – but, but you can’t hop in.

Sarah:  No, you can’t.

Susanna:  Like, elicited, if somebody writes to me and says, could you please explain why you did this –

Together:  – that’s different.

Susanna:  You know, then that’s fine, but the rest of the time, just let them, just let them talk.  It’s their book.  It’s, you know, I’m, I don’t even care.  I, my publishers –

Sarah:  You can’t change it.  It’s done.

Susanna:  But my publishers need to cover their ears right now, because I don’t even care if people pirate them, because not everybody has that money.  Not everybody has a library.  Not everybody has –

Sarah:  I have said this too.

Susanna:  You know, and, and, for me this whole piracy issue is way overblown.  It’s, it, people that run around trying to do takedown notices, it’s like, you might as well play Whac-A-Mole.  Remember Whac-A-Mole?  You’re old enough to remember Whac-A-Mole, right?  You know –

Sarah:  Of course I am!

Susanna:  And it’s, it’s ridiculous.  You just, most people are good people, and they will get the book however suits them.  They might borrow it from a friend; they might buy it used; they might borrow it from the library.  Those are all valid ways to read.

Sarah:  And if that’s how – I, I always think, okay, you just spent several hours reading something I wrote.

Susanna:  Yep.

Sarah:  I don’t care if it fell off the back of a truck –

Susanna:  Oh, yeah.

Sarah:  – and you have no idea where it came from; I am extremely flattered that you spent that time.

Susanna:  When I was in high school, I was a big Hall & Oates fan, and I will always say this, I was like, you know, I used to borrow my friend’s Hall & Oates records – records! – and make mix tapes of ‘em.  You know, I’m pretty sure Hall & Oates are not still gunning for me because I made a mix tape of their record without paying the royalty for it, so it’s, if my career ever comes down to being dependent on one writer, or one reader, you know, not pirating a book, then I’m in very serious shape, so I just think that readers need to be, I think readers get so many things thrown at them, you have to do this, you have to do that, you have to buy the book on the first day it’s out.  You have to buy it new, you have to – and it’s like, no, you don’t have to do anything.

Sarah:  Nope.

Susanna:  You owe us nothing.  We are the storytellers in the corner of the bazaar –

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Susanna:  – and in the old days, seriously, in the old days, I would have taken my blanket and set it down in a corner of the marketplace and started telling my story, and if people wanted to stop and listen to the story they would stop.  If they liked the story, they’d throw a few coins out.  If they really liked the story, they might come back the next week.  They might bring a friend of theirs the next week to come listen to it, and they might start searching out your little corner of the, the marketplace, and that’s what you’re doing as a writer is you’re trying to keep telling the best stories you can so people come to your corner of the marketplace.  But they might not like your story.  They might move on, and they don’t owe you anything.  If they want to go on and listen to the guy in the next corner, that’s, they’re allowed to do that.  If they want to come and not throw coins because they don’t like the story that much or they don’t have coins to throw, they can do that.  So I think a lot of writers, you know – and I’ll probably get hate mail after this – but I think a lot of writers just need to get over themselves and, and realize that we are not that special.  We are just storytellers.  Just like a mechanic fixes a car, just like a teacher teaches kids, you know, a cleaner cleans toilets, everybody fills a function in society, and we just tell the stories.  So I wish people would stop telling readers what they need to do.

Sarah:  I agree.  I think the, the book belongs to, the book, the experience of the book belongs to the individual readers, and you don’t –

Susanna:  Right.

Sarah:  – you don’t, as the writer, get to dictate how that happens –

Susanna:  Oh –

Sarah:  – or why it happens.  It’s –

Susanna:  No.

Sarah:  – it’s out of your control.  Relinquish control of it.  Once it’s published, it’s not like you can go find every copy and fix something.  I would love to do that, ‘cause there’s a typo –

Susanna:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  – that makes me bonkers, and I wish I could fix it, but I can’t.  Got to let it go.

Susanna:  There will always be a typo, Sarah.  There were always, it’s always –

Sarah:  There is – isn’t that the truth?

Susanna:  It’s always after you published the book; it’s never before.

Sarah:  My, my son is reading a book that he is, he is enjoying so much, he begged us to let him read at the dinner table, he, like, ran and got ready for bed and ran and got ready for school so he’d have extra time to read, and he, he came and found me last night, and he goes – he was just incensed, just horrified and appalled, and he’s, you know, he’s ten, so he’s really good at doing those two things –

Susanna:  Right, right.

Sarah:  – and he’s like, there is a, there is a typo in my book!

Susanna:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  And I’m like, oh, no, that does happen, ‘cause you know, these books are made by people, and we make –

Susanna:  Right.

Sarah:  – and I’m like, hey, there’s typos in my books, and then he was just, like, crushed.  Like, oh God, this perfect thing that I expected to be perfect, it has a typo.  Not only was it a typo, but I’m, I’m kind of proud in a sick way, because the problem was subject-verb agreement?

Susanna:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  And he picked it up!  He’s like, that’s wrong!  And I’m like, yeah, that, that, that is.  I –

Susanna:  You should be very proud of him.

Sarah:  I need, I need a moment.

[Laughter]

Sarah:  So before, before you go, I must ask you, ‘cause I always ask my guests, and I warned you ahead of time!

Susanna:  You did.

Sarah:  What have you been reading lately –

Susanna:  Well, I had –

Sarah:  – that you really recommend?

Susanna:  I had to look for fiction, because when I’m in the middle of research I’m reading –

Sarah:  It’s a lot of nonfiction.

Susanna:  No, I’m reading really sexy things like, you know, the correspondence between Governor Amherst and the guy that’s in charge of the French prisoners and, you know, I’m, I’m –

Sarah:  Woohoo!

Susanna:  – I’m doing all that kind of stuff, so I, I can’t really recommend that, but, you know.

Sarah:  I did a, I did a post interview with an archives librarian in New Jersey, and her stories about the letters that are in the New Jersey archives, like –

Susanna:  Ah.

Sarah:  – this farmer wrote a letter about, you know, pig farming, and now it’s in –

Susanna:  Yeah.

Sarah:  – the state library, and I always think, if you go back in time and tell that farmer, listen, dude, guess what?  That letter you totally wrote is going to be held onto –

Susanna:  Right.

Sarah:  – by the state, because it is important.

Susanna:  Well, I always think about people like –

Sarah:  I love letters!

Susanna:  I think about people like John Murray, who’s the, the hero of The Winter Sea, and you know –

Sarah:  Yep.

Susanna:  – features in a couple of the other books.  I mean, I think if you went back in time to, you know, 1708 and told John Murray that, okay, 300 years from now, you know, someone’s going to write your story, and it’s going to be on the New York Times bestseller list and all these women are going to think you’re really hot, you know, when he was standing up to his knees in the mud of the battlefield, he’d probably go – [snerk] – yeah, right, sure.  You know, you –

Sarah:  Okay, sure, lady.

Susanna:  Ohh-kay.  You know.

Sarah:  Pull the other one.  [Laughs]

Susanna:  Crazy woman.  But you just never know what’s going to happen.  So what have I been reading?  Well, when I’m writing, I’m a category girl.  I read category romance when I’m writing, because it’s like a really awesome TV movie for me.

Sarah:  Yep.

Susanna:  And, so I go back to comfort reads, and I’ve got three of them sitting here that I’ve been reading in the past couple of weeks.  One is – full disclosure: Molly O’Keefe is a very good friend of mine, and, but her writing just rocks.  I just love Molly’s writing, and not just the, the really new, sexy, explicit stuff, but all of her writing.  So I have A Man Worth Keeping by Molly O’Keefe, which is one of her old Super Romances, and I love it, and it’s one of my, one of the Mitchells of Riverview Inn series ones, and it’s just sort of one I go back to again to get this really nice feeling.

Sarah:  So A Man Worth Keeping is a book worth keeping?

Susanna:  A Man Worth Keeping is definitely a book worth keeping.  I have a Tanya Michaels book.  Tanya Michaels writes American Romance for Harlequin, and this book I just stumbled across, and it, it was so, it was the only time I’d really seen a secret baby plot that worked for me?

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Susanna:  Because she did it so cleverly.  It was, it was one of those things where the woman had just discovered she was pregnant.  The, and there were all the, like, I won’t go into the story because there are all these mitigating circumstances, but she had just discovered she was pregnant, and while she was trying to decide how she was going to deal with this, was she going to tell the guy, was she not going to tell the guy, he found out, and he was pissed off that she hadn’t told him, so, so it’s, it’s, it’s about how they get from that place to a real romance.  It’s called Her Secret, His Baby by Tanya Michaels, and it’s, if anybody thinks that you can’t read a secret baby plot that convinces you that it could happen, read that one.  It’s really good, and I love her relationship with her brother in that one, her brothers.  And a really old one, because I’m old –

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Susanna:  No, I am, I’m going to be 50 this month, so, yeah.

Sarah:  Oh, happy birthday!

Susanna:  Thank you!  Sara Craven’s Flame of Diablo, which is, interestingly enough, came out, I think, a year, maybe, I think a year before Romancing the Stone came out, but it is about, Sarah, a woman who goes out to Colombia to bring back her brother and needs a, a guide to take her, and the guide is this sort of disreputable, disheveled guy, and they’re looking for an emerald.  So it’s this really cool, interesting thing, it, it’s –

Sarah:  Ohhh, really?

Susanna:  Yes, so –

Sarah:  Ah!

Susanna:  I mean, I’m a, I am a huge Romancing the Stone fan, don’t get me wrong, but –

Sarah:  I am 110% here for that.

Susanna:  – it would not surprise me at all if the woman who wrote Romancing the Stone had not writ-, or read Flame of Diablo the year before and got, got her thinking about Colombia and emeralds and stuff.

Sarah:  And this predates the movie?  [Gasps]

Susanna:  It does.  It was – let me see – it’s, well, it’s like, it’s not, you know, it’s not, it’s not a copy of –

Sarah:  No.  No, no, no.  I totally get it.

Susanna:  But it, but the, let’s see – yeah, it was published in January 1980, and I think, I’m pretty –

Sarah:  I’m looking it up right now.

Susanna:  You look it up right now.  I’m pretty sure it was ’81.

Sarah:  Yeah, Romancing the Stone was produced in ’84.

Susanna:  Yeah, so there you go.

Sarah:  I don’t when the mov-, I don’t know when the script would have been written, but yeah.

Susanna:  Actually the, the original of this was, the Mills & Boon one was ’79.

Sarah:  Whoa!

Susanna:  Yep.

Sarah:  That’s cool.

Susanna:  Mark was off in the wilds of Diablo looking for a legendary emerald, and the one man who could guide her to the territory was the handsome, arrogant Vitas de Mendoza.  Vitas de Mendoza has an eyepatch, and he dresses in black leather, and he’s just all kinds of bad, but it’s a really good book.  I really enjoy, I, I love a lot of the old white-covered medallion Harlequin Presents.  They’re sort of my, my crack.

Sarah:  Oh, my.

Susanna:  Anne Mathers, Sara Craven, you know, it’s just – oh, and I, Beverly Jenkins.  Love, love, love Beverly Jenkins’s books.  My favorites of hers, and I just reread Captured, but my, my new favorite is Midnight, which is actually set in revolutionary States, revolutionary U.S.A. –

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Susanna:  – and it’s, she does, I always say that Beverly kind of does what I do, but with African-American history, because she goes and looks for those little moments and –

Sarah:  Yes.

Susanna:  – and things that you’re not taught, and –

Sarah:  Yes.

Susanna:  – and with real people and real incidents, and brings them out and, and makes you connect to them, and I just, I just love her stuff.  And I’m also starting –

Sarah:  You know about her new book this month, right?

Susanna:  Yes!

Sarah:  Okay, good.

Susanna:  Yes, yes, yes.  Yes, I do.  I, but I’ve got that on my, my list for sort of, I have to reward myself, ‘cause I have to actually write more of the book I’m writing, ‘cause my deadline approacheth, so –

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Susanna:  I, I sort of, like, anything new coming out this year, I save until after June.

Sarah:  Yep.

Susanna:  But I am just starting two books that, that I was given to read that aren’t out yet.  One of them is just out, I think:  Nicola Cornick’s House of Shadows, which is, Nicola works for Ashdown House in, in England.

Sarah:  I’m pretty sure that you are the second podcast guest to mention this book.

Susanna:  Yeah, well, Nicola’s really neat.  I like Nicola a lot.  Again, I know her.

Sarah:  Right.

Susanna:  We, I, the thing about being a writer is you end up meeting a lot of writers, right, and, and a lot of the time you will seek them out because you like their stuff.  You’ve –

Sarah:  Yes.

Susanna:  – you’re at these conferences, and you’re like, ooh, look!

Sarah:  Oh!

Susanna:  There’s Meljean Brook –

Sarah:  Oh!

Susanna:  – or ooh, look, there’s, you know –

Sarah:  Yes.

Susanna:  And I’m fortunate that, that I, you know, I’m, I’m on sort of lunching and cocktailing terms with a lot of really, really interesting and good and wonderful writers, but Nicola was one of the, the first ones that I, that I got in contact with, and, and we have similarities because of our, you know, she works for a historic house; I used to, you know, be the curator of a historic house.  But she’s done this, this, it’s not just two time periods, it’s three –

Sarah:  It’s three, yes.

Susanna:  – interwoven at Ashdown House, so it’s called House of Shadows.  And then the last one that I’m just going to be starting is called In Another Life by Julie Christine Johnson, and it’s one that Sourcebooks sometimes, they, they take really good care of me, but they also send me all these free books that they think I –

Sarah:  Isn’t that just the worst?

Susanna:  – that they – I know, it’s horrible –

Sarah:  It’s just terrible.

Susanna:  – that they think I might be interested in, and they’re not, it’s not –

Sarah:  Oh-ho!

Susanna:  – it’s not done in a, you know, hey, can you blurb this book kind of way, because they’re –

Sarah:  No, it’s this –

Susanna:  – they’re not like that at – it’s like, oh, we, we’re really excited about that, ‘cause at Sourcebooks, that’s what they’re like.  They, they all get very excited about the new books, and this one, I think, is coming out in February, but it’s set, they thought I would really enjoy it because it’s set in, it’s, again, it’s multi-time, it’s kind of time, oh, time-stretching I guess is how you’d call it, but the –

Sarah:  Ooh!

Susanna:  – it’s set in the south of France and has to do with the Cathars in the south of France in medieval times, as well as the present day, and the present day here when it’s a woman who’s dealing with the grief of the loss of her husband and sort of finds that – and the tagline is “Three men are trapped in time.  One woman could save them all,” which is very hmm, no, but it’s, it’s very much my alley as well, so that’s what I’m reading in fiction.  And like I say, I’m reading a crapton of nonfiction, and I read a lot of old stuff off archive.org and, and all these little books, strange books that I find in the library, and strange books that I order, and my, my entire writing room is going to, you know, fall over and sink into the swamp like the thing, like the castle in –

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Susanna:  – Holy Grail because it’s just, my bookshelves are, are supposed to be just stacked two deep, but I’ve actually, you know, I don’t tell my husband this, but I’ve stacked them three deep in most places and –

Sarah:  Yeah, you can totally do more than two deep –

Susanna:  Yeah.

Sarah:  – on a good bookshelf.  We won’t tell.

Susanna:  And it’s fourteen linear feet of ‘em all the way down the room, so they, you know, they’re, they’re pretty stacked, but I, I just –

Sarah:  These are important things!

Susanna:  – I can’t help it!  You know, they –

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Susanna:  – and, and I, you know, this one of the reasons why I will never ever be one of those people that, that gets in people’s faces for buying at used bookstores, because I’m a used bookstore junkie.  You find the neatest things.  I just went down to New York with my, my elder kid who, all they wanted for Christmas was a trip, a weekend in New York, and I’m like, okay!  [Laughs]

Sarah:  Okay, sure, yeah.  Not a problem.

Susanna:  I, I can do that.  We went to the Strand Bookstore and –

Sarah:  Oh, that’s just a –

Susanna:  I know.

Sarah:  That’s a legitimate rabbit hole.

Susanna:  It was a giant rabbit hole, but I always find, you find these little tiny books, and that usually becomes the start of another huh! moment that could lead to a book in the future, and I found this really neat little tiny slim old volume of, of a journal of a German indentured servant who had come over and been stuck in I believe Pennsylvania, and it was, it was, again, a story I’d never heard about.  I’d never heard about this particular thing, and, and the, and he himself had gone back and warned people in Germany not to come over and all the horrors that were going to happen to them as an indentured servant.  So, you know, when I get time I’ll read that and see where he leads me, but, but right now I’m, I’m very, very happy being lost in the, the 1750s on Long Island with my French Canadian hero and my American heroine having a good time.

Sarah:  Cool!  Well good luck with your book.

Susanna:  Thank you!

Sarah:  I hope the writing is easy.  And thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me today.

Susanna:  Oh, thanks so much for, for calling.  I mean it’s, it’s always fun to take a little bit of time out of my day and talk, and I just, your blog is one of my favorite blogs anyway, so.

Sarah:  Oh, thank you!  I appreciate that!

Susanna:  No problem.

Sarah:  I always figure there’s, like, six total people looking at it in any given, you know, year.  [Laughs]

Susanna:  Yeah, no, no.  No, my, my morning routine is very set.  My morning routine is pour a cup of coffee –

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Susanna:  – open up Smart Bitches, read, read whatever – and, and usually the reviews, you know, I’m a big movie person too, so.  Movies I have seen that I would recommend:  everybody –

Sarah:  Oh –

Susanna:  – everybody needs to go see Spotlight.  Everybody needs to go see Spotlight.  It was an amazing film, and – I mean, I’m not just saying that.  My, my agent’s husband is in it, but – [laughs]

Sarah:  Oh, cool!

Susanna:  – but, but the, it really hit me on a very deep level, and it was a beautifully made movie.  It was a wonderfully constructed and made and written movie.  It was really good.  I haven’t seen Michael Keaton be that good in a long time.  Yeah.

Sarah:  Wow!

Susanna:  And it’s got Mark Ruffalo in it.  How can you not like a movie with –

Sarah:  Yes, there, there’s, there’s the addition of many excellent people in that feel.

Susanna:  It’s, it’s a wonderful film.  And just last week I saw The Big Short, which was also very, very good, very well done, so.  But I, but Spotlight, if you have one movie to see this year, that’s the one I would make it.

Sarah:  [Laughs] I, two of my reviewers live in Boston, and –

Susanna:  Oh, yeah.

Sarah:  – and they saw it and were like, this is incredible.

Susanna:  It was just so well done, and it’s hard to do an ensemble – for me, it’s hard to do a movie where you know the ending, right?

Sarah:  Yes.

Susanna:  There are few directors who can do that.  Ron Howard does it.  If I see Ron Howard’s name on a movie I go, just because he’s so good at doing that.  Like, the Apollo 13.  I’m old enough to remember watching Apollo 13 splash down, so I knew they got out of it.  I knew they were fine.

Sarah:  Yes.

Susanna:  I knew they survived, and I was still, through that whole movie, on the edge of my seat.

Sarah:  Yep.

Susanna:  So when you can do that as a, as a film maker – and I learn a lot from film makers.  I learn an awful lot from film makers.  When I –

Sarah:  Even Titanic, for all its flaws –

Susanna:  Oh –

Sarah:  – you know it’s going to sink, and by the time you get to that part you’re like, oh, no.

Susanna:  It’s sinking, oh, no!  But the, I mean there’re some film makers that are just so, so brilliant.  John Sayles does awesome movies.  Lone Star is one of the great, great films.  I mean, I fell in love with Chris Cooper in, in Lone Star, and he will hold my heart for a very long time.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Susanna:  It’s, it’s just such a – he’s, he’s all, he’s, well, you know my type of hero is always the sort of quieter, understated guy.  They’re not really alpha, they’re not really beta, they’re, they’re kind of theta.  [Laughs]

Sarah:  Yep.

Susanna:  You know, they’re, they’re a bit of both, but they’re, there’s a lot going on under the surface.  And Chris Cooper in Lone Star is very much that, that thing, but when you hear John Sayles talk about film making and how to do historical films, you can learn so much as a writer, so I like to do that cross-pollination thing and – my grand-dad was a, a film projectionist.  He ran the, the projection cameras at a movie house from, oh, gosh, you know, from, like, the ‘30s –

Sarah:  That’s cool!

Susanna:  – up until the time he retired, so he, that was his job.  He went down and watched movies, like, you know, four or five times a, a day, and the, so I get that from him.  I can go back and see a movie again and again and again, and that’s, that’s my, that’s my relaxing time when I’m writing.

[music]

Sarah:  And that is all for this week’s episode.  Thank you to Susanna Kearsley for spending so much time with me.  If you would like to learn more about Susanna Kearsley, here are some things for you to know:  her most recent book was Named of the Dragon, and you can find her on her website at susannakearsley.com and on Twitter @SusannaKearsley.  I will also link to both her Twitter feed and her website on the show notes for this podcast on smartbitchestrashybooks.com, and I’ll also link to all of the books that we discussed and mentioned, because, well, we are all victims of the same lack of impulse control, me as much as anyone else.

This podcast was brought to you by Renee Ahdieh, author of The Wrath & the Dawn, published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons Books for Young Readers, available in print and eBook.  Each dawn brings death, but can love change the story?  This intoxicating retelling for A Thousand and One Nights will leave you begging for book two, The Rose & the Dagger, coming Summer 2016.

Each podcast has a transcript, and each podcast transcript this month is sponsored by Kensington, publishers of Mercury Striking by New York Times bestselling author Rebecca Zanetti.  The first in a thrilling new apocalyptic series, Rebecca Zanetti brings her trademark high-octane action and sizzling sensuality to the mean streets of a chillingly believable L.A. devastated by a deadly bacterium.  Part romantic suspense, part medical thriller, part apocalypse drama, don’t miss this thrill ride through post-pandemic society, where the survival of mankind hangs in the balance and where love blooms even under the most dire of circumstances.  On sale January 29th, 2016.

Our music is provided by Sassy Outwater.  You can find her on Twitter talking about really interesting things @SassyOutwater.  This is Shadow Orchestra.  This track is called “Sweet as a Nut.”  You can find out about Shadow Orchestra on their MySpace page, and they’re also on iTunes and Amazon and wherever you buy your fine, fine, funky tunes.

Future podcasts will include many discussions about romance, because that is how we roll.  If you have ideas or suggestions, feedback, a question, comment, need a book recommendation, want to tell me about something that you liked or that you didn’t like?  Cool!  You can email the podcast at [email protected], or you can call and leave a message, and this is kind of cool because, you know, technology is as rad as it is?  You can leave a message in our Google voicemail box, which is a U.S.-based number.  You ready for the number?  You should write it down, and you should totally call.  The number is 1-201-371-DBSA.  Give us your name and where you’re calling from and leave us a message, and we would be more than thrilled to work that into an upcoming podcast, ‘cause y’all are awesome and you know lots of things.

But in the meantime, on behalf of Susanna, everyone here, and myself, we wish you the very best of reading.  Have a great weekend.

[beautiful music]