{"id":80,"date":"2021-09-19T09:45:45","date_gmt":"2021-09-19T09:45:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/?p=80"},"modified":"2021-09-19T09:45:45","modified_gmt":"2021-09-19T09:45:45","slug":"lone-star-listens-susan-wittig-albert","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/?p=80","title":{"rendered":"Lone Star Listens: Susan Wittig Albert"},"content":{"rendered":"
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As professor of English at UT-Austin and New Orleans’s Sophie Newcomb College and administrator at Southwest Texas State University — not to mention role-model author — <\/span>Susan Wittig Albert<\/span> has inspired and influenced a full generation of writers. Her Work of Her Own: A Woman’s Guide to Creating a Right Livelihood was recently released in a 20th Anniversary edition. It was our good fortune to talk with her on publication day for the Lake Union Press edition of A Wilder Rose,<\/span> the acclaimed fictional treatment of the life of Rose Wilder Lane that she had originally self-published.<\/em><\/p>\n

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LONE STAR LITERARY LIFE: Susan, you are certainly a prolific author under a variety of names. Why did you use pen names, and how many books have you published?<\/strong><\/p>\n

SUSAN WITTIG ALBERT: When I was writing YAs, I was a ghostwriter for a number of series under different names: Carolyn Keene, the Hardy Boys, Francine Pascal, and others. When my husband, Bill Albert, and I wrote together, the publisher wanted us to write under one name: we chose Robin Paige, and published a dozen books under that pseudonym. All my other writing for adults has been done under my own name. At last count, I\u2019ve published about 110 books, but that\u2019s an estimate, and doesn\u2019t include my academic books or textbooks. I stopped counting when I got past 100. : )<\/p>\n

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Many authors lament the rapidly changing nature of publishing. You seem to have embraced the range of options\u2014you are traditionally published, and you are also a publisher with your own imprint. How would you characterize the current state of publishing?<\/strong><\/p>\n

These days, there are a great many more options than there were when I started writing full time in the mid-1980s. But even then, there were more options than most people acknowledged. There\u2019s always work\u2014even paying work\u2014If you are determined to write, persistent in your efforts, and willing to take risks.<\/p>\n

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Readers may not know that you are the founder of the Story Circle Network, a nonprofit organization for women writers. What prompted you to found Story Circle?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I was teaching journaling and memoir writing and needed a book for my students. So I wrote Writing from Life<\/em>.<\/span> That book led to Story Circle, which I founded in 1997. We\u2019re almost twenty years old now, and sponsor a number of excellent programs. To see what we\u2019re doing, go to www.storycircle.org<\/a><\/span><\/strong> and look around.<\/p>\n

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As a fellow gardener, I enjoy reading your blog. I also appreciate protagonist\/herbalist\/herb shop owner China Bayles, and the metaphorical and literary roles herbs play in those books. Can you tell us more about the ways gardening informs your writing?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I couldn\u2019t write China\u2019s mysteries if I didn\u2019t have a pretty solid background in gardening\u2014I would make too many mistakes! Gardening and homesteading (which includes chickens, ducks, geese, cows, sheep\u2014the whole ee-i-ee-i-o barnyard) were major subjects in my first two memoirs, Alone Together<\/span> <\/em>and An Extraordinary Year<\/span><\/em>. I blog about gardening, too. It\u2019s a part of my life. While I still have a large veggie garden, though, I no longer grow exotics, just native plants and those that do well here in the Hill Country. I think I\u2019d call myself a nature writer, rather than a garden writer. To see what I\u2019m doing in that area, visit my blog: www.susanalbert.typepad.com\/lifescapes<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

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As a child, did you want to write? When did you decide to make it a career?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yes: I was determined to be a writer when I grew up. I decided to make it a career when I was nineteen and began publishing YA short stories, but got sidetracked into college and an academic life. At midlife, I left the university behind for full-time writing.<\/p>\n

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There\u2019s been a lot of dialogue in the book press lately on the question\u2014\u201cCan writing be taught?\u201d As a former academic and an author\/publisher, how would you answer that question?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Writing skills\u2014and yes, these are necessary!\u2014can be taught and learned, as long as there\u2019s some aptitude and desire, just as dance steps can be learned. And a strong, sympathetic, empathetic teacher can show students how other writers work, can introduce them to excellent writing, and encourage them to take off on their own. But the rest of it is the writer\u2019s own doing, on her own. If she wants to learn, she has to be her own teacher.<\/p>\n

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What advice would you give to new writers\u2014especially to those who are seeking their dream to publish later in life?<\/strong><\/p>\n

To new writers, read read read read read. (And don\u2019t neglect basic skills.) To midlife writers: Yes, you can, yes, yes. But you won\u2019t know what you\u2019re capable of doing until you stretch out and reach as far as you can. (But you do need basic skills, too.)<\/p>\n

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What\u2019s the best thing to happen to publishing since your career started?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Word processing (I started with a manual typewriter!). Then electronic publishing and online ebook retailing of author-published works. Writers no longer have to wait until a gatekeeper-agent agrees to represent them. They can put the work out themselves. That doesn\u2019t mean they\u2019ll attract lots of readers. But at least they\u2019ll have a foot in the door.<\/p>\n

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Here\u2019s the most important topic of all: describe your quintessential Texas meal!<\/strong><\/p>\n

Pork ribs, beans, and coleslaw or potato salad, with slices of big, fat, ripe tomatoes, a hunk of hot garlic bread, and a cold beer.<\/p>\n

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Interview with multi-genre Texas author<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":79,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[229,9,8,178],"class_list":["post-80","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-authorinterview","tag-lonestarliterarylife","tag-lonestarliterarycom","tag-susanwittigalbert"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=80"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/79"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=80"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=80"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=80"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}