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"We're giving you a French flap," my publisher said.

"That's fantastic!" I said.

Then I immediately Googled "French flap."

Which it turns out is not, as I feared, some new variant on a Brazilian wax.

A French flap is a fancy-pants design in which the cover includes an extra folded bit on each side, which gives the publisher more room to tell you about the book, and gives you a built-in bookmark to fold into place. (Unless of course you decide to read the book in one sitting, in which case, I'm sure you can find some creative use for your flap page).

The French flap says, exquisite physical object. But, being bilingual, it also says pas trop cher. A French-flapped tome is not only elegant, it's less expensive, less heavy to schlep around, and less of a space-hog on your bookshelf than a hardback.

Yes, I said it. My book, The Secrets of Mary Bowser, is not coming out in hardback. This is the kind of news that until not long ago ...

Describe your latest book.
It is titled Birdseye: The Adventures of a Curious Man, and it is coming out in May from Doubleday. This is the first ever autobiography of Clarence Birdseye, the man who developed the frozen food industry. Birdseye could be called a foodie in that he thought about food constantly. Every letter he wrote was describing a meal he had recently enjoyed or an interesting dish he had sampled. But, born in 1886, he was a 19th-century foodie. Born at the height of the industrial revolution, he believed that industry would make food wonderful. He constantly thought of ways to industrialize food. He even worked with farmers to make their products more suitable to industry. His dream was for high quality fresh food to be made available to everyone. He saw this as a growing movement in the world. He imagined his native New York food self-sufficient, growing their produce hydroponically on roof tops and freezing it to have throughout the year.

He was a curious man in both senses of the word, interested in absolutely everything, and in how to improve it. But ...

To an author, librarians are superheroes. First, they are incredible sources when we are researching and writing. Then, they are vital connectors for helping readers find our finished books. And if librarians in general are superheroes, Nancy Pearl is the superduperhero, the librarian so cool she has her own action figure. So when Nancy Pearl defines the four elements that make a person fall in love with a book, who wouldn't listen?

Story. Character. Setting. Language. Pearl calls these four elements doorways , "because when we open a book, read the first few pages, and choose to go on, we enter the world of that book." And since books take us places, I figure we might as well carry Pearl's four-door metaphor into sedan-land. That way, I can hotwire it and take it for a blog-entry spin.

Here's what Pearl means by her four doors:

A book heavy on story is a page-turner, and we fall headlong into its can't-wait-to-find-out-what-happens-nextness. What in graduate school I was taught to call narrative desire and what in ...

I didn't know I was going to be a novelist.

Or a Civil War Enthusiast.

So how did this happen?

Some years ago — never mind how long precisely — I was a geeky academic-wannabe, sitting in my grad school library, reading a book of women's history. Buried in the book's 300 pages were a few paragraphs about Mary Bowser. Born a slave to the wealthy Van Lew family of Richmond, Virginia, Mary was freed by Bet, the headstrong (guess what that is code for) Van Lew daughter and sent North to be educated. But Mary returned to the South and, during the Civil War, became a spy for the Union... by pretending to be a slave to the family of Confederate President Jefferson Davis.

Wait a minute — I thought the Civil War was boring. A seemingly endless list of dates, battlefields, and names of generals we had to memorize in high school. Who knew ...

Some six or seven years ago, I heard a story about an employee of a coastal restaurant who beat a one-legged gull to death with a stick out back of the establishment. Apparently the gull served as the establishment's mascot, and for whatever reason, if sociopathic behavior can be said to have logical reasons, the employee bashed the bird to death.

The man who recounted the incident to me heard about it from an eyewitness who later called the police. An investigation ensued, but the perpetrator wasn't arrested, even though killing a gull constitutes a crime under federal migratory bird law, punishable by a maximum fine of $15,000 and a maximum prison sentence of two years, depending on the offense.

The tale of the senseless and horrific murder of a gull has never left my mind. I can also never forget driving behind a pick up truck and watching a male driver purposely swerve into the shoulder of Highway 20 and kill a gull. Who are these people? What happened to their moral development? What books do they read to their children? If I had had my cell phone with ...

I started and finished A Sense of Direction in one evening; I couldn't really stop thinking about it, so I couldn't put it down. I found it incredibly honest, messily lovely, and so damn smart — a really deep, intelligent, generous, funny look at life and purpose, which never relied on easy answers. It made me want to go on a pilgrimage, and it made me think differently about forgiveness. I haven't been so impressed with a memoir or travel book since Geoff Dyer — and as much as I love his work, A Sense of Direction frequently felt more thoughtful and self-aware than Dyer's books sometimes can. Thank you so much for publishing it; it genuinely moved me.

—Jill Owens, in an email to the publicity director at Riverhead Books

A Sense of Direction is Lewis-Kraus's account of three pilgrimages: the Camino de Santiago, an ancient pilgrimage route across Spain which has become secular and fairly popular; a circular pilgrimage, the 88 Temples of Shikoku in Japan; and a trip to Ukraine for Rosh Hashanah with his brother and father. It's also a sharp-eyed and extremely funny meditation on desire, discipline, friendship, work, family, ...

Early on in the writing of my books, I choose a title. It's usually a title that reminds me what I think the book is about. Sometimes the titles change, as I never really know what a book is about until I've written it. But the title is my North Star to steer by as I navigate my way, paragraph by paragraph, towards the finished book I'm imagining I am writing .

After I'm done with the writing, other people enter into the process, all with opinions about the title I've given my book. First comes my editor, Shannon Ravenel, who has been reading drafts of the manuscript, but has held off commenting on the title until now. She wouldn't think of nixing a navigation device while I am still using it. I recall how during the writing of my first novel, she kept mum about my working title: Daughters of Invention, based on a malaprop of the mami in the book. When I turned in my final draft, Shannon told me that my title was just too dull for the ...

It should not be so hard to write both poetry and fiction. Both arts, after all, make use of the same materials, words and punctuation. Poems frequently utilize the strategies of fiction, which in turn, in the hands of the best writers, listens carefully to the sounds that it is making. Even poems which do not tell a story contain descriptions of people or settings, and all poems have to figure out how to handle time, which is usually the tallest obstacle that stories also have to hurdle.

And yet few writers have been officially crowned in both genres — just Thomas Hardy and D. H. Lawrence come unequivocally to mind. In my high school in the 1970s, we read Sylvia Plath's Bell Jar, but the critical consensus has come to be that Plath's novel lacks the maturity of her poems — even Plath dismissed the novel as a potboiler — and it is not now given equal footing in the canon. Prolific novelists, such as John Updike and Margaret Atwood, ...

One of the things I discovered in writing a nonfiction book is that unlike your fictional characters, the people you meet and write about enter your life, not just your imagination. They call you up on the phone or send you holiday letters at Christmas. After all, you've written about them, given them a second life inside a book, and that's a special bond. And if you have inherited those sociable Dominican genes, which I have, you find yourself with a lot of new friends. This without even joining Facebook!

With A Wedding in Haiti, people who were not an integral part of the story became a part, however briefly, of our lives. Two who led me on a little side journey with a happy ending were the sisters Soliana and Rica, nieces of Charlie, in whose house we stayed both times we visited Piti's family in Moustique.

Soliana and Rica
One of the pictures I sent their mom in Florida.
©Julia Alvarez

That first weary ...

I wouldn't have met Piti if it hadn't been for a chichigua.

To translate chichigua as a kite does not do justice to these beautiful creations of Dominican folk art. When I was a girl growing up in the Dominican Republic, chichiguas made their appearance in the skies above us in the spring, windy season, just in time for Easter.

Chichigua soaring high in the Haitian sky
(©Julia Alvarez)

We often made them at home, out of whittled bamboo sticks and colorful waxy paper. We needed string; we needed scissors and glue; we needed rags to tear up for the long, whirling tails. We needed someone with patience of an old person and the soul of a child to help us cut and paste the paper on the frame just right so our chichigua would fly. But we children were in charge, because chichiguas, as the core of the word implies, were for chichís, little kids like us who needed to soar above our small, cramped place in a world that belonged to the adults .