PowellsBooks.Blog
Authors, readers, critics, media − and booksellers.

Describe your book:
My very first book, 50 Hikes With Kids: Oregon and Washington, is a handpicked selection of the most kid-friendly hikes in the region. Over the course of a winter I was on the ground, hiking trails, finding hidden gems, and recording data to come up with the best trails to get kids excited about the outdoors. All the essential details are in there to make exploring a breeze — easy to follow maps, distances and elevations (all easy to moderate and under 4 miles), and tons of fun scavenger hunts to keep the kids engaged!
 
What was your favorite book as a child?
The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster. This book introduced me to maps and I fell in love...

Being the most sentient form of life on a planet can be a lonely business. We humans are constantly looking for our reflection in the animal kingdom — we want the sea otters holding hands to be “in love” and our dog’s smile to mean it is happy. Our urge to anthropomorphize is compulsive, but it is especially distracting when it comes to observing our closest animal cousin, the chimpanzee, which is something I discovered firsthand when I had the chance to join the primatologist Dr. Catherine Hobaiter and her team studying the communication of wild chimps in Uganda. 

Our expedition began at the tail end of the night in order to catch the chimps as they woke...

So, as a writer, I write a lot of sequels. And because I write a lot of sequels, I sometimes worry that I'm going to write a book that someone who is new to me is not going to want to read. The reason for that makes perfect sense to me as a reader: they're worried that they're going to get into the story late. They won't understand what's going on. They're going to be confused by events, and that's going to make them angry. Then they're not going to have any fun reading my book. I think this is a serious problem, especially in science fiction and fantasy, where so many books are sequels, or in a series, or otherwise part of a larger universe...

I was new to the writers’ room. Mostly, I’d been helping myself to the ubiquitous snacks that filled the otherwise unremarkable, whiteboard-lined office. Keeping my head down. Listening and learning what it meant to be a TV writer. But when somebody pitched that our main character — the president — should fire his FBI director, I saw an opportunity to prove my worth.

“Guys,” I started in, “No president these days would realistically fire his FBI director while under investigation.” Of course, the real often bends to the dramatic in my new business, but the room, deferring to my expertise, agreed it was a nonstarter for our pretend president. We broke for what I had already gathered was the linchpin of the day...

Describe your latest book.
My latest poetry book, Sea of Strangers, invites you to go beyond love and loss to explore themes of self-discovery and empowerment as you navigate your way around the human heart. Sea of Strangers follows my internationally bestselling debut novel, Sad Girls, an emotionally charged coming-of-age story, where young love, dark secrets, and tragedy collide.

What was your favorite book as a child?
The Green Wind by Thurley Fowler was my childhood favorite. Other notable mentions include The Chocolate War, Hating Alison Ashley, Matilda, The Ordinary Princess, The Outsiders, The Singing Tree, Deenie, and Looking for Alibrandi...

Summer of 2000, after the first of a two-year MFA program at NYU, I had gone to Detroit for the annual Cave Canem retreat for African American poets, and met Don, another aspiring bard. Poets were arriving from all over the country. Like me, Don was from New York. I had only lived in New York for a year, having escaped the tedium of my native South Jersey, but because I had ridden the New York subway uptown a few times, I felt entitled to some metropolitan cred. Later that summer, after we got back home from Cranbrook, a kind of high-art school and museum where the retreat convened that year, Don introduced me to Ginger, my future wife...

“Write what you know.” 

Platitudes. No fun. Yet...

You’re gonna write what you know no matter what you write. And it’s not going to come out the way you think it is. It’s not a matter of writing about science because you’re a scientist, or setting your book on a farm because you grew up on one. It’s about taking pieces of the life you’ve lived, almost always subconsciously, and discovering you’ve put them in the story long after you’ve written the end.

The rough draft for Unbury Carol was written in a 15-day explosion of some 5,000 words a day, a gloriously manic run. The rewrites, of course, took forever. That’s how it goes for us pansters, those of us who write without an outline...

I was nine when Where Eagles Dare, with Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood, came to Molde, the small city where I grew up. The film was rated 15, so my little brother Knut and I had to stay home while our older brother, Per, went to see it. When he got home, he called the two of us into his room, closed the door and dimmed the light. Then he took us through the entire thing. About the Allied general being held prisoner by the Nazis, who has to be rescued if D-Day is going to be a success. About the impenetrable fortress in the mountains, the planning, the internal conflicts in Major Smith’s group. About the way Clint Eastwood smokes, and the fight on the roof of the cable car. All 156 minutes of it...

Describe your latest book. 
And Now We Everything: On Motherhood Before I Was Ready is a book of interconnected essays about my experience with pregnancy and new motherhood. As Booklist put it, “This is not a book about the wonders of motherhood but about the tension between culturally inherited ideals and the realities of lived, bodily experience.” It’s very personal and specific to my life, but I hope it gives women permission to feel all sorts of things about their own experiences. This was my attempt to parse all the overwhelming and confusing feelings I had during a major life transition, to explain myself to myself. It worked!...

Every book Tracy K. Smith has published has won an award or received an honor. Her first book of poetry, The Body's Question, won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize; her second, Duende, won the James Laughlin Award; and her third, Life on Mars, upped the ante and won the Pulitzer. Her memoir, Ordinary Light, was a National Book Award finalist (as well as one of our 25 Memoirs to Read Before You Die). And of course, she has just begun her second appointment as United States Poet Laureate. Which begs the question: What's in store for her new book of poetry, Wade in the Water?

If you know Smith's work, it's not surprising that she's so critically acclaimed...