Evy Journey has
always been fascinated with words and seduced by beautiful prose. She loves
Jane Austen and invokes her spirit every time she spins tales of love, loss,
and finding one's way—stories she interweaves with mystery or intrigue and sets
in various locales. SPR (Self Publishing Review) awarded Evy the 2015
Independent Woman Author bronze for her writing.
She's lived and
traveled in many places, from Asia to Europe. Often she's ended up in Paris,
though—her favorite place in the world. She's an observer-wanderer. A flâneuse,
as the French would say.
The mind is
what fascinates her most. Armed with a Ph.D., she researched and spearheaded
the development of mental health programs. And wrote like an academic. Not a
good thing if you want to sound like a normal person. So, in 2012, she began to
write fiction (mostly happy fiction) as an antidote.
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Elise thought she knew her mother.
Agnieszka Halverson is a caring woman, a great cook, and an exceptional piano
player; but living in a secure, predictable world, she’s also a little dull.
Her world is
Born to immigrant parents weighed down by
their roots, Agnieszka takes solace in learning to play the piano, taught by a
sympathetic aunt who was a concert pianist in Poland before World War II. But
when her aunt betrays her and her parents cast her aside for violating their
traditional values, can Agnieszka’s music sustain her? Can she, at eighteen,
build a life on her own?
When she finally bares her soul to her
children, Agnieszka hopes they can accept that she has a past that’s as complex
as theirs; that she’s just as human, just as vulnerable as they are. But do her
revelations alienate her husband and can they push Elise farther away from her?
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We welcome you to My Bookish
Pleasures! Can you tell us how you got started writing fiction?
I wrote my first story—a short
one—when I was in high school. I did it
for the school paper. Many of my classmates told me they liked it. So did the
teacher-adviser for the paper.
I was then the editor-in-chief
of the paper and my forte was supposed
to have been essays, not fiction. But I found fiction a lot of fun to write. I
could let my imagination take flight. When I did editorials, I always had to
keep the facts of what I was commenting on in mind. After my modest success
with my first short story, you could say I was hooked. I wrote a few more.
Can you tell us about your most
recent release?
My most recent release in
October, 2016, is Brief Encounters with Solitary Souls, a book of short
stories on the truth contained in this Eugene O’Neill quote: “Life is for each
man a solitary cell whose walls are mirrors.” The five stories are set in
various locales, two of them in Paris where
I’ve “lived” off and on for two to six months at a time.
How did you get the idea for
the book?
Hello Agnieszka is
Book 2 in a family saga that starts with her daughter Elise. I hadn’t initially
intended to write a series but I got intrigued with the idea of finding out
what kind of past Agnieszka might have had. That’s how Book 2 took shape.
Of all your characters, which
one is your favorite? Why?
My main characters tend to be my favorites. I think I have trouble
writing about people I don’t like. Better, or at least braver, writers than I
may enjoy narrating the adventures of an evil protagonist, but I can’t spend
months, maybe years, in the company of a protagonist who terrorizes me every
time I put her in a scene. Anyway,
Agnieszka’s passion for music speaks to me; so do the poignant events and
heartaches she goes through.
What was the most challenging
aspect of writing your book?
This was a relatively easy book
to write. Maybe because the main character’s personality has been largely defined
in the first book. So were those of two other characters (Elise and her father). Including certain
aspects of Polish culture was the least easy part but research filled the gap
in my knowledge so I could write those sections confidently.
What projects are you currently
working on?
I’m writing a fifth novel that
includes many scenes involving food because the protagonist has a job cooking
at a Michelin-starred restaurant. Her grandfather was a French chef. The novel has no title yet, though.
What advice would you offer to
new or aspiring fiction authors?
One I learned from Francine
Prose, a writer and professor of writing: Read fiction that has stood the test
of time and pay attention to how great writers do it.
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