October 03rd, 2025

“Although some things never change about growing up, the time in which you grow up isn’t one of them. It’s forever changing, shaping you in ways you can’t control or anticipate. As each year passes, the only wild card is you.” I love this, and it causes me to wonder if this was your reasoning for using To Kill A Mockingbird--using many of its themes and “mockingbird” --because so much has changed yet not changed at all culturally?  
You’ve said it extremely well.  I began writing the novel in 2021 when the “Black Lives Matter” movement was still resonating from the previous summer and it made me think of To Kill a Mockingbird––that is, how far we have come but also how far we still need to go. As for my “wild card” line you quoted, I wanted my characters, once I had them in mind, to be wild cards, to be different than the times were pushing them to be.  That’s why I set it in June of 1964: The Civil Rights Act passed in July of that year. And it is why I end it in 2021, so the reader can “see” their growth.

Did you set the novel in the ’60s because it echoed your childhood?
Oh yes, echoed is the right word.  In 2021, just six months after publication, West with Giraffes had sold 100,000, so my agent asked me to write another.  “I don’t have another,” I said. “Yes, you do,” she said back with a big smile.  So, I began to think about it. I don’t write fast and they wanted it to be done in about 2 years. As I mentioned, the Black Lives Matter movement after the George Floyd murder was still on my mind. So, if I were going to write something quickly, I might need to use my childhood, and that made me think of To Kill a Mockingbird. I grew up in a town with a railroad track down the middle separating its citizens, whites on one side/ blacks on the other, the schools still segregated. I lived only a few blocks from that railroad track and yet, as children, we were told never to cross it.  If your readers have read Mockingbird Summer, that will all sound very familiar. How about if you would have set it in current times?  That would have been an entirely different story, wouldn’t it? I have lived long enough to know that progress is a pendulum here in the United States and not a smooth one.  If I can mix my metaphors, we tend to go forward a step and then back a step. And, sadly, right now we seem to be going back two steps. But my hope is that pendulum will do its thing soon.

“There among the dead crows was also a dead mockingbird. And seeing that, she couldn’t keep the tears from coming.”  The mockingbird is a symbol of innocence. But you added crows. Why crows? 
[Laughs]. I don’t really know, except that crows are black, which is perhaps a symbol of loss of innocence?  Writers often write better than they know, as William Faulkner famously said.  I better go with that.

You have a very diverse background as a writer. Your novels are also diverse. From Mockingbird Summer to West With Giraffes.  
Plus, Faith Bass Darling’s Last Garage Sale, my 2012 first major novel. Yes, diverse is certainly the right word.  Do you take on novel subjects in much the same way you would select a journalism subject?  By the way—loved West with Giraffes. How do you decide what story to take on?  I have been eclectic and that probably does come from my journalistic background––that and my low boredom threshold. I do love to wander in my interests, which is probably the former travel writer in me. But, truly, I have no idea what story will hit me next. That’s half the fun for someone like me. I’m told editors will often ask a writer to write another novel like one that sold well, and I think that’s impossible.  It’s like trying to catch lightning in a bottle, isn’t it? So, I’m thankful I’ve only had the kind of editor who lets a writer do her own thing.

If I were still in the classroom teaching, I would use both Harper Lee’s book and yours as a lesson about themes. How proud are you that this ‘coming of age’ can also be so wonderfully used in the classroom?
Wow, that’s high praise, thank you! Yes, very proud.  I hope one day some teacher does that and I hope I’m around to hear about it.

Did Harper Lee’s book make an impact on you when you read it? Why?
I read Harper Lee’s novel when I was 15 in 1965. I devoured it, no doubt because of all that was happening during the Sixties. What other authors have made such an impact? Well, I’ve also been eclectic in my reading, largely due to earning a couple of literature degrees, which exposed me to many voices and styles. I do tend to gravitate toward more Southern literature as well as ones a little more globetrotting.  Good examples are John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath and Travels with Charley. And more recently Yann Martel’s Life of Pi.  But there are so many others. To be a good writer, I strongly believe you need to read, read, read, broadly and deeply.

Some of your characters parallel those in To Kill A Mockingbird. Corky is a little older than Scout. Why did you decide to keep to the same first-person point of view? You know what I love about that question?  Mockingbird Summer isn’t from a first-person point of view––it’s third person––but you remember it as first person and that means I did my job of making it feel personal.  To Kill a Mockingbird is a distant first-person POV, as if the narrator is an adult telling it from memory.  I actually tried first-person POV yet quickly understood I needed to go broader. So, after studying To Kill a Mockingbird’s first-person narration, I tried to emulate it in my third-person POV, which you picked up on. And that, I hope, allowed my storytelling to be simple yet personal and profound.

What did you do in writing to keep your novel unique from Harper Lee’s? 
Voice is everything, isn’t it?  I’m not a good enough writer to have emulated her voice, but I didn’t want to; I just wanted to emulate her style.  So, the answer to that question is really that I had to be “me” on the page. And that meant lots of humor in service to the story’s upbeat gravitas. Robert Frost once said that a good piece of writing "begins in delight and ends in wisdom." I always aim to write the kind of story that stays with you, gives you food for thought and packs a velvet punch…but is always delivered with a dash of joy. That's my goal for all my novels.

Have you read Percival Everett’s  James—a rewrite of Huckleberry Finn from Jim’s point of view?  A great concept. I haven’t gotten to it yet, but I will.  What is the challenge for an author in recreating from books so famously read? Mostly, to keep one’s own voice while emulating the book’s style. It’s definitely a tightrope you’re walking. Would you suggest other writers attempt this? [Laughs] If they are feeling masochistic, sure, go for it. What was your biggest challenge in the writing? To tell a story that was my own while keeping true to the intent of Harper Lee’s story. When I first entertained the concept, I asked everyone I knew––and I mean everyone young, old, male, female––if they had read To Kill a Mockingbird. Almost everyone said yes. That gave me the courage to try using it as a literal book in Mockingbird Summer that my two main characters would experience quite differently and poignantly.

What are you writing now? And when can readers expect it out? I love that question because that means that you and others love my writing. I came late to the party; I’ve always had literary pretensions but life kept getting in the way. I have some ideas banging around in my head, but nothing yet that’s grabbed me and won’t let me go. When you spend years with an idea it better be the latter, right?

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