Ten Questions for Jamila Minnicks

“I need to live life to make art.” —Jamila Minnicks, author of Moonrise Over New Jessup
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“I need to live life to make art.” —Jamila Minnicks, author of Moonrise Over New Jessup
“In the mornings—or when I roll over from a dream—there’s only God and me talking to each other.” —Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, author of The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois
“You’re neither the genius nor the failure you think you are.” —Jack Wang, author of We Two Alone
“Do the hard stuff first.” —Kaitlyn Greenidge, author of Libertie
“I had to imagine the life of characters who shared some of my own history but had their own unique ways of being in the world.” —Jeffrey Colvin, author of Africaville
“Sometimes at the end of an eight-hour day I’d have a single paragraph to show for it.” —Dexter Palmer, author of Mary Toft; or, The Rabbit Queen
“I didn’t always feel like writing but I still made myself sit down and do it. I practiced discipline and worked towards inspiration.” —Maaza Mengiste, author of The Shadow King
How do you handle research? How indebted do you feel to stick to the historical record? Two novelists discuss their experiences researching, imagining, and depicting earlier times.
A fiction writer’s habit of imagining the lives of people who live in her favorite houses leads to serious research for her novel.