Ginger Bensman was awarded a Ph.D. in Human Development from the University of Maine in Orono in 1993 and spent 25 years directing programs for at-risk children and their struggling families. But she was always a writer, too, and now she writes whenever she’s not reading or gardening or watching her grandsons grow. She lives with her husband here in Salem.

Will: Ginger, tell me how you discovered that you were a writer?

Ginger: Every night at bedtime, my father read fairytales, or would make up adventure stories about my brother and me. I loved those stories! But mostly, as far as written materials and books were concerned, my family would rather be physically active outdoors than reading. We hiked, and camped, and fished. My father hunted and my mother loved gardening, canning, picnics and huge extended family get togethers. In our house, we had children’s books, our local newspaper, a subscription to Readers Digest Condensed Books, and a set of encyclopedias my parents bought for my brother and me. Otherwise, there weren’t a lot of books. I didn’t discover the public library until my sophomore year in high school, during a stretch when I was moody and sad, and having a tough time. The library was a place I could go to be alone, sequestered among the stacks. Books became my refuge. Through them, I could venture out of myself. I discovered David Copperfield, Jane Eyre, Silas Marner, The Count of Monte Cristo, Green Mansions, Gone with the Wind, the novels of John Steinbeck, D.H. Lawrence, Jane Austen. It seemed to me then, and still does, that those writers achieved an almost impossible kind of magic—and I wanted to do it too.

Will: Can you give us a glimpse into your writing process? Do you have a special time
and place for writing? Do you write every day?

Ginger: Before Covid, I would take a notebook or my laptop to a coffee shop or restaurant mid-morning or after the lunch rush when there were lots of empty tables and the waitstaff was happy to bring me a cup of tea or a latte and leave me to my work. It was an environment where I could slip into a sense of space and detachment, and escape into my own head with the characters on the page and the rhythm of words. I miss those times, and that open sense of possibility.

Now, most days, I spend a couple hours writing in my study. I know how lucky I am to have such a pleasant place to work, but I’m anxious to get back to my table at the coffee shop.

Will: Do you work from an outline?

Ginger: I don’t use an outline, but I do have a plan when I begin a writing project. I start with a character, the rough arc of a story, and an image of how the story will end. And then I sit, and walk, think, and put in time staring at the page. Sometimes, listening to music that evokes the mood of a scene helps. I am a painstaking writer. I ponder each sentence, and I don’t do rough drafts. For me, writing is like laying brick, one solid, intentional layer at a time.    

Will: When I read your novel, To Swim Beneath the Earth, I was struck by how poetic
your prose is, by your uncanny ability to find precisely the right word for your descriptions, elevating the ordinary to the sublime. It seems magical. How do you do that?

Ginger: What a kind thing to say! Thank you. Finding the perfect word, or phrase, or cadence, is the thing I love most about writing. I do a lot of research with a special focus on elemental things, those experiences encountered so often they tend to happen below awareness. I use Google images and YouTube videos to help me be more present with the thing I plan to write about. I like to visualize actions in slow-motion, to notice the nuances. When it’s possible, I duplicate an experience myself. And, of course, I’m a huge fan of the thesaurus. If I can render something mundane in a way that makes it sensory and vivid, I’m happy.

Will: I see you’ve used some professional review services to promote your novel,
including Kirkus Reviews and The San Francisco Book Review. Is that something you’d
recommend to other indie authors?

Ginger: Recommend—that depends. Getting a professional review is certainly something for an indie author to consider. I did it for two reasons: First, because I wanted an objective professional assessment of my novel from a recognized source—a sort of “seal of approval” (or disapproval) before going public as an indie author. Second, if the reviews were positive, I could use quotable excerpts on my novel’s back cover and in promotional materials. The downside is that getting a professional review is expensive, and an indie author would have to sell a lot of copies to recoup the cost. Would I do it again? Yes, those “esteemed” encouraging words gave me the confidence to self-publish.

Will: Please tell us about your short story, “When the Heat’s Off.” What was the inspiration for that?

Ginger: “When the Heat’s Off” is about Ella, an elderly widowed, shut-in, and the two young punks who break into her house with a plan to take her for all she’s worth. Trouble is, Ella may not be as docile as she seems.

This story was so much fun to write! The character of Ella is a tip-of-the-hat to the beautiful silver-haired Ella MacHolland who lived next door to my family when I was growing up. She was a feisty widow who told stories about how Confederate Soldiers commandeered the animals from her family’s farm and stole the clothes right off the clothesline.  

Will: What are your thoughts about “novel versus short story?”

Ginger: A short story needs to be tightly organized, there’s less room for digression. A novel, on the other hand, gives the author broad latitude, and that can be daunting. A short story is like a close-up photograph of a single flower, while a novel is more akin to a landscape. I love them both.

Will: I understand you have a new project in the works. Would you open the curtain a bit
and tell us about it?

Ginger: My current project is a novel titled Minor Insults about two sisters in the second half of their lives confronting past differences and the pitfalls of aging. In our Western culture, aging often comes with a loss of autonomy and a host of social and institutional indignities. Many of the most egregious indignities are heaped on the aging with, what amounts to, a scolding finger and a “for your own good” kind of parental arrogance. If we live long enough, age comes for all of us. In the end, it’s how we respond.

  
Will: Do you have any advice you would share with other new authors, especially those
who may be on the fence about whether to pursue traditional publishing or go independent?

Ginger: Traditional publishing is not always a choice. I wanted an agent and a traditional publishing contract for To Swim. I spent several years submitting to agents via conferences and mail-in submissions before I decided to self-publish. These days, a whole industry has evolved to guide and support independent authors, but promoting an independent book takes resources, persistence, and an astonishing set of skills (many that don’t come easily if you are an introverted author like me). Most indie authors I know do it for love, not money. But, make no mistake, seeing your book in print is a heady beautiful thing.

Will: Ginger, thank you so much for your time and your insights. I am anxiously awaiting your new novel!

For more about Ginger and her writing, click here to be taken to her website.

I’d like to introduce you to a favorite indie author of mine. From the bio on his website: “L. Wade Powers is the pen name for fiction written by Lawrence Wade Powers, a retired academic dean and professor emeritus of natural sciences. He’s the author of a textbook and several papers on hematology, monographs and papers on marine biology and animal behavior, and articles on the history of the Pacific Northwest, especially the Klamath Basin of eastern Oregon. Larry lives in Eastern Oregon with a beautiful wife, a very strange cat, and surrounded by four seasons of glorious nature, except for the damned midges.” 

Will: Tell us about your craft. How do you approach writing? Do you write every day? Do you develop an outline or are you what some call a “pantser?” How long have you been at it?

Larry: I write when I feel like it, which means on some days, or weeks, not at all. It might be morning after coffee and breakfast, late afternoon, or late at night when I get strange looks from our cat. I don’t use time or word quotas for measures of productivity. It’s not that these approaches are wrong, but I just have too much fun being sporadic and lazy. Some novels may start with an outline, subject to extensive revision, but most short stories start with an idea or an opening paragraph, what I call the “Ray Bradbury approach.” I fooled around with some ideas and put them away about fifteen years ago, but didn’t start writing fiction until I retired in 2013. It is only since 2017, however, that it has been a truly active pastime.

Will: Your first novel, The Home: One Year in a Children’s Institution, is a different take on the coming-of-age story. What was your inspiration for it?

Larry: Like many beginning writers, I began with what I know best, a hybrid of my real life experiences combined with flights of fancy. I spent six months in the Sacramento Children’s Home in 1956–57. Many of the characters are based on real people (most but not all of the names are changed). About half of the incidents happened (social doings at the junior high, the snake men, the rec hall parties, the flirtations and sexual encounters). Other events are figments of an overindulged imagination.

Will: You have two amazing volumes of short stories, Falling in Love and Other Misadventures, and Confronting the Boundaries: short stories real and unreal. Unlike many “post-modern” stories, yours have plot, as well as a beginning, a middle, and an end, not to mention a cast of extraordinary characters. Tell us about them. What are your thoughts on the “genre” of the short story?

Larry: Some of the stories follow real life occurrences faithfully (e.g., “The Trove”), others are mostly real (“Lawnmower Ted”), others completely off of my inner wall (“The Shroud”). Diverse characters have always fascinated me, in addition to the growing and learning scenarios we all experience. I was a nature nerd and slow to arrive at the threshold of sexual awareness. I also didn’t get a driver’s license until I was twenty, an unforgiveable crime in California. The awkwardness of confronting maturity and its myriad obligations and expectations runs through a number of my musings (“Odometer Moments,” “The Omaha Two-Step,” “Fig Newton”).

      I believe that depicting character is a challenge in short stories because the need for brevity restricts the development of back story. The best short story writers get right to it, bang, and you’re immersed in the tale. Choose words carefully, waste no space. Some of my favorite writers are Edgar Allan Poe, Ray Bradbury, Margaret Atwood, Karen Russell, and Joyce Carol Oates.

Will: I think I’m still chuckling after reading The Party House: Texas Gulf Coast Schemes and Dreams. How autobiographical is the tale of a graduate student studying fiddler crabs for his doctoral dissertation?

Larry: The Party House is based on my time as a graduate student at the University of Texas Marine Science Institute in Port Aransas. The setting, including the community bar and social club were real, as were some of the characters, but as with The Home, I added fictional elements. I did study fiddler crabs (thus, the cover with a crab and a glass of beer), received my doctorate, and took my first jobs in New York City as a professor at City College and a research associate at the American Museum of Natural History. The craziest events depicted in the novel actually happened.

Will: You’ve recently ventured into historical fiction with your book, New Albion Sunset: Drake’s Lost English Outpost in North America, 1579. While it is a novel, I understand you did extensive research and present an interesting hypothesis about Drake and the Golden Hinde. Give us the juicy details!

Larry: The reason for placing Drake in the Pacific Northwest, specifically British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon, rests on the studies and publications of several people: Bob Ward of Newport, Oregon, Garry Gitzen of Wheeler, Oregon, and Melissa Darby (Thunder Go North). They and many others have recently presented evidence that Drake’s long lost Novo Albion occurred well north of California, despite commercial interests during the twentieth century to place his anchorage in the San Francisco Bay Area. I am convinced the current scholars and investigators are correct and the appendix to the novel includes supporting materials: maps, references, and historical chronologies that support the theme of a northern landing, a missing ship, a fortune in silver, and the fates of about two dozen men left behind as the Golden Hinde returned to England. I now have an extensive library on Drake and the Elizabethan times, but we won’t know the truth of these competing claims until hard archeological evidence is uncovered. The location of that evidence is described in the appendix.

Will: Your latest novel, The Sagebrush Hotel Tontine: A Tale of Treasure and Treachery, is a character study of a group of poker players who come upon a trove of gold they can’t dispose of right away. They make a survivors’ agreement—a tontine—that later morphs into a “dead pool”—last one standing takes it all. Where did that story come from?

Larry: I play poker, small stakes, live, not online. My dad taught me the game when I was twelve and I like the action, the fun, the mystery of the competition around the table. There are a lot of metaphors for real life situations, and I trotted out a few of those for the novel. The novel started as the story of a drifter returning to a small town to reclaim a shared treasure. I focused on the old hotel and the memories it invoked in Johnny, my male protagonist. I set it aside for over two years before creating the prologue about the gold bullion. The idea of a tontine has always fascinated me. As explained in the author notes following the novel, tontines started as insurance and investment mechanisms in Europe a few hundred years ago. Relating a tontine to a dead pool provides the mystery for a group of characters, not all of whom have good intentions. The woman pictured on the cover represents Brandy, my female protagonist, so there is a bit of romantic intrigue also thrown into the pot.

Will: Can you give us a sneak peek at your current project?

Larry: I am currently working on a novel with the manuscript name of SurrogaCity. It stands for Surrogate City, a future community (former San Francisco) in a world-wide gynocracy, a global cooperative governed by women. Most men (98%) thirty years from now are sterile and the ones who aren’t are maintained in reverse harems to protect them and the future of the human race. Conflicts abound as women try to decide whether to rely on artificial insemination and long-term sperm storage. There are rebels, men and women, outside of the domed cities who oppose the new order, but climate change is being addressed and there hasn’t been a war since women have assumed command.

Will: Wow! Sounds fascinating! Do you have any more comments about your craft or your road to publishing? Is there any advice you’d like to give to new indie writers?

Larry: Writing as an indie author is challenging in many ways, but the advantages of control and full royalty payment, in my opinion, compensate for the loss of commercial marketing associated with a traditional publisher. I can still receive full and competent design and editing services, which I pay for, but have the book out in stores and on the Internet in four months, instead of a couple of years. My advice? Explore the possibilities, compare costs (financial and labor effort), and believe that in this publishing era, you can be successful. There is a tremendous community of indie authors to help, offer advice, and provide encouragement. Of course, the best advice for any would-be writer is always, READ!

Will: Larry, thank you so much for taking the time to share your insights with us. It’s such fun to get a glimpse of how a writer creates the books we come to enjoy so much. To my readers, click here to zip over to Larry’s website and check out his whole bibliography. I wouldn’t be surprised if you find your next favorite book there!

Michael Gardner, whom I interviewed for my December newsletter, is an indie author from New Zealand. I’d like to introduce him to you by reprinting the bio he’s posted on Goodreads.