Interview with Christina Hoag
How does writing nonfiction challenge and enrich you?
I primarily write fiction but I like interspersing that with nonfiction essays as it provides a nice break and exercises different muscles. It’s also much easier than writing fiction because your subject matter is already laid out, you don’t have to make it all up! The creative part is how you express reality. I also like nonfiction for a couple very practical reasons: It reaches a different audience than fiction and gets my name and work out there while I’m working on a lengthier fiction piece.
If you could meet one character from a book in real life, who would it be and why?
I’d like to meet the main character in “Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine” by Gail Honeyman. It was one of the best books I’ve read lately. She’s hilarious, snarky yet sympathetic, highly intelligent yet completely socially awkward, craving companionship yet mired in loneliness. She’d be very interesting to meet.
How do you nourish your creativity?
A simple thing I do is nourish creativity is take walks, preferably in nature, and clear my head space. It’s surprising how much that helps to free blockages, come up with plot solutions etc. I also really arrange my life so I save mornings for writing when I’m at my most alert and creative. On a larger scale, and in normal times, I like to expose myself to different art forms, namely visual art, and different forms of writing like poetry. I’m also a voracious reader. I always have a book going, usually fiction but the occasional narrative nonfiction. I find reading other people’s work stimulating.
I primarily write fiction but I like interspersing that with nonfiction essays as it provides a nice break and exercises different muscles. It’s also much easier than writing fiction because your subject matter is already laid out, you don’t have to make it all up! The creative part is how you express reality. I also like nonfiction for a couple very practical reasons: It reaches a different audience than fiction and gets my name and work out there while I’m working on a lengthier fiction piece.
If you could meet one character from a book in real life, who would it be and why?
I’d like to meet the main character in “Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine” by Gail Honeyman. It was one of the best books I’ve read lately. She’s hilarious, snarky yet sympathetic, highly intelligent yet completely socially awkward, craving companionship yet mired in loneliness. She’d be very interesting to meet.
How do you nourish your creativity?
A simple thing I do is nourish creativity is take walks, preferably in nature, and clear my head space. It’s surprising how much that helps to free blockages, come up with plot solutions etc. I also really arrange my life so I save mornings for writing when I’m at my most alert and creative. On a larger scale, and in normal times, I like to expose myself to different art forms, namely visual art, and different forms of writing like poetry. I’m also a voracious reader. I always have a book going, usually fiction but the occasional narrative nonfiction. I find reading other people’s work stimulating.
Nonfiction Preview:
Excerpt from "Cream"
Excerpt from "Cream"
Cream. The word takes me back to my childhood when spray-can cream didn’t exist, when people would have shuddered at the paragraph of unpronounceable ingredients on labels of Fat-Free Cool Whip, when calories, carbs and cholesterol were medical terms.
That was back in New Zealand. It was a land of dairy where no one dreamed of a diet deprived of copious amounts of butter, milk, cheese and cream from grass-engorged cows. They were the prime staples in any home’s larder.
When I was a girl, I would skip to the gate in the morning to pick up the two pints of milk the milkman delivered at dawn. The glass bottles would already be perspiring in the saffron glow of the day’s rising sun. Under the bottles’ silver-foil lids, which us kids would flatten into make-believe coins, rested a plug of ivory cream on top of the milk. I eyed that cream jealously because I knew it would be squabbled over at the breakfast table with my sister and brother. There was nothing as grand as eating cornflakes in cream, letting that liquid ribbon of satin glide over the tongue. It seemed the height of rich living . . . .
Christina Hoag is the author of novels Skin of Tattoos (Martin Brown Publishing, 2016), Silver Falchion finalist for suspense, and Girl on the Brink (Fire and Ice YA, 2016), Suspense Magazine’s Best of YA. She is a former journalist and foreign correspondent for the Miami Herald and Associated Press. She has taught creative writing in a prison and to at-risk teen girls. www.christinahoag.com.
That was back in New Zealand. It was a land of dairy where no one dreamed of a diet deprived of copious amounts of butter, milk, cheese and cream from grass-engorged cows. They were the prime staples in any home’s larder.
When I was a girl, I would skip to the gate in the morning to pick up the two pints of milk the milkman delivered at dawn. The glass bottles would already be perspiring in the saffron glow of the day’s rising sun. Under the bottles’ silver-foil lids, which us kids would flatten into make-believe coins, rested a plug of ivory cream on top of the milk. I eyed that cream jealously because I knew it would be squabbled over at the breakfast table with my sister and brother. There was nothing as grand as eating cornflakes in cream, letting that liquid ribbon of satin glide over the tongue. It seemed the height of rich living . . . .
Christina Hoag is the author of novels Skin of Tattoos (Martin Brown Publishing, 2016), Silver Falchion finalist for suspense, and Girl on the Brink (Fire and Ice YA, 2016), Suspense Magazine’s Best of YA. She is a former journalist and foreign correspondent for the Miami Herald and Associated Press. She has taught creative writing in a prison and to at-risk teen girls. www.christinahoag.com.