An Interview with Yona Zeldis McDonough

Thanks to Yona for taking the time to chat with us briefly.  This interview is part of the contest Yona ran on RTR in May of '05.

1.  Tell us about yourself – where you’re from, where you are now, your family etc.
 
I am a Brooklyn girl through and through. Though not born in Brooklyn, I was raised here and after some years living in Manhattan, my husband and I bought a 19th century brick row house in Park Slope, which is the neighborhood where DAHLIA is set. We have lived here for past 12 years.  I have two children—a son, almost 14, and a daughter who is 9.
 
2.  You’ve been writing for 20 years, publishing articles, short stories and essays.  How and why did you move to longer format fiction?  
 
I had always been writing fiction, and although I had many short stories published, I did not have a novel published until 2002.  So I had been working on fiction all along; it was not a departure, but a continuation.  I continue to love short fiction, but novels really allow a writer to settle deeply into a subject and a set characters.

3.  On that vein, what are you working on now?
 
Another novel, also set in Park Slope, Brooklyn. It’s about a woman in her forties, widowed early, who raised her son by herself.  Just as he’s about to go off to college, she discover that he’s gotten his girlfriend pregnant—and the girlfriend does not want to have an abortion.

4.  You’ve published 2 novels so far, THE FOUR TEMPERMENTS, which came out in 2002, and IN DAHLIA’S WAKE, which is coming April 2005.  Both deal with a family going through extraordinary grief or upheaval.  How do you get inside a character who is in such turmoil?  
 
In the beginning, I hear the voice of character speaking to me, telling me his or her story.  So it’s almost as if I’m transcribing rather than writing. I don’t know how or why this process takes place, but I’m always grateful that it does.  Novels give us the chance—both as readers and writers—to experience what the life of another person is like.  I love that about both reading and writing them. So the novels I have written give me a little glimpse into the lives of other people. And those lives contain their sorrows, like all lives do when you begin to examine them.

1. Your children’s books look fascinating.  They deal with Mozart, Nelson Mandela, Anne Frank and others, which are not your usual children’s books topics.  Tell us about those.  
 
I love writing for children, and deeply believe that children are equal to reading and hearing about all sorts of subject matter. Even when the subjects are difficult to deal with—Anne Frank’s short tragic life, Nelson Mandela’s long, heroic one—children seem to want to grapple with the material. I feel I am fulfilling an important need, and bringing attention to important issues and lives filled with true accomplishment.

 
1. Is there a medium you haven’t written in yet that you want to?  Can you see yourself writing other genres within women’s fiction?  

I have a strong interest in writing a book set in another time and place—Russia at the beginning of the 19th century, Germany at the close of it.