Blog Hop: Character Questions

 pictures of Dora Diamant

The wonderful author and human being Harriet Chessman tagged me in a blog hop. What is a blog hop? A series of questions are posed to an author, who answers them about a work-in-progress or a published work. The answerer then tags a few more writers, and the questions are posed to them, on their blog. You can follow this forwards and backwards and get a lot of insight into character and the wonderful work of some great writers.  I’m tagging Boris Fishman, Jillian Lauren, Janet Thornburg, Pamela Berkman and Lucy Jane Bledsoe, whose bios you can read below and whose blogs you can go read. They’ll be posting their answers next Monday, June 23, 2014.

And here are the questions, about a main character from a work-in-progress or a recently published work:

1. What is the name of your character? Is s/he fictional or a historic person?

Dora Diamant. She is historical—the last lover of Franz Kafka.

2. When and where is the story set? 

On the seashore at Muritz, in Berlin, in Prague and at the sanatoriums where Kafka goes to die, all during 1923-1924, the last year of Kafka’s short life . . . or so we’ve been lead to believe . . .

3. What should we know about him/her?

Dora was an amazing person in her own right. She walked from her native Poland to Germany when she was 19 years old. She was fluent in Hebrew (as well as Polish, German and Yiddish), excited about theater, and very much in love with Kafka. After his death, she married and had a daughter whom she named Marianne Franziska. (Notice the name “Franz” buried none too deeply in that middle name, the one she went by.)

4. What is the main conflict? What messes up his/her life?

Franz Kafka is dying. When his lover, Dora, rushes to his deathbed, she is in for a devastating surprise: the man wasting away in the home of Franz Kafka’s parents is a stranger to her. Who, then, is the man she has been living with for the past six months, the brilliant writer who captivated not only Dora, but the great literary minds of Europe?

5. What is the personal goal of the character? 

Dora must find the truth about Franz Kafka.

6. What is the title of this novel, and can we read more about it? 

A Girl in Berlin. Not currently available.

7. When can we expect the book to be published? [Or: When was the book published?]

Yeah, we’re waiting for my next book to lead the way . . . I’ll keep you posted!

Tag! You’re it:

Pamela Rafael Berkman is the author of the bestselling Her Infinite Variety: Stories of Shakespeare and the Women He Loved and the Pushcart Prize nominated The Falling Nun.  Her short story “Duty” is appearing in Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s new ELA Common Core program for grades 6–12, Collections.

Lucy Jane Bledsoe is the author of a collection of short stories, a collection of narrative nonfiction, and four novels, the most recent of which is The Big Bang Symphony. Her fiction has won a Yaddo Fellowship, the 2013 Saturday Evening Post Fiction Award, the Arts & Letters Fiction Prize, the Sherwood Anderson Prize for Fiction, a Pushcart nomination, a California Arts Council Fellowship, an American Library Association Stonewall Award, and two National Science Foundation Artists & Writers Fellowships. Her stories have been translated into Japanese, Spanish, German, Dutch, and Chinese.

Boris Fishman’s first novel, A Replacement Life, is just out from HarperCollins and is a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick. Boris was born in Minsk, in the former Soviet Union, in 1979, and emigrated to the United States in 1988. His journalism, essays, and criticism have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine and Book Review, The New Republic, The Nation, Harper’s, Vogue, The London Review of Books, The Wall Street Journal and other publications.

Jillian Lauren is the author of the New York Times bestselling memoir, Some Girls: My Life in a Harem and the novel, Pretty. Some Girls has been translated into seventeen different languages and is currently being adapted into a Lifetime movie. Her next memoir, Everything You Ever Wanted, is coming out from Plume/Penguin in 2015. Jillian has an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Paris Review, Vanity Fair, Los Angeles Magazine and Salon, among others. She is a regular storyteller with The Moth. Jillian blogs about motherhood and writing at whatever else she feels like at www.jillianlauren.com/blog. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and son.

Janet Thornburg’s collection of short stories, Rhubarb Pie, was published in 2005. Her short stories have appeared in Carve Magazine, The Distillery, In The Family, Lumina, The MacGuffin, Phantasmagoria, Phoebe, Diverse Voices Quarterly, and Sanskrit.  In addition to writing fiction, she has written and performed seven solo shows, and her poetry has appeared in Womanthology, A Collection of Colorado Women Poets and Most of the Holes are Occupied: A Santa Fe Anthology.