Celebrating 100 episodes of this podcast, Charlie is joined by Phillip Lewis, Melissa Fu, and Amanda Geard for a general bookish chat. This is a slightly quieter episode with some incredibly poignant and compelling stories.

General references:
Seamus Heany’s Limbo
Phillip quotes from Dorothy L Sayers’ Unnatural Death. The full quote is “…After all, it isn’t really difficult to write books. Especially if you either write a rotten story in good English or a good story in rotten English, which is as far as most people seem to get nowadays.”
Melissa’s episode of The Diverse Bookshelf
Amanda’s episode of Richard & Judy’s podcast
Phillip’s episode of Charlotte Readers
Information about Charles Ray Finch
Information about Ronnie Long
Netflix’s The Staircase
The episode of this podcast that includes Dorothy L Sayers is episode 100 with Liz Fenwick

Books mentioned by name or extensively:
Amanda Geard: The Midnight House
Amanda Geard: The Moon Gate
David S Rudolph: American Injustice
Dodie Smith: I Capture The Castle
Dorothy L Sayers: Unnatural Death
Frances Hodgson Burnett: The Secret Garden
Grace Paley: Enormous Changes At The Last Minute
Judy Finnigan: Roseland
Melissa Fu: Peach Blossom Spring
Phillip Lewis: The Barrowfields

Buy the books: UK || USA

Release details: Recorded 28th March 2024; published 29th July 2024

Where to find Phillip online: Website || Twitter || Instagram

Where to find Melissa online: Website || Instagram

Where to find Amanda online: Website || Twitter || Facebook || Instagram

Where to find Charlie online: Twitter || Instagram || TikTok

Discussions

04:10 What does your genre do and what it is for?
09:48 Where do you write, and where do you like to read?
16:46 What’s the nicest thing anyone’s said about your books, or the nicest review?
20:29 Tell us about a time when you were a guest on another podcast
25:38 What did you do before you were a published author or what do you do alongside your writing?
33:06 You can have a coffee morning with three other authors. Who are you choosing?
39:44 What bookish event or personal bookish event are you looking forward to within the next few years?

Transcript

Please note that this transcript has been edited for legibility and is not a 100% accurate representation of the audio. Filler words and many false sentence starts have been removed, and words have been added in square brackets for clarity.

Charlie: Hello and welcome to The Worm Hole Podcast! This is the fourth of a few milestone episodes to celebrate episode 100. These are different to the usual episodes – we’re talking casually and there’s more than one author; you can consider this a party. So, I’m your host, Charlie Place, and today I am joined by three authors whose genres sort of crossover, and they have a similar vibe, or atmosphere, to their work. They’re going to introduce themselves so that you can get an idea for their voices straight away.

Phillip: Hi, my name is Phillip Lewis. I am a writer in North Carolina. I grew up in the mountains of North Carolina, and I now live in Charlotte. I had a book come out a few years ago called The Barrowfields, which was set in North Carolina and in the southern United States, about a writer. And the story was told from the perspective of his son, who grew up sort of in the shadow of his father’s writing desk. And there was a great unravelling, and the story is unspooled for you by the son who sees all this tragedy happen. In any event, very proud of it; and since then, I’ve been working on a new book, which is provisionally titled A Cold Glitter Of Souls. And it’s loosely based on this Seamus Heaney poem, Limbo, which I read several years ago, and was greatly affected by. And that one’s in the works, and we’re hoping to have it out on submission sometime early next year.

Melissa: Hello everyone, I’m Melissa Fu, and I am a writer based just outside Cambridge in the UK. I grew up in northern New Mexico, and my first book, my debut novel, is called Peach Blossom Spring, which is a historical fiction that follows three generations of a Chinese family, starting in 1938 in China during the Sino-Japanese war, and follows them through the Chinese Civil War; they flee to Taiwan, and eventually the son emigrates to America. So it covers about 70 years, three generations, lots of travel [chuckles], lots of continents, and it really asks questions about home, belonging, and what stories carry us. And the stories… when everything that we know and understand to be our most valued places disappear, what we take forward. So that came out in 2022, two years ago now, and I’m working on what I hope becomes my next book. And I’ll just say that it’s going [Melissa and Amanda laugh]. I’m a little superstitious about saying too much about it.

Amanda: Thanks, Charlie, thanks for having us on. It’s the first time to meet Philip and Melissa, so lovely to meet you both as well. So I’m Amanda Geard, and I’m originally Australian, so I grew up in Tasmania, which was important for my second book. And my first book was The Midnight House, which is set between Ireland, where I live now, and London. And it’s very much a triple timeline historical mystery, where a disgraced journalist in the modern day unravels the disappearance of an aristocrat from the 1940s. My second book is set between Tasmania, Ireland, and a few other little bits of other jurisdictions I always like to smatter through. And that is also historical fiction; and I’m working on my third novel, which is also very similar with two, maybe three timelines – we’ll see – again about a modern protagonist really unravelling what’s happened in the past. And all three are focused on World War Two, but different aspects of it. So we’ve got Ireland and we’ve got London, and then we’ve got Norway in the third book. So I’m actually, as we speak now, I’m in northern Norway researching that third book, broadly where I’m going to set it up near Narvik. And it’s once again about secrets and female friendships and tribulations during war.

Charlie: So, the first question, what does your genre do and what is it for?

Amanda: I can jump in here, Charlie. Well, I would say, as you know, I mentioned, my genre is historical mystery unravelled through several timelines. And I have always loved reading this kind of book, Kate Morton types of books, where you have the modern protagonist, as I might be sort of walking through my life trying, trying to unravel what happened in my family’s past or in someone else’s family’s past. So whenever I read these kinds of books, I always go off down the rabbit hole researching, learning. I didn’t learn that much about, for example, World War Two history at school, but through reading these kind of books, I’ve really gone down the rabbit hole and just become fascinated with that era and female stories through that era. So for me, it’s a massive learning experience, but a really positive one.

Melissa: I might follow up on this question of how you learned history and what makes it through, like, makes the history seem living. And similarly, although I learned bits about the history of the Chinese Civil War, and I knew that the Japanese had done something in China that wasn’t very nice, it wasn’t through books, it wasn’t through school – formal learning – but it was through wanting to understand stories and specifically the story of my family, that brought me to writing this book. And I think this question, ‘what does your genre do?’ Historical fiction is a way of making history living. You can latch on to the story of a family or some group of characters, maybe some friendships. To me, it makes history become not a series of dates and battles and wars and treaties and maps – and those are all important – but they seem to be at arm’s length. And if I can understand what happened through the eyes of one family or through several eyes of one story of one family, but through several people in that family, I could just grasp it so much more. So I think that what is it for… I think it makes history present for me, and I think it also – being fiction – in my case, I didn’t have actual facts of what happened to my family or several families. I couldn’t trace one exact storyline and say, ‘this is what happened, this is true’. But I could string together many and make a plausible story. I think that’s another advantage and thrill of historical fiction, is you can put together pieces and make maybe not the story that happened, but a story that might have happened to many. What do you think, Phillip?

Phillip: I think genres are difficult for me. I mean, I understand the need for classifications and the want for folks to define literary works into particular categories. And historical fiction, I think, is one of those that’s easier to classify, maybe, than some of the others. When The Barrowfields came out, it wasn’t written for any particular genre, I didn’t have anything really in mind. And it was called literary fiction by some people, which I thought was interesting, I understand the parameters of that genre, but it wasn’t something that I was trying to do. And it has a lot of history in and of itself; I think it starts in the 1930s and carries on board for 40 or 50 years. And the book I’m writing right now is set in the 1920s, and there’s an enormous amount of history to it. But I’ve been reading some Dorothy Sayers recently, which I discovered her recently, I don’t know how I didn’t know who she was until fairly recently. And she said something like, she had a character say, ‘people are either writing’… let’s see, I’m going to get this wrong – it was, ‘rotten stories with good English or good stories with rotten English’. Anybody heard that [chuckles]? Anyway, I thought that was interesting, but there might have been some truth to it at the time, and there might be some truth to it now. You have a lot of commercial fiction where people are writing good stories, but there’s not as much of a focus on the writing itself. And then there are other folks who are maybe focusing more on the quality of the writing and less focusing on the stories. And I’ve never really understood why that is – I’m gonna talk myself into a hole here – but what I’m trying to do with my writing is to focus on the language and use it in the most beautiful way that it can be used, but also tell the most human stories that I can possibly tell. And I’ve read so many books where the author kind of keeps the reader at arm’s length and whatever emotive qualities are there, the author seems like he or she withholds to some degree. And I always want to reach across and find that emotive quality and shake it out of the author and say, ‘where is it? I know it’s there!’ And what I’m trying to do is just put it all on the page, and so you have the language and it complements the story, and the story complements the language. And who’s it for? I don’t know. I mean, there were a lot of people who told me The Barrowfields had too many dictionary words in it [chuckles] things like that, they wanted a quick beach read, and that’s not the kind of stuff that I do. And so I think that genre, if you could say it’s a genre, and I know this is too long of an answer, but to the extent it is a genre, it’s for folks who want to read slowly and carefully and look for the beauty in each word and each sentence.

Charlie: I don’t think that’s too long an answer. How anyone could have The Barrowfields as a beach read though, yeah, that’s never going to happen [laughs].

Phillip: Never going to happen [Phillip and Amanda chuckle].

Charlie: So where do you write and where do you like to read?

Phillip: So someone else should go first because I just took up so much time with the last one [laughs].

Amanda: I’ll jump in here, Charlie, and say that I don’t have much of an answer to this one because I pretty much will write and read wherever I am. I’ve set up this great… well, last time we talked, I had a lovely office behind me that I set up in Ireland and just the right colour, just the right desk and just the right books. But, half the time I find that I’m writing at the kitchen table or on a notepad outside or in the car, or, jotted down notes on the iPhone. I think sometimes you just have to snatch the moment to write as well. And I do the same with reading; I never read on the phone. But I’ve always got the Kindle with me. So if I’m waiting in line or I’m at the doctor’s or whatever, I’ll always have a book or the Kindle. And one of the great things about becoming an author has been getting all these proofs and all these early novels appearing in good post from fantastic authors, so I’ve got a few here in the cabin in Norway, and I end up devouring them all the time. We haven’t got a TV or anything, so I curl up in the corner or kitchen table and read wherever I am.

Melissa: I would like to read and write in your cabin, Amanda [everyone chuckles]. It sounds amazing!

Amanda: Well you’re very welcome, very welcome. Perhaps next time we’ll do this together [Melissa and Amanda laugh] from here.

Melissa: I write anywhere. Well, actually, I write a lot in a notebook, as you can see. I always have a notebook with me, and a lot of what becomes the book starts off in pen and paper. So wherever I am, I write things down. When I’m actually writing, starting to work on a manuscript or a project, I trick myself in that first I say, ‘I just have to keep my pen moving on the paper for 30 minutes or 45 minutes’. So that’s easy, no stakes. Then I say, ‘oh, all I have to do is type it up,’ and all I’m doing is I’m typing notes. So then that’s like the next bit! So I think where I write constantly trying to look for the easiest way in, so that does involve me writing in a lot of cafes because I’m bribing myself up – get a nice coffee or it’ll be a nice atmosphere. But I think there is something to being out of context. It’s easier for me move into a fictional world if I’m not surrounded by my real world. Where I like to read; I’ll read anywhere. I read in bed every night. Yeah. And since I got this iPad I mentioned, it’s nice, especially if my husband wants to be asleep and I want to be awake reading, I can just use the backlit.

Phillip: So I have two desks in my house; I have one in the living room, which is where I am now. And I’ve got an office upstairs. But I find myself writing in the living room more often than not. And I sit at a window, and the window looks over this backyard, and it slopes down to a creek, and then there’s sort of a field beyond that. So there’s a fence and then a creek and then the field beyond and it faces the south-east. So when you’re sitting here in the morning and the sun’s coming up – and particularly this time of the year, when everything’s kind of gold and green – it’s really, really lovely and it’s serene and it’s quiet and I’ve got a couple of bird feeders right outside the window and I can see all the birds and it puts me in a really good place to write. But, I think as Amanda and Melissa were saying, when I did the first book, I was very particular, I felt like I needed to be in one spot, and then I realised that it had nothing to do with the spot, that I just needed to be writing and working. And so now I find myself just sort of working wherever I am; and I have a day job and so I find myself, I’ll go into my job and when I’m supposed to be doing other work, I’m actually working on my book, and so don’t tell anybody about that [Amanda chuckles]. And in my last job, I almost got fired, because I was spending so much time working on The Barrowfields when I was supposed to be doing things for other people. And surreptitiously, I would print drafts and things and I would run to the printer and then it would jam and a piece of paper would get stuck in the printer and the IT people would show up and it was all very embarrassing. But now it’s much better. But, yes, I write this wherever. I think all of us are of the same sort of mindset with respect to reading – wherever I go and wherever anyone in my family go, everybody is just carrying books. We have books with us; there are books in the car, I have backup books in the car, I have backup books [Amanda chuckles] – you know how that is. But, yeah, always a book, and there’s always a pen inside the book so I can make the marks inside the books, when I mark up my books because I like to remember things. But just wherever I am, I will not be sitting idle – if I have two minutes, I will have a book in my lap.

Charlie: I’m listening to all your answers there, you’ve all got your spaces to write, but you don’t necessarily use that one space. Do you find that maybe there’s a lot of pressure to use the dedicated space, and in that way it’s a lot easier to write somewhere else?

[The next two lines are said together.]

Melissa: Yeah I was going to say…

Amanda: I think you’ve just solved my problem [everyone laughs]. I think you’ve just solved my problem, Charlie. Sorry, Melissa, you go.

Melissa: [Laughs] what I was going to say is, I think, I fantasise about having one of these dedicated spaces, like a shed out back or a special room in the house just for writing. But I think I wouldn’t use it if I actually did that. So, yeah, that’s an interesting bit of psychology there that you’ve tapped into.

Phillip: No, I think that’s right. I think that’s right. My office upstairs is set up for – it’s like a little writer’s haven. It’s got all the books and I’ve got all the art and stuff on the walls, it should be very inspiring, and you should be able to walk in there and just be really inspired to put down the wonderful art on the page. And yet I’m in the living room, more often than not! [Laughs.]

Amanda: I went through a phase of trying to record each day how many words I wrote, how it felt, where I was, trying to look for patterns – if my husband was driving and I was in the car tapping away, or on a notebook, or on planes, especially short hauls, where there’s nothing to distract you and you’ve just got to sit down and write. I found those to be quite effective. And I’m not sure any of the sort of top 20% of sessions would have been at my desk, which is also my work desk. And now you’ve made me think, if I had a separate spot in the office, but just for writing, would that then make the desk more attractive? I’m not sure. Very interesting, Charlie, you’ve got me thinking.

Charlie: I’m thinking… Well, no, I think it was yesterday, actually, I was trying to do some work in this space here, this is my study. And I just couldn’t do it, and I thought, I know I’ve got everything set up and I’d recently cleaned my desk as well because it’s often got books and notepads on it, and I was just like, I can’t do this. So I had to go downstairs and do some work there. So what is the nicest thing anyone has said about your books or the nicest review, etcetera?

Phillip: I can remember mine. I did a talk at a church once; I was invited to speak at a church in, I think, Roanoke, Virginia, which was interesting because The Barrowfields is not really a church book. But it was a lovely group who came. And when I was about halfway through my talk, an elderly lady, very nice woman, raised her trembling hand and had something to say and she stood up. And she said that I had described something in the book which was very meaningful to her. And she went on to tell the group, with tears in her eyes, that she had recently lost her husband of many years. And she said that the way that I had described grief and loss in The Barrowfields was exactly how she felt upon losing her husband of that many years. And she cried and we all cried and I haven’t forgotten that. And I think that was the single most important thing anyone’s said to me about the book.

Charlie: That’s wonderful.

Amanda: That was lovely, Phillip. I’m going to repeat, I think – at the last party, Charlie, I mentioned there was a knock on the door at our place in Kerry and I opened the door and there was a woman standing there with The Moon Gate. And she had walked over the fells from the other side of the hill and carried it with her and said, ‘I can’t believe this was written just over the hill. Would you sign it?’ And she’d come across country and it was just such a lovely moment. She said she really loved it, and a lot of it’s set in Kerry, or much more of The Midnight House that’s set in Kerry, but a little bit of The Moon Gate is. But actually something to add to that, Charlie, since last time. This lady, Pamela, then went on to publish a poetry collection, which I went to the launch of, and was able to take her book to her to get signed as well. So it was a lovely circle in the end; that was a few weeks ago.

Melissa: What a lovely story. Both of those are really moving. I think that’s one of the most biggest rewards and unexpected rewards, writing a book is when you find that it’s touched someone or resonated with someone in a way that you hadn’t imagined or expected. I think it’s both humbling and also it feels like a connection has been closed, you write the books to hope to reach a reader, and then when the reader reaches back to you and says, ‘got the message’, that’s really something. I think, for me, one of the really moving comments that I’ve had from a few different people – so in the story, my characters among the different generations, they don’t manage to always connect and talk to each other and share what happened. And so one of the sad things in the story is this loss of transmission. For various reasons the characters… they have good reasons why they don’t do what they do. A couple of readers get in touch and say, ‘you know what? Your book made me want to ask my parents more about their experiences’. Often it’s been people whose parents are immigrants or grandparents or immigrants or grandparents who lived during the war. And it could be Sino-Japanese or Chinese Civil Wars, it could be World War Two, but it’s just the thought that the stories in my book, failure to communicate among the characters has inspired real people to connect and communicate with their families, it’s not something I would have imagined would have happened and makes me really happy.

Charlie: They’re lovely stories. Really, really lovely. So, can you tell us about a time when you were a guest on another podcast?

Melissa: A podcast that I really enjoyed that – actually, I met through social media, Instagram, I met the person Samia Aziz, and her podcast is called The Diverse Bookshelf. And what was really special about getting to be a guest on her podcast was she had read an early copy of my book and was a real champion of it. And I just loved the way she spoke about what she found in the book, and I corresponded with her informally for some time. And then six or eight months after the book came out, she said, ‘oh, I’m thinking of starting a podcast. Would you like to be a guest?’ Oh, that would be fantastic! And so eventually, she got her ideas together and started the podcast. It was such an honour to see it go from the very beginning to – I think it’s maybe done two or three seasons now, or maybe this is its second year, now I think about it, because I went to the one year birthday party of The Diverse Bookshelf podcast. It was neat to see another creative endeavour come alive and get to be a part of that. It’s a thriving podcast; I would recommend it, along with The Worm Hole, of course!

Amanda: So, Charlie, apart from my podcast with you, obviously [laughs], I was very fortunate that The Midnight House was a Richard & Judy pick in the UK and Ireland. I was very excited, and then I discovered there were podcasts for each pick, and then I was very nervous. But through that, I contacted quite a few of the previous picks to ask them about the podcast and what it’s like, and then sat down and chatted with Richard and Judy themselves about the book. And they were really fascinated about the Irish setting, obviously Judy being a Finnigan as well. And we talked at length about Kerry; I’m a blow-in in Kerry – so I’m Australian, and so you have to live in Kerry for about 50 years, and then you’re considered to be [Phillip laughs] not a blow-in after that. So we talked about being a blow-in and how if you’re having a bad day in Kerry, you’ll go down to the corner shop and someone will make you laugh. It was a really warm podcast. I enjoyed it so much. And then about a year after that, I got a proof of Judy’s book, which came out in November. And so I thought there was this really lovely connection – obviously, you know, I don’t go around to dinner or anything [laughs] but there was a really lovely connection made there. And meeting and talking to all those other authors before that podcast was really positive; it’s one of my favourite things about being an author, has been the people that I’ve met.

Phillip: In Charlotte, there is a guy named Landis Wade, who is a retired lawyer, and he’s also a writer. And he started a podcast several years ago featuring local writers, North Carolina writers. North Carolina is such an extraordinary place, with such an extraordinary literary tradition. There’s so many storytellers here, and where I grew up in the mountains, it was particularly true. This sounds like a cliche, but I promise I’m not making this up [chuckles] – you could go down to the general store, to the gas stations, and sit, and there would be old men and old women sitting around, and they would be telling these stories about their youth, and they had such an extraordinary charm, and such an extraordinary wit, and a cleverness, a Mark Twain kind of cleverness, that you don’t see that much these days. And North Carolina in the south is full of those kind of writers and those kind of storytellers. And so what Landis has tried to do is find all those people and give them a platform, not just the folks who are putting out books with the big publishing companies – if you’ve written a book, Landis is going to have you on his show to talk. And it’s a really extraordinary thing that he’s doing, and I don’t know how many hundreds of episodes he’s done now, but it’s really terrific. And so he had me on some time back, and it was a wonderful, warm experience; he’s a delightful guy. And it’s nice to see that somebody can transition from the practise of law, that sort of occupation, into doing something just with words and writing, getting things on the page.

Charlie: If I remember rightly, Phillip, that podcast episode on Charlotte Readers was released either just before or just after the one I did with you for this, Worm Hole. And I remember, I published the episode on here, on The Worm Hole, and I thought, ‘right, well, I can relax. That’s done. I’m gonna go and enjoy and see what Philip was saying to Charlotte Readers’. And I have a favourite podcast from that.

Phillip: Wonderful!

Charlie: I very much enjoy that one.

Phillip: That’s great to hear. That’s wonderful. That’s good to hear. Thank you.

Charlie: And I’m going to have to… I’ve listened to Amanda’s podcast with Richard and Judy, and I’m going to have to find this one from Melissa as well. Listen to that one.

Melissa: Phillip, what’s the name of the podcast, again, that Landis does?

Phillip: I think it’s called -is it called Charlotte Reads or Charlotte…

Charlie: Charlotte Readers, yeah.

Melissa: I am a podcast junkie, I listen to so many, so new one to add.

Phillip: That’s a pretty good one.

Charlie: It’s got a lovely vibe to it. So what did you do before you were a published author, or what do you do alongside your writing?

Melissa: I did lots before I finally wrote [laughs] everything. It was all backstory, getting myself ready to write. But I was a scientist for a while, I was a physicist, I taught Physics in schools. I taught secondary English. I did science outreach. Had two kids; I still have them [everyone laughs] they’re just bigger now. I did writing for educational companies. And I think the thread through it all is I was always writing in notebooks, right. I had a really, particularly bad teaching job, it was just a disaster on the teaching job that I left. And I thought, ‘you know what, I’m going to stop trying to make it work so that I have an easy answer to the question, “what do you do?” I’m just going to do something I want’. I’ve always wanted to write. That spurred me into just going for spending a lot of time and taking myself more seriously. Now, after having a book out and the excitement of going through the whole process and hoping to do it again, I don’t write full time, but what I do is I work with students at the university here who have learning disabilities, as a mentor. It’s great; I meet with them about once a week for up to an hour and just talk about what’s going on in their lives and their university time. It’s such a wonderful insight. I mean, they’re brilliant people. I feel like I’m getting little mini character sketches each week [laughs]. So it’s sort of secret character development, research. It’s also, for me, the best parts of teaching without any of the not so fun parts. So all I really focus on is the person, yeah.

Amanda: I’m a geologist by training, which I’ve done for 15 years or so. And that is a fascinating job. I’ve worked in dozens of countries and crawling through the jungle taking samples and sometimes wearing suits, sometimes sleeping in hammocks, in Gabon or whatever. And I met my husband in Jordan at a drill rig [laughs]. So it’s been a very interesting, really interesting journey. And you can go anywhere with geology. But I was really just taken there, Melissa, with what you said about it’s all backstory to the writing, and I think there is an element of that. I weave in a lot of, particularly the places I’ve been or the people I’ve met, you know, obviously heavily disguised [laughs] appear, in the writing or inspire some of the writing. Before all that, I lived in Finland for a time and studied as a wilderness guide. Geology led, in some ways, to the writing because I used to work for two or three weeks on, and then you might have a week or two off; and I just picked up a flyer for a writing course somewhere and started writing some articles about geology. That led through to just writing a few short stories and fiction. And then when I moved to Kerry, which is a little bit like North Carolina, you know, such a home of storytelling, I was really inspired to pick up the pen and start writing there, juggling both at the same time now.

Phillip: Are you still doing work as a geologist?

Amanda: I am, yes, yep. Yeah. So I do love that. I think I would be a terrible full time writer because I would procrastinate too much [laughs]. It’s much better if I… like we were talking about at the start of the podcast, ‘oh, I’ve got half an hour now and I’m in the car. Right. I have to get 500 words down’. I think generally I find that gets me to the next stage much quicker.

Phillip: Right. No, I agree with that. I think that’s right. I’m a lawyer by trade. I’ve practised law for, I don’t know, 20 years now. And what I’m doing now is mostly civil rights litigation. We do wrongful conviction work primarily. And so we take folks who have been wrongfully convicted and have been exonerated in some form or fashion, received a pardon of innocence, that sort of thing. And we represent them and try to help them find some sort of compensation. And a lot of these folks have been imprisoned wrongfully for 30 years, 40 years. One of my first clients was a guy named Charles Ray Finch, who was in prison for 43 years for a murder he didn’t commit. And when he got out of prison, I went down and saw him and he was living in a duplex with some other members of his family, and he literally couldn’t buy groceries, he couldn’t buy shoes. And he said, ‘what am I going to do now?’ I mean, imagine – he couldn’t work the TV because, I mean, the technology, everything; the world had passed him by, 40 years of wrongful incarceration. And so we had another client named Ronnie Long – you can read about these folks if you search for them – Ronnie was imprisoned, I think, for 44 years, three months, and 17 days. And he knew, when you asked him about it, he would say, ’44 years, three months, and 17 days’. That’s how long he was put away. And with the help of the Duke Innocence Project and some wonderful lawyers here, after, like, a decade long fight, they secured his exoneration, and we were able to help him. And it’s just incredibly meaningful work to me. And so I’ve had jobs where I resented the fact that I had to do other work because it took away from the writing. I have a low level resentment and sometimes a higher level resentment with respect to anything that takes away from writing time. I know you all know how that is. Sometimes when you get in the groove and you’ve got a chapter that you’re working on, and it’s working, and then life intervenes, and it’s very frustrating, but I feel very grateful to be doing the work that I’m doing, and it just seems to be hand in glove with everything that I want to do. And so I get up as early as I can, and I work on the book, and work on the book and work on the book that I’m writing now. And then I have to take a break, inevitably, and go do law stuff. But because of what I’m doing, I feel proud of it, and I feel like I’m actually helping people. It’s inspiring to me, it helps me to come back to the writing and focus again.

Melissa: Did you ever want to write about those cases, Phillip?

Phillip: You know, we did a non-fiction book called American Injustice. The lawyer that I’m working for is named David Rudolph. And I don’t know if you guys saw – there was a documentary on Netflix a few years ago called The Staircase. HBO did a five part mini series about it, but I didn’t think that was particularly good! But the actual documentary called The Staircase, which was about the murder of Kathleen Peterson and the conviction of Michael Peterson, it’s absolutely fascinating. Whether you like law or crime or anything like that, it’s a terrific documentary, and you can still find it. But the lawyer who was featured in that, that’s whose firm I work for, and we worked on, and I helped him put together, a book on wrongful convictions that came out a couple of years ago, and it’s called American Injustice. It’s a wonderful collection of those stories, and I think we told all the stories in a very compelling sort of way, and I’m proud of it. So that’s where some of them are. If anyone is interested.

Charlie: I’ll put some links up for that.

Phillip: That’d be great.

Charlie: So you’re all helping, I think, society in some ways. So you can have a coffee morning with three other authors, living or dead, because spirits are welcome in this shop. Who are you choosing?… Listeners, I won’t keep all of this silence in the podcast for you [Amanda and Melissa laugh], but the authors here are writing down things, I think they’re coming to their conclusions.

Phillip: That’s a very hard question! But I think if I answer quickly, then I could be forgiven for not fully reflecting on the question before I answered, and then people will not think my answers are as shallow as they might be. But I’ve been reading Dorothy Sayers, as I said, has anybody read her?

Charlie: So, I haven’t, but I did actually, on Monday, have an extended conversation about her for another episode.

Phillip: Okay, so that’s kind of fun. So, I’ve worked in a bunch of bookstores before, and I’ve seen her books, but I didn’t really realise; I didn’t know anything about her. And there may be some bad things about her that I don’t know, and so people who know more about her might say something like, ‘she has this terrible thing in her past’, and I haven’t researched her enough to know that, but all I know is I’ve read a couple of her books now, and she was a scholar, she was a friend of Agatha Christie’s. She did a lot of really interesting things. She worked for an ad agency that did advertisements for Guinness, the beer [chuckles] anyway, there’s a lot to her character. I’ve really been enjoying her mystery novels, and you could tell that she must have been an absolutely fascinating person, from the text, just alone. And so I think right now, she would be a really fascinating person to sit in and have coffee with. There’d be no telling what she would say. I would also love to sit down and speak with Sylvia Plath, who I’ve been reading a number of her poems recently. Not recently, I mean, sort of chronically. I just have so many questions. I have a lot of questions. I think I would like just to sit down or go for a walk with Sylvia. And beyond that there was a guy, the newspaper man and author H L Mencken. He wrote a lot and a lot was written about him, but I still feel like it’s a fairly narrow view of who the man really was. And I think he had a lot of angels and a lot of demons, but there’s no question that he would be a very compelling person to sit down across the table from and have a coffee with.

Charlie: I’m wondering if any of these lists are going to match at all.

Amanda: It’s so hard to know, like you’ve got favourite books and favourite writers, but often I don’t know anything about the writers – sometimes, especially modern books, I don’t know much about the writers themselves. So it’d be interesting to put out the invites and think how the dynamic goes around the table [laughs]. But speaking of favourite books, one of my favourite books is I Capture The Castle, so I would probably invite Dodie Smith. And also I did read a lot about her writing of the book and her husband built a model of the castle and she was away from England at the time and you can feel the sense of missing home in the novel and she went through a lot of tragedy. It could be an intense conversation but I think it would be really interesting. And because I’m here in this remote cabin up in northern Norway, I’d probably invite Henry David Thoreau and have a chat about his experiences and find out what he thinks about the state of the modern world modern world [laughs] and chop some wood with me and then have dinner, obviously, because that was the question. And then, one of my other favourite authors is Carlos Ruiz Zafon, and I’m a real fan of capturing place in my writing; well, I try to do but he’s obviously the master, or a master.

Melissa: As I’ve been sitting here, my list has been growing [everyone laughs]. ‘Oh, I would have this one, I would have this!’ But actually, Charlie, you were wondering if there would be any overlap. My second author I wrote down – I won’t tell you how many the list is, I will only say three of them [laughs]. There’s Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was a friend of Thoreau’s. And actually I think Thoreau would turn up at Emerson’s house for dinner every so often. But I don’t know if Emerson would be a great conversationalist for coffee or if he might be a bit pretentious. I’m not sure. I love his essays; I think they’re beautiful. And I do have a book of excerpts from his diaries, but I don’t know if I could just take him in person completely. He might be a little bit much. So I would counter him with the short story writer, Grace Paley. Funniest short stories, there’s that collection – the title gives you a taste of her humour a little bit – Enormous Changes At The Last Minute! And she talked about how writers needed to have two ears; one was an ear for language and the beauty of language on the page, very much like maybe Phillip, when you were talking at the beginning about you write for folks who want to read slowly and carefully and love the sense of language; so Grace Paley said, ‘you need to have that ear. An ear for literature’, she may have called it, I’m not sure. But then she said, ‘you also need to have an ear for the street. And that’s for the dialogue. What people are saying and what they aren’t saying, or what they’re saying through suggestion or gesture or omission.’ And I think that’s what’s so wonderful about her short stories, is in a thousand words, she’ll create an entire world, and you get a history of other characters. She’ll have some long short stories, too, but I just find her tremendously entertaining to read. And then later, I’m still thinking about her. So she would be great for coffee, even if Ralph Waldo may or may not be. Maybe the third one, an author I would love to listen to is an author from childhood, Frances Hodgson Burnett, who wrote The Secret Garden, and A Little Princess. I think she was from the north of England. But the thing that really strikes me about The Secret Garden in particular, I read it so many times as a child, again and again. And then I read it to my daughter when she was seven, eight. We read it out loud. I felt it really, really stood the test of time. I think the book itself was written in the early 20th century, but it didn’t feel dated, everything felt just as alive. And I didn’t find myself anywhere saying, ‘oh, well, that’s because she was writing in this time’. The questions she was asking, the way she drew the character, the story she told. I think she’d be lovely to me.

Amanda: I love hearing that, Melissa, because there’s a tattered copy of The Secret Garden that’s been passed from woman to woman through our family, and, yeah, it’s got a really special place in my heart.

Charlie: So you guys have all introduced your next novel, so we will leave that one there. Listeners refer to the start of this episode. I would like to end on what bookish event or personal book-related event are you looking forward to within the next couple of years?

Amanda: My next event is finishing the first draft of the third book, and that’s when I’m going to pop the champagne. So we’ll just leave it at that [laughs], that could be a while away, but it will probably be after this podcast.

Melissa: I can chime in on a bookish personal related event, and I can be a little less coy about my next book in the same time. So it’s a good one to end on. So, in September, I will be spending the month of September in New Mexico, where I am from and where my next book takes place. And I’ve booked an Airbnb for the month to just work through what I hope becomes another draft. I’m planning on arriving there with a draft and then leaving with another draft, yeah.

Phillip: Good for you. That’s wonderful. When you can string those days together like that, you can get a lot done. I have no events scheduled right now, but what I look forward to is just completing a chapter right now. And it’s hard work, I think Thomas Wolf said that writing was the hardest job that he’d ever had. And for me, it’s true. It’s just difficult; I wish it were easier. I know people, and I don’t like them very much, but they say, ‘I wrote a thousand words today’, and they just dash it all off very quickly, and it seems to come easily, and it does not work that way for me. And so what I find is I begin a chapter by feeling like I’m dragging something out of the mud. And it feels awful and it’s painful and difficult. And then slowly it gets to the point where it gets more enjoyable. And then when I get close to the end of finishing a chapter, then I’m feeling good about it and it’s fun and I feel alive and it’s exhilarating. And so right now, before I got on here, I’m finishing up one of those chapters that I just feel ecstatic about. And I’m over the moon, but I’m getting ready to start another one. And I know that slog is going to start all over again as I work through. So, yes, what I’m looking forward to is just getting another chapter under my belt and getting a little bit further down the road toward getting this book finished.

Charlie: Fair enough. All sounds very interesting, and as you all know, I’m incredibly interested in seeing what you write and what is getting published next in all three cases. Everybody, thank you for being here. Thank you for your continued support of my podcast. It does mean a lot. Yeah.

Amanda: Thank you so much, Charlie, it was brilliant. And thank you both.

Melissa: Thank you.

Phillip: Yes, thank you for having us.

Charlie: Listeners, thank you for your continued support as well. It’s very much appreciated. The Worm Hole Podcast, Milestone episode 4, was recorded on the 28th March and published on the 29th July 2024. Music and production by Charlie Place.

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