Essays and Interviews

I’ve been asked to write a number of essays and give a number of interviews in connection with the release of A Reunion of Ghosts. I blog about each one throughout the News section of this website as they occur, but I thought I’d also try to corral the links here so they’re all in one place.

ESSAYS

October 27, 2014: 4th Estate Women: Madame Manec. A short essay on one of my favorite female characters, Mme. Manec from Anthony Doerr’s All The Light We Cannot See.

February 4, 2014: Read Dates: Atticus Finch. In celebration of Valentines Day, 4th Estate, my UK publisher, asked some of its authors to write about their dream date with a literary character. This essay was written shortly before the publication of Go Set A Watchman and now I would not give this guy the time of day. But for a while there he did seem dreamy.

March 16, 2015: “I’m Telling Everyone” A personal essay about asserting one’s Jewishness in unwelcoming places written for The Jewish Book Council‘s Visiting Scribes blog.

March 17, 2015: “Saving Clara” Iris Alter, one of the major characters in A Reunion of Ghosts, is based on the historical figure, Clara Immerwahr Haber, one of the first women in Germany to earn the PhD in chemistry. One hundred years after her death, I wrote an essay about her for The Amazon Review’s Omnivoracious blog.

March 18, 2015: “Some Thoughts on Autobiographical Novels.” A Reunion of Ghosts definitely is not an autobiographical novel, except for all the ways that it is. I try to explain this contradiction in this essay for The Jewish Book Council.

March 20, 2015: “Bagels and Groucho.” Did you know that telling political jokes was punishable by death in Nazi Germany? In this essay I talk about the power of humor, especially during dark times. Again, for The Jewish Book Council.

March 24, 2015: “The Book That Refused to Write Itself”  I confess to all the wrong turns I made during the 10 years I worked on A Reunion of Ghosts in an essay for Powell’s Books.

March 26, 2015:  Coffee with a Canine: Judith Claire Mitchell & Josie. A fanciful interview about me and my Westie.

March 26, 2015: Write Here. A short essay for the 4th Estate Blog about where I do my writing.

April 2, 2015: The Page 69 Test: A Reunion of Ghosts in which I describe the relevance of p. 69 of my novel to the entire book (very relevant, as it turns out).

April 3, 2015: Writers Read: Judith Claire Mitchell in which I talk about a couple of books I recently read.

April 7, 2015: Ghosts That Don’t Say Boo, written for Bookanista, in which I explain why I called a book with no traditional ghosts in it A Reunion of Ghosts.

May 16, 2015: The Top Ten (Unconventional) Ghosts in Literature, in which I discuss the different ways characters haunt us in works by writers from Dickens to Joyce to Lynda Barry to Kevin Brockmeier. Widely circulated, this originally appeared in The Guardian.

INTERVIEWS AND ARTICLES

March 22, 2015: “Family Sins Explored in A Reunion of Ghosts by Jeanne Kolker for the Wisconsin State Journal.

March 24, 2015:  An interview with Judith Claire Mitchell conducted by Deborah Kalb at Deborah Kalb’s Book Q&As.

March 30, 2015: “The Project is Nothing, The Process is Everything”  A conversation between author Chloe Benjamin and me on Fiction Writers Review.

April 1, 2015: “Judith Claire Mitchell: The Links Between Family and Fate” An interview by Carla Jean Whitley in BookPage (Cover Story)

April 6, 2015: “Laughing in the Face of Death” by Jeanne Kolker for the Wisconsin State Journal.

May 19, 2015: The Avid Reader Podcast. Sam Hankin, proprietor of the Wellington Square Bookshop, interviews me about A Reunion of Ghosts and so much more.

May 2015: Judith Claire Mitchell on Chemical Warfare, Suicide, and Humor. This is the transcript of Ann Strainschamps’ interview with me on Wisconsin Public Radio’s nationally syndicated show, To the Best of Our Knowledge. You can listen to the  broadcast here.

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