Dawn Tripp is the author of the novel Georgia, which was a national bestseller, finalist for the New England Book Award, and winner of the Mary Lynn Kotz Award for Art in Literature. She is the author of three previous novels: Game of Secrets, Moon Tide, and The Season of Open Water, which won the Massachusetts Book Award for Fiction. Her poems and essays have appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Harvard Review, AGNI, Conjunctions, and NPR, among others. She serves on the board of the Boston Book Festival and on the board of Gnome Surf: A non-profit Surf Therapy Organization focused on creating a culture shift towards kindness, love, and acceptance for athletes of all abilities. She graduated from Harvard and lives in Massachusetts with her sons.
Dawn and I met when she stopped by my Pen on Fire Speaker Series in Newport Beach, CA, some years back when GEORGIA came out. I love the way she writes historical fiction.
What’s the best writing advice you were ever given?
There is only “one real question to be asked of any work…is it alive or is it dead?” – Margaret Atwood
What’s the worst?
Any advice that pre-supposes that there are rules for writing, that there is a “right” way to tell a story. Each writer has to find their own voice, style, and process, and the rules are always fluid, always changing, depending on the parameters of a given story.
What have you read lately that you wholeheartedly recommend?
Held by Anne Michaels which came out earlier this year.
How about an older book—five years or more?
The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje and Emily L by Marguerite Duras, both of which I re-read every few years.
What else do you re-read?
The two titles above, along with Versailles by Kathryn Davis; Migration by W.S. Merwin; Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata; To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (and in that novel, I reread section II “Time Passes” several times a year)
How far will you read before you stop or do you finish every book you begin?
I’ll read the first page, and if I like the first page, I’ll read the first chapter, and if I like the first chapter, I’ll buy the book.
When you begin a draft, does it go straight onto the computer or do you start with a pen or pencil, or typewriter, or…
Always first in pen or pencil (Palamino Blackwing pencils) on narrow ruled lines in a notebook.
What do you do when you hit a wall?
I walk or listen to music or get into the ocean.
What are you currently obsessed with?
My next book.
Listen to my interview with Dawn talking about JACKIE here. On the show talking about Georgia.
And her website, here.