 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
 |
Back to Featured Interviews >> MEET STEFAN KIESBYE (9/2011)
|
|||||||||||||||||||||
|
| Stefan Kiesbye |
Crime novels. I grew up in a small town in northern Germany, but what fascinated me most were the hard-boiled detective novels by Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Ross McDonald.
What was your first job when you graduated from college?
Cleaning houses and stapling barcodes to road-race numbers that runners wear pinned to their shirts..
Do you do other types of writing - for example, educational, nonfiction, magazine work?
I've tried my hand at any kind of writing – from poetry to magazine writing and fictional non-fiction (a hybrid that is, I believe, gaining momentum. Fictional essays capture a sense of authenticity while at the same time whisking you away to an alternate universe).
Do you write every day and do you have set hours that you work?
I tell my students to have a set routine, no matter what that looks like. Even the 'wildest' writers were very disciplined workers.
What other jobs you had before you became a writer/illustrator?
I worked as an ice-cream vendor, coffee-shop reader, actor and radio show host. I also organized road races for runners.
Did you write stories when you were growing up? at school? Or at home as a hobby? As a young child, or as a teenager, or both?
I wrote my first 'book' when I was three. It consisted of four words and was about three tiny pages long. But I thought it was all there. I felt accomplished.
Was your first book accepted immediately? or did you experience a number of rejections?
The novelist Sue Miller once said that it takes 10 years of serious writing before you can get a book published. In my experience, that is about right. Rejections are just par for the course.
While some of my non-fiction titles will come out this fall and coming spring, my next novel will be published in October 2012 by Viking/Penguin. It's called YOUR HOUSE IS ON FIRE, YOUR CHILDREN ALL GONE, and is a very dark tale, set in a small village in Germany's Devil's Moor.