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Cameron Dryden's OriGenes, where stories come from, and where they go
Cameron Dryden's OriGenes, where stories come from, and where they go
  • Home
  • About
  • Cam’s Process
  • Cam’s Research
  • Author Insights
  • Book DNA
Category: Author Insights

Author Insights • Uncategorized

Liz Hauck’s Story of Cooking with Kids in Care Changed Me

July 22, 2021
Book cover for Home Made with a photo of the author and the interviewer

This interview was originally published in Dead Darlings Liz Hauck’s dad loved to eat. He also co-directed an agency that served teenagers in state care. Four years out of college, Liz suggested they start a cooking program at one of the group homes. When her dad died unexpectedly, she decided to push past her grief…

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0 comments • 26

Author Insights

Partly True: The Inspiration for “Do I Look Sick to You?”

November 9, 2018

Author C.J. Hribal was in love, so he asked his love to marry him. She was a sharp-witted, one-hundred-watt-smile woman, a mother, an academic and a cancer warrior. She had also just been re-diagnosed with cancer after five years of remission. “Officially, I asked her to marry me after she got her re-diagnosis. I knew…

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0 comments • 100

Author Insights

From a Doodle to a Novel: The Origins and Evolution of a Cozy Mystery Novel

October 29, 2018

They say if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself. That’s what Sarah-Jane McKenna did when she wrote her first novel, Dreaming in Irish. McKenna said that she wasn’t seeing the types of stories she wanted to read. “Everyone I know, their life is going in cycles and changing and I wasn’t…

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1 comment • 101

Author Insights • Book DNA

Fredrik Backman: Exploring Themes of Belonging

October 16, 2018
Bear Town Cover

Pay close enough attention, and you’ll notice that many writers have themes they return to. Stephen King writes frequently about weak characters who are victims of stronger ones. Jodi Picoult writes about family issues, often involving a court of law. Then there’s Fredrik Backman, a Swedish author who comes back to the theme of belonging,…

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0 comments • 111

Author Insights

Matchmaking New Yorkers Launched “Playing with Matches”

August 23, 2018
HannahOrenstein

For author Hannah Orenstein, matchmaking is more than a job she did for a few months in college. It’s also the premise of her first novel, Playing with Matches. The novel is about Sasha Goldberg, a recent NYU graduate who unexpectedly lands a job as a matchmaker at a dating agency. She has a boyfriend,…

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0 comments • 112

Author Insights • Cam's Research

Ripped from the Headlines Comes “The Widow of Wall Street”

June 30, 2018
Randy Meyers at reading

Randy Susan Meyers found the subject for her latest novel in the morning news. She read about an immense Ponzi scheme that effected thousands across the nation and realized she could tell the story the right way. Her bones resonated sympathetically with the notes plucked by the subject matter. So that’s what she did. The…

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0 comments • 120

Author Insights

The Making of Sonya Larson’s “Gabe Dove”

June 29, 2018

Sonya Larson didn’t set out to write “Gabe Dove,” one of the stories chosen by Meg Wolitzer for inclusion in TheBest American Short Stories 2017, differently than her previous stories. But circumstances forced her hand. “I was in a state of exhaustion. I had no more ideas.” Her job was demanding 10 and 12 hour…

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0 comments • 121

Author Insights

The Past Haunts People and Places in Flournoy’s Debut Novel

May 16, 2018
cover of The Turner House

In American vernacular, we often call a shameful or troubling past, “buried.” We know there’s some unfortunate event left unspoken, and to bring up those bodies is messy and largely unwanted. Instead, an order arranges itself around the unspoken, and we get used to the roles and assumptions needed to carry on with the silence….

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0 comments • 103

Author Insights • Book DNA

“An American Marriage:” Internment and Intimacy

April 6, 2018
author Tayari Jones

An American Marriage is a book about the unexpected devastation of a family. Celestial is a young newlywed dreaming of life with her husband, Roy. That future is ripped away from them unexpectedly when Roy, a young black man, is wrongfully accused and convicted of rape. With less than two years of marriage under their…

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0 comments • 125

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