Maximum Shelf author interview: James Workman and Amanda Leland

Posted on September 29, 2025 by pagesofjulia

Following Friday’s review of Sea Change, here’s James Workman and Amanda Leland: Messy, Immersive, and a Little Salty.

James Workman and Amanda Leland are the authors of Sea Change: Unlikely Allies and a Success Story of Oceanic Proportions (Torrey House Press, September 30, 2025), the compelling story of hard-driving fishermen and determined conservationists working together to turn the tide on overfishing. In this vivid, accessible book, they argue for a system that could serve as a blueprint for solving other environmental crises.

James Workman

James Workman is a storyteller, entrepreneur, and author of resilience strategies, including the award-winning book Heart of Dryness. He founded AquaShares, a firm pioneering water credit trading, and has been published in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the New Republic, Orion, Trout, and Washington Monthly. Workman studied at Yale, Oxford, and Stanford, and taught at Wesleyan and Whitman. But his real education came from wildfire recovery, reintroducing wolves, blowing up dams, smuggling to dissidents, getting married, and raising two daughters.

Amanda Leland
(photo: Ben Tiu)

Amanda Leland fell in love with the sea at five years old, when her grandfather taught her to fish. She is executive director of Environmental Defense Fund and previously led EDF’s Oceans program, a global team focused on reversing overfishing while supporting those whose livelihoods rely on fish. An avid kayaker and scuba diver, Leland holds a master’s degree in marine biology and lives with her family in Washington, D.C.

What was the origin of this book?

It’s the classic, counterintuitive “man bites dog” story, right? Against the ubiquitous headlines warning our oceans were running out of fish and “deadliest catch,” we knew there was a counter-narrative of quiet recovery, innovation, and collaboration. Fishing was growing safer, more ecologically resilient, and more prosperous, yet almost no one knew it. That silence was our opportunity: to share this well-kept secret of offshore transformation with fellow landlubbers.

The scale and complexity of this story ruled out a blog series or even a long magazine feature. Moreover, it cried out for a deeply human protagonist, someone who faced storms, institutional obstacles and his own doubts. That search led us to Buddy Guindon, a Galveston captain whose life traced the arc of modern fishing: from unregulated abundance to dangerous depletion, from the most dangerous profession to calm seas, from fierce resistance to steady reform. Through Buddy’s eyes we could share how a remarkable inner shift, combined with real agency, altered the fate of a fishery and sent ripples outward to the region, the nation, and the world.

How did the two of you come to this project?

For two decades, on opposite coasts, we had been watching this story take shape and sensed it needed to be told in full. On the Atlantic, Amanda, a trained marine biologist turned environmental advocate, was building coalitions, educating policymakers, and supporting new solutions. On the Pacific, Jamie, fascinated with hunter-gatherer societies, was interviewing fishermen from Mozambique, India and Belize to Lake Michigan, the Gulf, and his native California coast.

Both of us kept hearing the same universal, fatalistic trap: “If I don’t catch the last fish, someone else will.” We realized our distinct but converging perspectives could make the book richer and more compelling: Amanda could open insights into ocean ecology and the political tensions behind reform; Jamie could personalize the stakes for readers with a firsthand view of life and death on the docks, bars and decks offshore.

What are your roles as coauthors?

It’s an iterative process of talking, writing, rewriting… then rewriting again. Amanda brought science knowledge, policy experience, and relationships with key players like Buddy. Jamie had flexibility to explore narrative structure, conduct dockside or barstool interviews, research scientific documents, and distill complex systems into human stories that would resonate beyond the waterfront.

Drafts got passed back and forth until even red ink Track Changes could no longer tell who had revised what. When we disagreed, our exchanges mirrored the trust-building central to the book, the delicate negotiations between conservationists and fishermen, scientists and policymakers, who must work past suspicion to get results.

What does the research process look like for a project of this scope?

Messy, immersive, and a little salty. We logged hundreds of hours in interviews listening to fishermen, scientists, seafood dealers, policymakers, and critics. We tracked EDF’s decades-long efforts to advance sustainable fisheries. We sifted through historical archives, economic data, and stock assessments, where otherwise dry material might yield some fresh angles or surprising discoveries. For example, among our title’s “unlikely allies,” Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton set aside a lifetime of political rivalry to unite, perhaps for the only time, behind an economic vision for America’s fisheries based on “sharesmen.”

The work took us from early-morning commercial harvests to fluorescent-lit stakeholder workshops, from policy conferences in Washington to cutting bait on a skiff in southern Belize. We found patterns: secure rights, clear rules, and shared stewardship could take root in wildly different contexts, from tropics to arctic, and we tried to bring those contrasts to life on the page.

The structure you use, a journey from personal to global, feels very natural. How did you come to it?

It grew organically, with form following function. Other approaches–framed on a single species, gear innovation, era, or location–lacked the human flow and rising stakes we wanted. By chance, the formal evolution of catch shares paralleled Buddy’s personal journey from alienation to reconciliation, from antagonism to collaboration, from fighting the old system to advocating for the new.

His growing concern radiated outward: from family, Galveston bar and first boat, to the local wharf, fish house, and rival yacht club, then to his coastline, country, Gulf Stream, and fishing communities worldwide. That expansion mirrored the spread of an unlikely idea that began with skepticism yet matured into stewardship. Helping readers identify with Buddy made the story tensions real; scaling up made the stakes consequential.

That arc also let us show a universal truth: fishery management is really people management. And since few of us (not just Buddy) like to be managed by distant strangers, the challenge is to overcome the legacy of distrust and rediscover how to manage from within the community, because the people closest to the problem are often also closest to the solution.

What do you hope results from this book’s publication?

There is an undeniable despair and cynicism about how, or if, we can sustain a healthy, clean, life-giving planet for all of us. It’s too easy, especially while shopping in well stocked supermarkets, to point fingers at “commerce” or “industry” and blame remote “others” for ecological decline, or to cut off access to resources so essential to the health, nutrition, and security of billions.

Sea Change wants to replace simplistic blame and fatalistic shrugs with a proven, science-based case for practical hope. We want readers to see that “wicked problems” aren’t always intractable, that solutions can emerge from unexpected alliances, and that those most directly tied to the fate of a resource can become its fiercest protectors when given the right incentives.

We also hope the book sparks a wide conversation about how the same principles that saved fisheries could help us restore mature forests, groundwater, soil fertility, and even slow climate change. If a Gulf Coast “pirate” can transform into a guardian of the sea, imagine what the rest of us can do?

This interview originally ran on September 11, 2025 as a Shelf Awareness special issue. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun.

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Maximum Shelf: Sea Change: Unlikely Allies and a Success Story of Oceanic Proportions by James Workman and Amanda Leland

Posted on September 26, 2025 by pagesofjulia

Maximum Shelf is the weekly Shelf Awareness feature focusing on an upcoming title we love and believe will be a great handselling opportunity for booksellers everywhere. The features are written by our editors and reviewers and the publisher has helped support the issue.

This review was published by Shelf Awareness on September 11, 2025.

Journalist and entrepreneur James Workman and Amanda Leland, executive director of Environmental Defense Fund, present a rare story of ecological recovery with Sea Change: Unlikely Allies and a Success Story of Oceanic Proportions. In the concept known as “catch shares,” fishers are allotted proportional shares of a limited quantity of fish to be harvested; the demonstrated outcome improves the health of fisheries as well as the lives and livelihoods of commercial fisherfolk. Through the lens of engaging characters and locally based stories, Workman and Leland suggest this strategy may be applicable to other challenges around the world: “This revolutionary social contract with the sea has not only slowed, stopped, and in some cases reversed the devastating effects of overfishing along our coasts, but the centrality of pragmatism and collaboration could help solve some of the thorniest and most urgent natural resource challenges we confront worldwide–including the climate crisis.”

In an easy-to-read, storytelling style, Workman and Leland describe how catch shares have been proposed and enacted, often amid great conflict. The authors also detail how this strategy has led to safer and more profitable fishing while helping recover fish populations. Even former opponents have become involved in supporting and expanding such programs. Sea Change wisely focuses on delightful, colorful characters, opening with Keith “Buddy” Guindon, who grew up fishing the Great Lakes and then made a career in Galveston, Tex. Big, brash, a self-described pirate with a “reputation as a grim reaper of the aquatic world,” he’s an ideal protagonist. “A barrel of a man with amused eyes, a gruff voice and a Santa Claus beard, Buddy is a Galveston legend.” Since arriving there in the late 1970s, “he has consistently outmuscled and outfoxed every other fisherman in the western Gulf.” An early, outspoken detractor of catch shares, Buddy rapidly morphed into one of its champions, proselytizing across the United States and the world.

Fisheries in the United States and around the world have been, in recent years, suffering various stages of overuse. As the problem grows exponentially–fewer fish, longer hours, greater rush in more unsafe conditions, lower prices–so does the solution. When fishermen are assured of their fair share of the total catch, they can be more methodical, efficient, and selective about their work. They can avoid dangerous weather conditions, work shorter shifts with less rush, save on fuel, reduce bycatch and waste, bring in higher-quality product and command higher prices, even tailor their harvest to market. In Alaska’s pollock fishery, for example, “Each shareholder could set a unique and more unhurried pace to catch his quota. Vessels dropped trawl nets into the sea less often and more selectively, with fewer ‘tows’ per day. Waste from having to throw back both regulatory discards (fish that are marketable but illegal to keep) and accidental bycatch (species with no market value) plummeted. Fishermen began to insist on and provide credible data, sharing information on how much they caught where and at what time just as soon as it was available.”

Moreover, as the fish population, health, and habitat recover, fishers and communities become safer and more secure. Fishermen like Buddy, generally fiercely independent individualists, learn to work together not only in allocating shares but in enforcing rules and developing technologies to assist in transparency and improved fishing practices. Fishers learn to work with scientists and environmentalists–not traditional partners–and everyone with a stake in the fishery’s health learns to play a more responsible role.

Often following Buddy’s own journey, Sea Change is structured as a movement from the microcosm to the macro, in sections titled “Personal,” “Local,” “Regional,” “National,” and finally “Global,” where readers see Buddy travel to Tokyo’s Tsukiji fish market, and share his support for catch shares with Japan’s commercial harvesters. The narrative progresses from highly specific successes to globally applicable potentials. Coercive, top-down policies set by government or environmental agencies had long rankled the likes of Buddy, who reflexively pushed back; but catch shares depend on cooperative buy-in from the fishers themselves and incentivize them to protect overfished populations of their own volition.

Catch shares is in some ways an innovation, but also based on traditional relationships across many small coastal societies throughout history: the concept that everyone takes a share according to ability and need, and that everyone contributes to responsible stewardship. It is a version of the concept of the commons, in which a public resource is both used and maintained by the public. The “tragedy of the commons,” in turn, is the fear that if one party does not use up their share–or more than their share–another will. This mindset encourages irresponsible use: if someone else is going to overharvest, it might as well be me, some might think. But with appropriate monitoring–another piece of the system whose development wound up actively involving fishermen–Buddy and the others were able to relax, build trust, and fish smarter.

From local fisheries to global trends, Sea Change samples best and worst practices to highlight the great promise of catch shares to help both fish populations and the people who rely upon them for livelihoods and nutrition. This accessible study emphasizes galvanizing opportunities to make positive change in myriad other areas of policy and sorely needed optimism in the world of environmental thinking and planning.

Rating: 6 hooks.

Come back Monday for my interview with Workman & Leland.

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author interview: Rabih Alameddine

Posted on September 19, 2025 by pagesofjulia

Following my review of The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother), here’s Rabih Alameddine: In an Insane World.

Rabih Alameddine is the author of Comforting Myths: Concerning the Political in Art; novels including The Angel of History, The Wrong End of the Telescope, and An Unnecessary Woman; and the story collection The Perv. He divides his time between his bedroom and his living room. His latest novel, The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother), considers the life of a high school philosophy teacher in Beirut and his fractious relationship with his overbearing mother.

You are a painter as well as a writer–what is the relationship between the two?

Rabih Alameddine
(image: Oliver Wasow)

I’m not very good at painting, which is fine, because part of the reason I enjoy it is I don’t ask of myself a lot. It’s as if I no longer enjoy writing; I put so much pressure on myself.

I started taking piano lessons at around 58, and I can’t say I am the worst piano player ever, but it’s close. I love that there’s no requirement. Removing the pressure, painting allows me to play.

It takes two to three years for something to grab a hold of me for a writing project. It might be interesting for a month or for an hour, but to sustain interest for the three to four years that it takes to write, is a big thing. Whereas with painting–ooh! That’s a lovely tree! It’s expressing a feeling at that time. It’s not necessarily instantaneous, but it’s not a long-term obsession. Writing is all about obsession, what will not leave my head.

It’s the pressure of making something good that troubles me. I watched a documentary on Meredith Monk the other day, and I was fascinated. She does a lot that is just experimental. It might work, it might not, people might see it, they might not. And I started thinking, when was the last time I did something like that? I don’t know.

Painting and bad piano playing allow me to relax. To allow play back into my work. I make it sound like my work is serious, which it isn’t, but my intention is serious. And I think that’s the problem. One of the worst things an artist can do is take themselves seriously. You have to take it a little seriously, but there has to be some part of me that always goes, ha ha! You think that’s good! Otherwise it becomes too earnest. There has to be a part of me that wants to change the world and a part of me that says, fuck it.

Does your wonderful humor come naturally?

Humor is my defense mechanism. How can one live in this world and be conscious of all the traumas that we cause and still be sane if one didn’t have a sense of humor? How do we deal with the Trump years? One of my ideas was to write this book where this woman gets distracted by two men, one who’s all sex and the other who’s all patriotism. I’m trying to see, would that work as distraction? Would having a lot of sex counter the guilt of being part of a genocide? Or cutting Medicaid on millions of people? How do we deal with these things? What is the distraction? For me, it’s humor. In an insane world, being insane is quite normal.

Raja the Gullible starts and ends in 2023 but jumps timelines in the middle.

I did not want to deal with Gaza, so it had to stop in 2023. There’s no way anybody living in Lebanon or, for me, in the United States, could not deal with it if it goes past 2023. Hakawati ended in 2003, right before the Iraq invasion. You can’t not deal with it, and dealing with it would take over the book.

I wanted this parabolic look at life, and the center of it is the kidnapping, if you want to call it that. I was interested in how we looked at trauma, and how trauma has become identity. We have prescribed ways of dealing with trauma; I sometimes think that it might be better if we go back to not dealing with trauma. We forget that two people might have the same experience and have completely different outlooks. We tend to think this person is this way because such and such happened to them. This is not just wrong, it’s insane! Not even Freud ever suggested that this would explain everything. It has become a cliché: my father did not pay any attention to me and that’s why I fall for men who are such and such. That’s bullshit! I went to see this movie, one of the Marvel superhero movies, and it had a talking racoon. And the movie actually went back to how the raccoon was tortured as a baby raccoon, and I thought, wait, am I supposed to become attached to a raccoon?! This book is sort of the anti-raccoon. Yes, yes, Raja could go back and deal with [his trauma], but dealing with this is not his primary concern. He’s functioning. That’s what I was going for… and then I started writing, and the mother took over.

I did want to write about love. Whether you want to call what was between the two boys Stockholm syndrome–I hate these terms, because it assumes the syndrome is the same for everybody. It isn’t. I wanted to show different kinds of love. It turns out that the weirdest was Raja and his mother. They’re completely devoted to each other, and they want to kill each other. There’s one line: Raja says, “I want to kill my mother. I don’t want to hurt her!” If you live through a civil war and you’re kidnapped, how much would you want the world to be orderly and controlled? He’s a control queen. His mother is, what is the opposite of a control queen? A chaos queen. That was the primary tension.

What do you hope your writing offers to the world?

I am both still shocked that anybody reads me–What?! You don’t have anything better to do with your time?–and shocked that I am not read by absolutely every single person on earth. It is in this tension between ‘you must listen to me’ and ‘why would you listen to me’ that I think art resides. This tension of narcissist megalomania and, I don’t want to call it self-loathing, but feelings of utter incompetence. I hope that tension makes something good.

A book doesn’t exist without a reader, but we’re all different. If you write in every detail, down to the knot in your shoelaces, that leaves little to the reader’s imagination. I tend to write just enough description to be believable, but readers fill in the rest. Because we’re all so different, each reader brings something different. I used to think if we could just empathize–but a book can never do that, in my mind. If this romantic notion were true, that a book can change a life… there are so many amazing books, and we still commit genocide. It is my perspective that what you get out of it is yours–it’s not from the book. Maybe what books do is light a fire under you. What you already had.

This interview originally ran in the September 5, 2025 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish news.

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Her One Regret by Donna Freitas

Posted on September 15, 2025 by pagesofjulia

A young mother confesses regret in this satisfying, dynamic mystery that is also a rousing conversation starter about an experience of motherhood still treated as taboo.

Donna Freitas’s Her One Regret explores what one of her characters calls “the last taboo of motherhood.” At once a rocket-paced crime tale of suspense and a thoughtful examination of cultural dictates about motherhood, this novel of women’s lives and relationships excels as both entertainment and a call to difficult but necessary conversations.

In a brief introductory section, readers meet Lucy in the parking lot of a supermarket in Narragansett Beach. On a gorgeous, early fall afternoon, she loads groceries alongside her nine-month-old daughter, Emma. Then begins Part I: “The First 48 Hours.” Lucy has vanished; Emma is found, alone, crying, but perfectly fine, in the parking lot. The small Rhode Island community is horrified, united in a search for the missing mother. But then it is revealed that Lucy had recently confided in her best friend, Michelle, that she regretted having Emma. She had fantasized about staging her own disappearance. The community and the nation erupt in harsh judgment. Is Lucy a kidnapping victim, or on the run? Is she a monster? What do we make of a woman who regrets motherhood?

The rest of Freitas’s narrative jumps between the lives of four local women. Lucy is seen mostly in memory, or as a symbol. Michelle is devastated by her best friend’s disappearance, in love with her own role as mother, but galvanized to defend her friend. Lucy had tried to tell Michelle what she was suffering, but “Michelle did the thing everybody does with mothers: dismiss their feelings as not real. Michelle gaslit Lucy, kept gaslighting her. She hadn’t meant to.” Diana, a retired detective, is drawn to Lucy’s case and its similarities and differences from other vanished women. And then there is Julia, whose baby is the same age as Emma: “Julia keeps waiting for the moment she’ll feel bonded to her son, that miracle other women talk about when connection and unbelievable love will flood her person and overcome the dread, the sadness, the resistance. But it never happens.” Julia, an artist who can no longer bring herself to create, sees herself in Lucy, shares the fantasy of escape, and now watches as the world on social media condemns her parallel self. Her desperation feels like an emergency no one around her will acknowledge.

Freitas (Consent; The Nine Lives of Rose Napolitano) relates these lives and quiet–or in Lucy’s case, suddenly very public–struggles with nuance and compassion. Her One Regret is purposefully thought-provoking and a riveting mystery–a masterpiece of duality, not soon forgotten.

This review originally ran in the September 5, 2025 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 8 sketches.

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Witchcraft by Sole Otero, trans. by Andrea Rosenberg

Posted on September 8, 2025 by pagesofjulia

This graphic novel follows an unusual household over several centuries in Buenos Aires, Argentina, through various characters whose lives are impacted, if not ruined, by three enigmatic sisters.

Argentinean comics artist Sole Otero (Mothballs) offers a tale that meanders through historical and speculative fiction with Witchcraft, a graphic novel that spans centuries in Buenos Aires. In Otero’s evolving but recognizable visual style, the opening scene emerges spookily from the fog, as a ship arrives in Nuestra Señora del Buen Ayre in 1768. (One of a series of footnotes explains that this was the original name of Buenos Aires, given by the conqueror Pedro de Mendoza.) Readers see three women disembark with their goat, taking with them the three-year-old son of another passenger, to the latter’s wails of despair. From these early, atmospheric pages, a sense of unease is established and maintained.

The following sections of the narrative undertake large jumps in time. In more or less present-day Buenos Aires, a man tells his friend a scarcely credible story of nude women dancing around entranced nude men, with a goat and a chalk circle and “this super creepy music.” In an earlier, historical setting, a Mapuche woman goes to work at a grand estate for three sisters who are both feared and respected in their local village, to a horrifying end. In modern times, a reclusive woman exchanges e-mails with a similarly lonely man, the veterinarian who came on a house call to look at her sick cat; he tells strange, disturbing tales about his family and the elderly goat they want him to save. A nunnery sends an allegedly evil orphan girl to live with three sisters who normally adopt only boys. From these and other narrative threads, populated by spirits, witch hunts, pleas and losses, readers begin to piece together the fractured story of the María sisters and their unusual, perhaps supernatural, habits.

Otero’s style of illustration varies somewhat between sections, but is often distorted or off-kilter, and highly detailed; in full color, her characters’ facial expressions and contortions advance the unnerving atmosphere of the larger story. Page spreads may include carefully spaced panels or no panels at all; text style likewise shifts, with infrequent footnotes to help readers along. This results in a sinister, mysterious, and deeply compelling reading experience. Translated by Andrea Rosenberg (who also translated Otero’s Mothballs), Witchcraft blends horror, dark magic and dark humor, rage and righteousness. This disjointed, sometimes discomfiting, entertaining story addresses colonial power and indigenous resistance alongside ritual, sex, and sacrifice in an eerie, phantasmagoric package not soon forgotten.

This review originally ran in the August 18, 2025 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 6 trees climbed.

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Sister Creatures by Laura Venita Green

Posted on September 1, 2025 by pagesofjulia

From rural Louisiana to locations around the globe, the same problems and secrets follow a quartet of girls-become-women in this arresting, unnerving, and wise debut novel.

With Sister Creatures, Laura Venita Green invites her reader to navigate a shape-shifting world, beginning in rural Louisiana and ranging overseas and into starscapes and imagination. Rotating among a small group of girls and women, this imaginative narrative muddies the line between the novel’s real world and a fictional one within it. The result is dreamy, often disturbing, and hauntingly unforgettable.

In the opening scene, Tess uses her isolated job as a live-in nanny to hide away from the life she feels has already cratered, at age 20, with her heavy drinking. A neighboring teenager, Gail, makes a disquieting appearance: she is clearly not well, perhaps in danger, but rejects Tess’s half-hearted offer to help. The older girl “hat[es] how relieved she felt not to have to deal with anything.” Gail’s plight becomes a legend to the other characters until she makes a reappearance as an adult at the novel’s end. Meanwhile, Tess grows up and has a daughter of her own, lives around the world as part of a military family, but struggles to escape the problems she hid from in Pinecreek, La. Her former best friend, Lainey, leaves Louisiana as well, resulting in permanent banishment at the hands of a troubled younger sister. Another young woman, Olivia, wrestles with the local options, characterized as “Jesus and booze,” and with a sexuality not likely to be tolerated there. And then there is a recurring character whose entire reality seems in question. While they all choose to leave Pinecreek, the struggles that originate in their shared hometown follow these characters to Munich, Baltimore, New York City, and beyond.

In their parallel comings-of-age, and across generations, Green’s characters thread their paths between love and spite, affection and abuse. Their loose connections and jumps in chronology reward close attention, contributing to a slightly off-balance reader experience that is very much a part of the novel’s atmosphere. Sister Creatures blurs the concepts of reality and of right and wrong. Are the woods–of Louisiana, Maryland, or Bavaria–sanctuary or threat? Who is real and who is made up? Green’s narrative offers a strong literary bent, as characters interact with “The Yellow Wallpaper,” old fairy tales, misogyny, motherhood, and their own creative pursuits. They hurt each other, but they help each other, too; this is a novel ruled by nuance and surreality as well as the all-too-real.

Sister Creatures is often unsettling, but pairs moments of great sweetness alongside discomfiting ones. This novel remains thought-provoking long after its final pages.

This review originally ran in the August 12, 2025 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 cut-out musical notes.

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author interview: Jessica Gross

Posted on August 22, 2025 by pagesofjulia

Following my review of Open Wide, here’s Jessica Gross: Playing with Reality.

Shelf Awareness called Jessica Gross’s first novel, Hysteria, “coolly sexy and razor-smart”; it has been optioned for TV development. Her nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Lilith, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other publications. She has taught writing at the New School and Texas Tech University, and lives in West Texas with her husband and her dog–she notes that “we all have the same hair.” Her second novel, Open Wide (Abrams Press), is thought-provoking, darkly funny, and a little terrifying, and has been optioned for film development.

Do you start with the imagery of splitting open, or a concept that you then look for a metaphor to fit?

Jessica Gross
(photo: Macy Tapp)

More the latter. This book has taken me through a personal evolution. At the time I started working on it, I was a single woman living in New York in 2019. Then I met my now-husband and entered a serious relationship for the first time in a long time. I was grappling with the question of what it means to be with someone and maintain your separate personhood, and my own boundary issues and confusions. So it started with mining that difficult psychological terrain personally, and thinking, what can I do with this in a fictional world? And concretize it. So it started with the psychic part, and became the surreal body horror iteration.

Is that a matter of literalizing a universal impulse?

I’ve been very inspired by the writer Marie-Helene Bertino, who I’ve been privileged to know personally. Her work often does this kind of magical realist thing, and she’s talked about it in ways that have influenced my own writing. Why not literally make the world magical, instead of it just feeling magical? That’s been something I’ve had a lot of fun playing with in my own work. It’s just taking a concept to its most extreme version. Often, when I’m revising, it helps me to print out the work. Then I can see it from a distance and in a new way, and cut it up and play around with it, literally, on the paper. It feels like a version of that. I’m going to play with this concept, but from a different angle, and see what happens. And it’s often nothing good for the characters! It’s easier to see their psychological ailments when you make them really concrete.

Why do you suppose it’s fun for us to write, and read, those uncomfortable extremes?

When I taught at the New School, we were reading a story where the characters were completely going at it, and one of my more brilliant students said “Oh! In fiction the characters can do and say things that we’re too scared to do and say in real life.” And that was a great description of one thing that fiction can offer. This catharsis, being able to live through characters what we don’t necessarily have the guts or ability to live through in our real life, is something that plays and novels have offered us since their inception. It’s fun in the same way that reading a book set on the French Riveria while you’re living in Lubbock is fun. You get to be transported to another world, another person, another psyche, and you get to play something out without any repercussions in your actual life or relationships. And maybe there’s a bit of schadenfreude too, that this character is doing something damaging and, oh, what a relief. It’s like waking up from a dream. Whew. None of that was real.

This is a very physical, embodied story. Is it fun to write that stuff, the guts? Is that a consistent interest or feature in your writing?

Yes. I like to root things in the body. I feel like it’s a very effective way to involve the reader in the story, simulate for the reader what’s happening in the story. In my first book, there was a lot of sexual body stuff–which there is some of in this book. But the body horror elements–it’s funny, because I don’t like reading or watching horror. It’s not a genre I’m interested in as much. But doing it myself is obviously very different, because I have total control over the gruesomeness. So it was extremely pleasurable! On the couple of occasions when I forced myself to watch videos of doctors performing surgeries, I was really disgusted. I was then having to search “doctor explaining surgery on human model,” because I just couldn’t handle the actual gore. But it was extremely fun and pleasurable to be able to write about the body in such a visceral way. In this novel, also, I tried something new to me, which was making it very focused on sound. And that’s tough–trying to get anything sensory on the page is a fun challenge, and a way for the story to subsume the reader from different angles that aren’t just intellectual.

What relationship does Open Wide have with Hysteria? Are they in conversation?

They definitely are. One is not an extension of the other–it’s not a sequel–but the narrators of both happen to be a little off their rockers, have psychological struggles that they’re working through. They’re both deep first person. The first one even more–it takes place over about 48 hours, so it’s very much about living the narrator’s life, and incredibly embedded in her psyche. With this one, I wanted a tiny bit more distance, and it takes place over a longer period of time, so it’s not quite as immersive. But they have that stylistic thing in common, and the surrealism. The first one was also surreal; in both of them I’m playing with reality. What’s really happening? And as you noticed, concretizing something that could have just been a metaphor. They have a lot in common, but with different characters and different challenges I set myself from a craft perspective.

What makes Olive so compelling as a protagonist?

Well, it is not a foregone conclusion that someone else would find her compelling! To me, she’s strange in a way that I really enjoy. I feel like she’s very observant, and she’s funny, and just bizarre and messed up in a way that I like. I’m not drawn as much to characters that have everything figured out. I’d rather they be working through something kind of messy, and a little bit spilling all over the place. I’m drawn to people who are working through it, working on their psyches, and willing to let you in. I tend to start with something I’m grappling with my own life and then turn up the volume by 400%. For fun. For exploration.

This interview originally ran in the August 8, 2025 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish news.

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Open Wide by Jessica Gross

Posted on August 18, 2025 by pagesofjulia

This mind-bending novel examines the nature of love and the social conventions that govern relationships and asks where limits should be drawn, if at all.

Jessica Gross (Hysteria) staggers and challenges readers with her sophomore novel, Open Wide, starring a socially awkward protagonist who finds love and dives in very, very deeply.

Olive compulsively records all the hours of her life, “collecting sounds the way other people collect stamps.” She records diegetic sounds, which she uses in her work as a radio producer, and conversations, which she plays back–to study what went right or wrong, to soothe or arouse herself. She has long yearned for romance when she meets Theo, a handsome colorectal surgeon. He agrees with Olive’s proffered metaphor: people’s insides look like pink pasta. Olive can’t get enough. She wants to spend every night together. She wants to “climb inside” him.

Alongside their deepening love affair, Olive reveals to readers her relationships with her sisters and mother, through which Gross also explores boundaries (or lack thereof) and obsessive love. “My mother had climbed inside of me. My little self, filled with her bigger one. Her daughter, who was not supposed to be the vessel, but the one contained.” However, Theo is not parent or child to Olive but partner, so their intimacy is different, Olive tells herself.

Olive’s first-person narration of her bizarre story is an inspired choice that makes readers privy to her fears, confusions, passions, and rationalizations. By the final pages, which reveal what has changed in Olive’s surreal world, readers will feel dizzy with her perspective and its consequences. Open Wide is a tense, engrossing examination of the bounds of love.

This review originally ran in the August 8, 2025 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish news.

Rating: 7 dog walks.

Stay tuned for my upcoming interview with Gross.

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Maximum Shelf author interview: Pat Harris

Posted on August 11, 2025 by pagesofjulia

Following Friday’s review of A Season on the Drink, here’s Pat Harris: People Matter.

Pat Harris is a lifelong Saint Paulite and passionate community champion. His commitment to public service began in 1989 as a VISTA volunteer at Catholic Charities, where he first learned about the Saint Anthony Residence and heard tales of a softball team that won it all. The experience sparked a lifetime of civic engagement and advocacy. Harris’s debut novel, A Season on the Drink (Adventure Publications, September 9, 2025), chronicles the story of Marty Peterson and the Saint Anthony Residence fast-pitch softball team their single, undefeated season, and the flash of inspiration it provided. Harris and his partner, Laura, have four dynamic children, and one enthusiastic canine companion named Ranger.

Tell me about the line between verifiable fact and fiction in this novel based on true history.

Pat Harris
(photo: Michael Murrary)

It’s nearly all true, although obviously you have to bring in some license in order to really show the story. When I was a VISTA volunteer, I spent time at the Saint Anthony Residence and learned some of the struggles that people were going through, but also the hope that existed in that building. It’s kind of the end of the road if you’re a person in the deep levels of alcoholism; that’s where you can go to sort of live out life and continue to be an alcoholic. I spent a lot of time there learning about people, and I heard this story, of this one year where they started playing pickup softball games at this park near the building, and they were kinda good! In the middle of some very intense poverty and alcoholism, they were good softball players. It was anchored by a guy I eventually worked with, Marty Peterson, who played baseball at the University of Minnesota. He was a standout baseball player, but alcoholism turned the tide of his life. As soon as I heard it, I was like, someone’s gotta tell this story. A lot of stars aligned to really change some people’s lives. The Saint Anthony is a very intense place that a lot of people are unaware of, but this one year, something really cool happened.

I spent the better part of many years interviewing people and learning what happened. I compiled all the information, but I wasn’t at the games, so I had to reconstruct them based on interviews and stories. All the members of the team, as far as we can tell, have passed. The staff people have passed. Some of the people in the book are still around.

When Marty got sober and got out of the Saint Anthony Residence, that’s when I met him. I discovered this extraordinary person with a trove of original poetry, who saved a child from a burning building (which is in the book)–an absolutely 100% true story that was on the front page of the St. Paul Pioneer Press. My main character, who was a chronic alcoholic and played on this softball team, saved a child from a burning building! You can’t make that up. It had to have been true; I could never have thought of it.

What research did you do?

A lot of it was that I was there. Not for the games–that season happened before I arrived–but the stories were told with great pride. I just spent time there and knew everybody. There were extensive interviews. Marty Peterson’s son and I have become good friends. He tells some amazing stories about his dad, ones of struggle and ones of extraordinary times. A little baseball research here and there, to correlate to what was happening in baseball at the time. The Twins were on the verge of the World Series–they didn’t have a phenomenal season in ’86, but they won the World Series in ’87.

Is this a book about baseball?

This is a book about hope. The game of softball, or baseball, carried some people on this pathway of hope and of perception. Sure, it’s a sports book. But it’s also a book about hope and recovery and alcoholism and poverty and all over the top of it, perception. You’re a bank, or a construction company, or whatever, and you’re playing people who are chronic alcoholics–they’re wearing jeans, and they’re smoking, and half of them are actively intoxicated, perhaps on Lysol or other chemicals, and they’re beating you–badly, sometimes. And competitive juices flow on ball fields, and people get angry. But at the end of these games–hey, you know what, y’all might be at the Saint Anthony Residence, but you’re all right.

This book has a little bit of everything. It’s got sports, it’s got some humor, a lot of sadness, and recovery… and it’s got people that couldn’t get out of those depths. A lot of the team passed onsite, or somewhere not far after exiting the facility.

It’s not singularly a book about sports. It’s about perception and hope, in a true story. This is really emotional for me because people matter. People matter. There are a lot of places that lesson can be taught, and one of them is the ballfield.

What about Marty captured your attention so hard?

I was in my 20s when I met him as a client in the job service program. Marty was one of these guys… this softspoken person that had struggled all his life with the disease of alcoholism. At his core, externally and internally, Marty was a brilliant and good human being. He struggled with this disease; it impacted his family, his job, his ability to be successful in baseball. And he was an extraordinary baseball player. He was kind and decent, and we’d sit in the Union Gospel Mission Thrift Store where he worked, and we’d talk about books and about life and where he was going. He was kind. And then I found out he was a poet! You read his poetry, or the letters his son allowed me to see, and it’s extremely emotional. The gentleman was deep. And, oh yeah, he saved a child from a burning building!

This interview originally ran on July 24, 2025 as a Shelf Awareness special issue. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun.

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Maximum Shelf: A Season on the Drink by Pat Harris

Posted on August 8, 2025 by pagesofjulia

Maximum Shelf is the weekly Shelf Awareness feature focusing on an upcoming title we love and believe will be a great handselling opportunity for booksellers everywhere. The features are written by our editors and reviewers and the publisher has helped support the issue.

This review was published by Shelf Awareness on July 24, 2025.

In 1986, at the Saint Anthony Residence, a haven for folks two steps away from living on the street in Saint Paul, Minn., a series of events and personalities converged in an unlikely and perhaps unprecedented situation. As described in the opening pages of Pat Harris’s novel A Season on the Drink, two softball teams met on Raymond Field: “The Saint Anthony Residence for chronic alcoholics and the drywall company were tied. It was the final game of the season.” It was just rec-league ball, but the stakes felt much greater than the outcome of the game itself. There was dignity on the line.

Harris’s debut is a remarkable novel whose subject is, on its surface, a softball team made up of chronic alcoholics. Immersion in its storytelling, however, reveals greater depths, focusing on a handful of characters from the team and the Saint Anthony Residence; most central is a man named Marty Peterson. Marty is nearing 50 years old, with a county record including “treatment six or so times, detox 30 or 40,” when he goes to live at the Residence. Quiet, easygoing, cerebral, Marty has long found himself unfit for mainstream life.

He does have a personal history with baseball, however. A strong player in high school, he played a single year at the University of Minnesota, briefly brushing shoulders with greatness in the form of coach Dick Siebert and Herb Brooks. “Herb would eventually take off his Gopher baseball uniform for a checkered sport coat and one of the most iconic gold medals in history. Marty took off his uniform for a shirt he found at Goodwill.” In an extraordinary year at Saint Anthony, he will have an important role to play in forming a team that will go undefeated for its single season.

Based on a true story that touched the author early in his public service career, A Season on the Drink delves into Marty’s personal history through “Marty Interludes” and his original poetry. Harris features a few other characters in detail: Harry Opus, the day manager at Saint Anthony, is a recovering alcoholic and somewhat reluctant team member. Terry Thomas, longtime resident, is “a provocateur… humorous, conniving, and sad,” but a born salesman and Marty’s more gregarious counterpart as player/manager. Allison Boisvert, director of housing for Catholic Charities, aka “the Queen of Housing,” along with community investors Mr. Long and Mr. Ryan and a “charitable mobster” known as “The Padre,” provide financial and moral support; the Queen’s partner, Jim, also a staffer at Saint Anthony, is a steady hand on a team with very few of them. But Marty is the heart, soul, and talent.

In telling the story of these and other lost alcoholics and those who serve them, Harris artfully profiles people, the city of Saint Paul, and alcoholism itself. He also touches on politics, economics, and social services. The existence of the Saint Anthony Residence relies on the skillful marketing by the Queen and other advocates to both ends of the political spectrum. Housing “chronic inebriates” at Saint Anthony costs taxpayers far less than treatment or detox; visible, homeless drunks are bad for business. It is also “a matter of dignity… [which] calls for the basics of life–food, shelter, and maybe something for the soul.” “All were welcome at Saint Anthony”–the residence is a wet house: residents have no obligation to attend meetings or make any attempt to be sober. They may own alcohol but not possess it on the premises. Some leave for parts unknown; some leave in a body bag. There is a regular schedule to each month, from the first when residents collect a check for $47 and are, briefly, funded drinkers, through the mid-month descent into alchemy: profoundly toxic cocktails of cleaning products and rubbing alcohol for the truly committed. “The Saint Anthony Residence was a last stop–a formal determination of the end while living.”

But then there was the spring of 1986. Led by Kirby Puckett and called by Bob Kurtz, the Minnesota Twins are on the Saint Anthony televisions; Marty, Terry, and Harry watch in the latter’s office, and Marty recalls his youth. A baseball glove appears. Marty and Terry knock a ball around over at Raymond Field, and the Queen directs Harry to form a team–she wants to see the residents a little more occupied, beyond alchemical creativity. Terry’s charisma and salesmanship, Harry’s unenthusiastic aid, and most especially Marty’s love for and knowledge of the game coalesce to form “America’s first organized softball team of chronic inebriates.” “The game of baseball was made to make the world feel better. Even in failure, it offered victory.”

By the end of this narrative, fictionalized from Harris’s own conversations with Marty Peterson, a team has formed and stumbled, won, and disbanded. The Saint Anthony Residence is still the bottom of a certain trajectory, but there are fine and shining moments. “Seeing the playing field from the vantage point of the batter’s box is the greatest moment in sports, and Marty was right back in it.” Victory parties are thrown with kegs of root beer.

“If this were a movie, there’d be happy endings, but life stories are not that neat.” With A Season on the Drink, Harris offers somber but loving reflections from this less-than-neat story, and there is no question of the tenderness at its center–“[Marty] just liked playing ball.”

Rating: 8 unusually fresh doughnuts.

Come back Monday for my interview with Harris.

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