An epic family saga, The Sorting Room is a captivating tale of a woman’s struggle and perseverance in faint hopes of reconciliation, if not redemption.
We chat with author Michael Rose about his newest release, The Sorting Room, along with book recommendations, writing, and more!
Hi, Michael! When did you first discover your love for writing?
I’ve never taken a creative writing class and didn’t dabble in writing fiction until I was thirty years old. Being a farm boy at heart, I recoiled from office work after suffering my first such job upon graduating university with a BA in Economics. Before my one year anniversary of that office job, I quit. I left New York and found work in a cabinet shop in Florida, then on the production line of an aircraft manufacturer. I next moved to California where I worked construction. I enjoyed the work, but injured my back and, out of necessity, found myself once again in an office environment. I wanted to continue my education. I had a minor in communications, so I took a class in group communication, assuming I’d pursue a masters in communications as opposed to an MBA, which was the advice I’d received from management. I wrote a paper for that communications class. We were sent on a field trip to watch an old film, Duel in the Sun (1946), at a local community theater. Before getting down to the meat of the assignment, I described my sprint through a downpour from the parking lot to the quanset hut theater. The professor handed me back the paper, praised “the writing,” and told me I should have it published. I didn’t even know what he meant, but an authority had given his blessing and I wondered if what I had dreamed about for years might be possible. I had long wanted to be a novelist. I suppose he gave me permission to fall in love, which came years later when I sat at a keyboard to write fiction for the first time. It was love at first type.
Quick lightning round! Tell us the first book you ever remember reading, the one that made you want to become an author, and one that you can’t stop thinking about!
- The first book I remember reading: Rascal (1963) by Sterling North
- The book that made me want to write: Sometimes A Great Notion (1964) by Ken Kesey
- The book I can’t stop thinking about: All the Light We Cannot See (2014) by Anthony Doerr
Your novel, The Sorting Room, is out now! If you could only describe it in five words, what would they be?
The following is an excerpt from the Kirkus review, which I felt captured an important essence of the novel. I hope you’ll forgive the word count and ignore the two uses of the word “and.”
“…affecting and unpredictable story, unsentimental and unflinching.”
What can readers expect?
The story is compelling, and readers will never forget Eunice Ritter, our protagonist. Many of the generous friends and family members who read my early draft have told me that, years later, they still remembered many of my characters and the events depicted. No one who commented had forgotten Eunice. I trust that readers will experience accessible language, aerodynamic writing that moves the story along without drag or friction, and an uninterrupted dream from beginning to end.
Where did the inspiration for The Sorting Room come from?
I drew from my own experiences on the family farm and my part-time job working at an industrial laundry during my high school days. I was also inspired by the life story of an American man I knew who was born in the late 1920s. He resembled a Native American, although he had been born to an American woman of German ancestry, whose husband was of Swedish descent. They were both alcoholics and rumors about the child’s paternity cited an affair. As a baby, he was shipped off to live on his maternal grandfather’s farm. His story offered me inspiration for a fabricated tale with fictional characters.
Additionally, I had a work colleague who had lived on a reservation when he was a kid. His father was the white schoolteacher and his mother was Latina, a Mexican American. My colleague considered his mother and the members of the tribal community on the reservation to be of common ancestry. His family story was my introduction to the connective roots of indigenous people throughout our western hemisphere.
Can you tell us about any challenges you faced while writing and how you were able to overcome them?
After retiring from my business career, I wrote away for a couple of years in blissful ignorance. Then, I solicited professional feedback on my writing. Confronting my serious lack of craft was a shock. That said, I knew what I wanted and I’m a very stubborn human being. I sensed talent and felt drawn to this work unlike anything before in my life. I had failed in my first attempt (an 1100 page monstrosity of a novel), but I couldn’t shake the sense that if I worked hard I could attain a modest level of craft. My first writing teacher was blunt with his criticism. I’m thankful to this day for his frankness. He showed me where I was out of bounds. He was a great coach, too. He highlighted sentences that I’d written that he claimed any author would have been proud to have penned. He said I already possessed what couldn’t be taught, but that I couldn’t dodge my bad habits, I had to learn the craft. It was all I needed to hear. Someone I respected, an authority in the discipline I craved, had said that I had talent. I was driven to unleash that talent and create compelling fiction. In spite of reaching the debut publishing milestone, I persist in calling myself a writing student. From my journey to date, I suspect a steady stream of revelations about the craft will chase me to my grave. I love that.
What was your research process like?
I investigated many aspects of life during the Prohibition and the Great Depression eras, including the world of industrial laundries, child labor, women attempting divorce, etc. However, I do not have an extensive bibliography to offer. I grew up on a small dairy farm and, during high school, I worked at an industrial laundry. The scents, sights, and sounds of both environments came to me through personal experience.
As mentioned above, I knew a man who in part inspired the Native American sub-plot. He was a gifted carpenter and an alcoholic. He, too, grew up on a farm so we had similar early-life backdrops to our stories, which were, however, very different. Most of the adult family members around him as a child were alcoholics. As noted, he did not look like the product of his German/Swedish parents, so he was sent away to the farm to be raised by his maternal grandparents. I was close to his daughter, who earned a MA in Psychology and worked as a child counselor. She, by definition, was the adult child of an alcoholic (ACOA). Both of my own grandfathers were prone to drink. As a result, my parents, too, were ACOA. They were both essentially teetotalers. I’ve read about alcoholism and ACOA, however most of my knowledge resulted from listening to these people in my life.
I lived in Spokane, WA from 1979 to 1986. While there, I worked with the young man (noted above) who had been raised on a reservation in Idaho. He taught me about the reservation, its dire financial conditions, the excitement of powwow, and the trap posed by alcohol on the reservation.
My ninety-four-year-old father is an avid reader of history and a talker. He sounds like a docent regarding the Great Depression and farm life of the era. He is a storyteller, and his tales have formed many of the impressions in my mind of the times. When I came along, the bulls, hogs, and horses were gone from the farm. We were down to milk cows and chickens for eggs. Much of the ag infrastructure had changed as the result of improved machinery and changes in husbandry, artificial insemination as an example. However, vestiges of the depression years remained all around. In one fallow field, an old 1928 Dodge had been abandoned and sat rusting. We kids used it as a prop for all sorts of imagined adventures. Remnants of horse-powered farming were evident, including the erstwhile blacksmith shop with the tools of the trade retained in bins and barrels or pinned to the walls nearby the old fire pit. I can conjure the smells of that shop to this day.
One hot summer day, as a scrawny ten-year-old boy, I complained about the pre-WWII tractor I was fighting to control in the field. I protested that the kid on the farm down the road had a new tractor with power steering. My father’s response was, “When I was your age, I drove horses.” That brought our “discussion” to a close and I steered that tractor down the row, building my skinny arms as I fought to hold the line. So, when I took on this project, I didn’t feel the need to search for material to familiarize myself with the era. I called Dad. Still do, every day.
Were there any favourite moments or characters you really enjoyed writing or exploring?
The Kirkus review of The Sorting Room pronounced Eunice, our protagonist, as a “remarkable hero.” The famous historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, while touring for her book Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (2005), was asked if she liked Lincoln. She grinned ear to ear and responded, “How could I spend ten years with a man I didn’t like?” I’ve spent over ten years with Eunice Ritter, a tough kid, who grew into a hardened adult character. She revealed her humanity to me over many rewrites. I grew to know and love her more as the years rolled on and I worked to acquire the basics of the writing craft. She was my constant companion and guiding light. And, Eunice would never have entertained any whining about the inherent challenges in learning to write well.
What’s the best and the worst writing advice you have received?
Best writing advice: an online quote from Jennifer Egan, “Read at the level at which you want to write. Reading is the nourishment that feeds the kind of writing you want to do.”
Worst writing advice: “Write what you know.” When I first read this advice, years ago, it made sense. It still does, depending on your interpretation. To me, at the core, it’s a call to augment personal experience and acquire knowledge through research, including interviews, as well as striving to deepen the writer’s empathy for characters that don’t share the writer’s personal background. However, of late, I’ve witnessed this old saw being repurposed to the point of censorship, which invites a slippery slope. It seems to have morphed into a third rail for modern writers, electrified perhaps by our current cultural angst, including accusations of cultural appropriation.
We writers have also heard the advice to write with courage, take risks, do not recoil. The writing teachers and scholars who promote such risk taking, rather than limiting writers to experiences from their own lived lives, stipulate that fiction must achieve verisimilitude. To me, that’s an invitation to explore whatever you want, as well as an admonishment to do your research well or suffer the appropriate criticism that “you know not of what you write.” Once you have attained the requisite knowledge, you should proceed to “write what you know.” With that reinforced foundation of knowledge, you’ve license to free your imagination. Otherwise, I fear the writing life would become boring. Here’s a quote taped to my refrigerator, which provides daily nourishment for, but is not limited to, the writing life:
“The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.” – Dorothy Parker
What’s next for you?
I have another completed novel which has been copyedited by the same skilled woman who copyedited The Sorting Room. I anticipate publishing that second novel in about a year after this debut. The working title is His Imagination About Her Past. It’s the story of an American woman, Coty Fine, a freelance photographer, who, as the book opens, is escaping Hanoi, Vietnam on the back of a truck during the French exit in 1954. In the opening scene, as she mounts the flatbed of the truck which is idling before a crowd gathered in front of a convent, Coty meets her traveling companion, a young French priest who is about her own age. As they depart, she takes a photograph of a beautiful Vietnamese nun whose eyes are locked on the priest’s. The novel spans the remainder of Coty’s life and includes a mystery that dates from the moment she took the photograph of the nun.
Lastly, do you have any book recommendations for our readers?
My answer might seem as if I’m seeking extra credit from a professor. For the length of the list, I apologize. After years of reading for business and slipping in an occasional novel, since I retired, I’ve been a kid in a candy store. I’ve been devouring novels rather than gum balls. I apologize for not uncovering the sweets among new indie offerings, but I do recommend the listed titles, each of which has enjoyed broad sponsorship by readers and critics alike. Referring to Jennifer Egan’s advice cited above, here’s a small sample of the books that have brought me joy of late as a reader and informed my writing life.
More recent titles:
- Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017) by Jesmyn Ward. Beautiful writing that shifts between points of view with stunning clarity, while never jolting the reader out of their dream.
- Lincoln in the Bardo (2017) by George Saunders, the renowned short story artist. Saunders’s beautiful and unique approach to the novel format was unanticipated when I sat to read. A great story told in a different manner by a master of words.
- The Nickel Boys (2019) by Colson Whitehead. Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2016) was magical and rests among my all-time favorite reads. I found The Nickel Boys a dramatic story of straight-up fiction. His beautiful writing persisted throughout this compelling novel as well.
- The Wolf Hall trilogy: Wolf Hall (2009), Bring Up the Bodies (2012), and The Mirror and the Light (2020) by Hilary Mantel. These three books constitute my favorite historical fiction series. She is the master.
- Deacon King Kong (2020) by James McBride. I bought this because I was taken by McBride’s earlier novel The Good Lord Bird (2013) which presented the abolishonist John Brown through the eyes of a ten-year-old runaway slave. McBride’s humor, interspersed throughout his dramatic story telling, is a joy to read.
- The Night Watchman (2020) by Louise Erdrich. Okay, it just won the Pulitzer, so my recommendation isn’t a revealing suggestion. Still, it’s brilliant. Months before the award was announced, I had read about this author and was intrigued. So, during the early lock down in the pandemic, I ordered a copy of The Round House (2012). I thought Erdrich’s voice and style were unique, and attractive to me as a reader. I learned from her depictions of modern Native American life and found that first book very satisfying. When I read about Erdrich’s Pulitzer, I was nodding my head long before I bought a copy and cracked open The Night Watchman. I had assumed that the committee had awarded a deserving book from an already stunning author. Indeed.
Older titles: as a self-described writing student, I’m also catching up on many of the great novels of the past. Here are a select few that aren’t under the spotlight much anymore, but worth a look.
- Shadow Country (2008) by Peter Mathiessen. If you enjoyed the everglades setting of Where The Crawdads Sing (2018) by Delia Owens, the scenery will be familiar although Mathiessen takes you back to the late 1800s, and then brings you into the early Twentieth Century. Mathiessen’s nonfiction book The Snow Leopard (1978) spotlighted his ability to place the reader in unfamiliar settings with a deft touch. He does it with mastery as well in Shadow Country.
- A Man Called Ove (2012) by Frederik Backman. You’ll soften toward that suspected curmudgeon in your life after getting to know Ove over the course of the novel.
- Let The Great World Spin (2009) by Colum McCann. I saw McCann interviewed on PBS and was intrigued. I picked this novel from his stack and found both the story and his writing compelling.
- The Way To Paradise (2003) by Mario Vargas Llosa. If you’ve not yet read him, you’ll soon appreciate Llosa’s Nobel Prize in Literature (2010). The book is an imagined family history of the famous fine artist Paul Gaugin and his grandmother Flora Tristán, an early woman’s right activist who died before her grandson was born. The novel oscillates between the stories of these two adults, passing from Flora’s time in the 1840s and Paul’s as his life crossed the late 1890s into the new century.
