Veteran TV writer John Stephens’ (Pomona College Class of ’94) first foray into children’s fantasy books, The Emerald Atlas, was a hit in a hot publishing genre. Now he is back with The Fire Chronicle, the second in the Books of Beginning trilogy. Kirkus Reviews gave the new book, released this fall a starred review: “Irreverent humor and swashbuckling adventure collide in a fetching fantasy.”

Stephens’ stories follow three children who have been hidden by the wizard Stanislaus Pym at the Edgar Allan Poe Home for Hopeless and Incorrigible Orphans, but are soon discovered by their enemies. In Chronicle, Kate is chased 100 years into the past to a dangerous and enchanted New York City and left searching for her brother and sister, Michael and Emma, who are following clues into a hidden world to find the legendary book of fire.

Stephens ’94 is already well-established in television, where he spent 10 years as executive producer of Gossip Girl and a writer for Gilmore Girls and The O.C. And while The Emerald Atlas was highly sought after among publishers, Stephens found writing the follow-up brought a new set of challenges, as he describes in this abridged interview:

Is it easier or harder to write the second book in a trilogy? 

Writing the second book is both harder and easier. On the easier side, you already have your main characters. You know who they are, their strengths and weaknesses.  Also, in a trilogy such as this, you have a certain level of story momentum.  There are specific plot points which have to happen. Granted, you want to get to them by unexpected paths, but you know that sooner or later you have to get to them.  That said, writing the second is in many ways more difficult than the first. The first I wrote more or less in private, almost on a lark. There was no deadline, no one waiting for the book. I could write in my own time, and if the book ended up stinking, well, no one ever had to know.  With the second book, there was a deadline.  People were waiting.  The pressure was totally different.  When you write a first book that ‘works,’ it feels like you somehow managed to pull a rabbit out of your hat in the privacy of your own office. Writing the second book, you’re suddenly on stage in front of a thousand people, and there’s a worldwide rabbit shortage. And you’re naked.

Did you start The Fire Chronicle soon after the first book? How long did it take you to complete it? 

I started The Fire Chronicle when I was in the process of selling The Emerald Atlas, which in some ways meant going from one book right into the other. You have to understand, I was kind of terrified. I had managed to write one book, but to me, all that proved was that I could write one book. Who was to say I could write two, much less three? But I’d signed a contract promising three. I had this image where angry publishers would come to my house and take my dog when I failed to produce the books. From my first notes to the locked book was almost exactly two years. Two wonderful, wonderful panic-filled years.

Have you completed book three? What are you working on now?

I have not completed book three. I have done a rough outline and begun writing. Though right now, I’m taking a little bit of a break to direct a couple episodes of television. After two years alone in a room, I worried I was getting a little weird, and I felt it’d be a good idea to venture out into the world before I descend again into my hobbit hole.

–Sneha Abraham

More about John Stephens in PCM

During his Pomona College days, Dan Hickstein ’06 landed a prestigious Churchill Scholarship to study at Cambridge (where he earned his master’s in physics), co-authored articles for such publications as the Journal of the American Chemical Society and  completed two internships at the National Institutes of Health.

But Hickstein also knows how to let off some steam in the great outdoors, and he recently took a year off from pursuing his Ph.D. in chemical physics at the University of Colorado at Boulder to write The Mountain Biker’s Guide to Colorado, earning rave reviews on amazon. The result: 367 pages chock full o’ trail details and ratings, maps, photos and even tidbits on bike shops and places to eat from Fort Collins to Aspen.

As Hickstein told Colorado Daily:

“A week at a time I’d drive out to some part of Colorado and ride all the trails — and ride them all with a GPS. I wanted to have really good maps in the book. I would ride with digital camera and each time I got to a turn I’d make a point on the GPS and record the instructions as a little movie on my  camera. I spent hours going through the videos and GPS tracks. I really tried to be out there most every day, rain or shine, trying to get the trails ridden and get the research done.”

When Susan Beilby Magee ’66 was 6 years old, she posed for a portrait by Kalman Aron, a Holocaust survivor and fine artist who had come to Los Angeles after World War II and was barely eking out a living.

The critically-acclaimed, year-long Pomona College Museum of Art exhibition, “It Happened At Pomona: Art at the Edge of Angeles, 1969-1973,” ended in May. But as this photo tweeted by KSPC’s Erica Tyron shows, interest in the exhibition carries on, far beyond Pomona. The shot shows the display window of San Francisco’s famous City Lights Bookstore, and the gray-colored tome is the catalogue for “It Happened.”

If you’re reading James Thurber and Robert Benchley and composing comedic poetry at the tender age of 7, then writing a book that examines humor from every conceivable angle doesn’t feel like that much of a stretch. Indeed, when David Misch ’72 began putting together Funny: The Book three years ago, it felt like the next logical step in a four-decade career that has included stints as a comedic folk singer, stand-up comedian and writer for such shows as Mork and Mindy and Saturday Night Live. Misch credits his days at Pomona for both the beginning of his life’s work and its latest chapter. During his senior year, Misch was goofing around, making up songs on guitar with some friends in his Clark dorm room.Their laughter prompted a concert booking at the Smudge Pot coffee house and a postgraduate career as a “professional funny folk singer,” an occupation that, Misch notes, “went out around the same time as ‘buggy whip maker.’”

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It’s all over the news  this week: the president of Honduras has announced that a team of researchers, using airborne laser mapping, may have found a fabled lost city deep in the rain forest of the Central American nation. Reports Innovation News Daily via MSNBC:

“Underneath the thick, virgin rainforest cover in the Mosquitia region of Honduras, archaeologists have discovered ruins they think may be the lost city of Ciudad Blanca … researchers flew over the area in a small plane and shot billions of laser pulses at the ground, creating a 3-D digital map of the topology underneath the trees.”

Adds ScienceDaily:

“The project has demonstrated the power of airborne laser mapping to locate archaeological ruins in regions covered with thick forest, and it appears that the method will be used widely in the years ahead.”

And, then, via an author’s web link to the Honduran government’s press release, we learn that our very own Douglas Preston ’78, best-selling author of both thrillers and non-fiction as well as New Yorker archaeology correspondent,  was along on the expedition. Can’t wait to find out what he was up to.

More about Douglas Preston and his brother Richard Preston ’76, who is also a best-selling writer:

“The Man Who Cried Plague” (an interview with the brothers))
“Of Cannibals and Monsters” (about new books from the Preston brothers)
Douglas Preston’s 2011 Commencement speech
Richard Preston ’76, Michael Crichton and Micro

Children’s author Barbara Brooks Wallace ’45 has racked up more than her share of awards and rave reviews in a career spanning five decades. And, at 89, she’s still at it, with the Cinderella-themed Diary of a Little Devil released in December and another book in her Miss Switch series coming in the fall. But she hasn’t forgotten her shaky start. Wallace, who today lives in a retirement home in McLean, Va., credits her success to an initially-nerve-wracking encounter with her freshman-year English professor at Pomona. Wallace had always pleased her high school teachers. But at Pomona she came to realize she was prone to “flossy” overwriting and for the first time in her life, she was making C’s on papers. Then English Professor Charles C. Holmes called her into a meeting.

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Nura Maznavi ’00 was tired of hearing everyone talk about Muslim women, without ever stopping to listen to Muslim women themselves. “Nowhere in the public discourse did we see a reflection of the funny, independent and opinionated Muslim women we knew,” says Maznavi, who, with co-editor Ayesha Mattu, thought an anthology could help fill the void. “We decided to compile our faith community’s love stories as a celebration of our identity and heritage, and a way of amplifying our diverse voices, practice and perspectives.” In Love, InshAllah: The Secret Love Lives of American Muslim Women, 25 women chronicle their experiences of romance, dating, love and sex in the context of their varied relationships to their Muslim faith. (“InshAllah” means “God-willing.”) For the anthology’s co-editors, this was an opportunity to subvert popular perceptions and stereotypes of Muslim women and also remind readers of the universality and complexity of the search for love.

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David Foster Wallace would have turned 50 today, and the web is full of fresh remembrances of his literary legacy. Wallace (Infinite Jest, The Pale King) was Pomona College’s Roy E. Disney Professor of Creative Writing at the time of his death in September 2008.

The Awl lists “46 Things to Read and See for David Foster Wallace’s 50th Birthday.” 

From the New York Daily News: “David Foster Wallace at 50: Why he still matters and always will.”

The Atlantic Wire also offers an interesting roundup  of links.

 Flavorwire: “Awesome Tattoos Inspired by David Foster Wallace.”

 From the PCM archives: Pomona students remember David Foster Wallace 

The Pomona Student Union held its own event this past Saturday discussing Wallace’s legacy with novelist and essayist Jonathan Lethem (Pomona’s Roy E. Disney Professor of Creative Writing and English), Laura Miller (author and writer for Salon and The New York Times Book Review), and D.T. Max (writer for The New Yorker and author of an upcoming Wallace biography). Update on 2/27: Video of the event is now available on the PSU web. (Photo below: Miller, moderator Julius Taranto ’12, Lethem and Max.)

Richard Preston’s friendship with Michael Crichton is a strange one—mostly because the two writers never met. It developed as Preston ’76 finished writing Crichton’s 17th novel, a thriller that finds seven grad students lured to Hawaii for a research project that turns out to be run by a sociopath scientist. The students are plunged into the insect world of Oahu and must struggle to survive. “At first I thought I would be intimidated,” says Preston, “but I became entranced by Michael’s materials. It became an act of friendship, and I developed a feeling of affection for Michael even though I had never met him.”

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