Interview with Janice Steinberg, author of The Tin Horse

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Janice Steinberg, author

Janice Steinberg, author of The Tin Horse

Janice Steinberg’s latest novel, The Tin Horse, delves into the lives of two very different twin sisters, living in Boyle Heights, California. The novel begins at a time when the sisters, Elaine and Barbara, have been apart for 60 years, then gracefully steps back to their childhood and teenage years, in the 1920s and 30s, to a vanishing culture and era, when Boyle Heights was alive with the experiences of Jewish immigrants.

An award-winning arts journalist, Steinberg has published more than four hundred articles in The San Diego Union-Tribune, Dance Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere. She is also the author of five mystery novels, including the Shamus Award–nominated Death in a City of Mystics. She lives in San Diego with her husband, Jack Cassidy.

Q. How did it feel to get published by Random House?

Let’s just say “Random House” is my mantra. Whenever Radio Station KFKD (as Anne Lamott calls it in Bird By Bird) starts blaring in my ear, I yell back at it, “My novel was published by Random House.” Or, I repeat “Random House” to myself, à la the song from Bye Bye Birdie,
“Ed Sullivan.”

Beyond the ego boost, what was wonderful about being picked up by Random House was getting to work with a brilliant editor, Kendra Harpster. There’s a general belief that editors don’t really edit anymore. But my first editorial letter from Kendra was 18 pages long, single-spaced. And her suggestions were more than just smart and insightful. You know how, when you start to write a book, you have a crystalline vision of how the book could be? But, along the way, you run up against issues of craft or just the limitations of your talent, and there’s always a gap between the book you dreamed of and what you manage to produce. Kendra shared my vision of what The Tin Horse could be.

 Q. What drove you to write Tin Horse?

My inspiration was a nameless character in the Raymond Chandler novel The Big Sleep, a woman working in a bookstore who’s described as having “the fine-drawn face of an intelligent Jewess.” I was struck by that phrase with its sense of otherness and by the fact that, among Chandler’s tough guys and fast women, the Jewess in the bookstore was the one character with whom I identified. So—in the spirit of novels like Mrs. Ahab, which take marginal female characters from other books and put them center-stage—I set out to tell the Jewess’s story.

Q. Obviously place has had a big influence on writing TH. Can you talk about that?

I got insanely lucky! I had a feeling the Jewess in the bookstore occupied a very different Los Angeles than Chandler’s mean streets. And I started researching the history of Jews in Los Angeles, to find out where, in the 1930s, she would have lived. I found a goldmine, a setting so rich that it could become a character in its own right: Boyle Heights.

I say a lot about Boyle Heights on my website, The Tin Horse, but to give a few basics: It’s directly east of downtown L.A. and is now completely Hispanic, but in the 1920s and 30s, Boyle Heights had a large Jewish neighborhood on the West Coast and was a center of Jewish culture, with delis, Yiddish and socialist societies, synagogues, and more.

I got even luckier in that an oral history project was conducted in the early 1990s, and I was able to listen to people’s reminiscences of growing up in Boyle Heights, which gave the book flavor and sometimes inspired major incidents.

Q. What are your habits, as a writer. I learned about the “egg timer” method from you. Do you still use a timer?

I’m mushing these two questions together, because the answers are related. I used to think I needed vast swaths of time to do a novel-length project. But when I started The Tin Horse, I had a lot of other balls in the air – newspaper articles, teaching, etc. A friend, Sara Lewis Murre (a wonderful novelist who’s also a hypnotherapist and creativity coach) suggested I set aside time daily for the novel. It didn’t matter how much time, even just 20 minutes, as long as I did it every day. And to make sure that time was sacrosanct, she told me to set a kitchen timer; any interruption, and I had to stop the timer. I was dubious, but I gave it a try. Most days I was able to carve out at least an hour. And it took six years, but with the continuity of working every day, I finished a draft that felt ready to send out to agents.

A couple of individual twists on this method: My novel time has to be first thing in the morning. If I used that time for an article and told myself I’d spend an hour on the novel later, it didn’t happen. And I do best working Monday thru Friday and taking the weekends off.

These days, I have fewer competing projects, but I still use the timer. By now, it’s more talismanic than practical. But I’m looking at it on my desk as I’m typing this.

 Q. Any mistakes that you learned from, writing TH or getting TH published?

It wasn’t until six months after my book came out that I read What To Do Before Your Book Launch by M. J. Rose and Randy Susan Meyers. I should have read it a year ahead of publication.

Q. What are you working on now?

The Tin Horse was my novel about women in families, where I got to play out my fantasy of having a sister. My new book, Tower of Song, is about a multi-generational family, but the crux relationship is between a father and son. And, to my amazement, it’s got humor. I think that’s because I’m able to have more distance from my male characters.

 Q. If you could change one thing about the world, what would it be?

For people to be willing to experience their pain and grief, so they don’t rechannel it into anger and aggression; and so they can empathize with the pain in other people’s narratives.

 Q. What about writing excites you?

Language. Emotion. Relationships. Being surprised.

Q. What do you aspire to, in your work?

Emotional honesty. Complexity.  Some of the comments I’ve gotten on The Tin Horse that have most pleased me are when people feel the story has to be an autobiography, because it feels so real, or when someone with a sister says I got the sister dynamic right. I love it when I visit a book group, and people don’t even want to hear from me because they’re so involved in discussing their takes on my characters’ actions and motivations—if I can provoke that kind passionate engagement, I’m thrilled.

 Q. If you could have lunch with any author, living or dead, whom would it be?

I would love to see Lynn Luria Sukenick again. I met Lynn, a wise woman and exquisite writer, when I was her student at UC-Irvine. She was one of the first people—and the most meaningful—to take me seriously as a writer. Her support, plus the journal-writing I started for one of her classes, helped me gain the clarity and self-respect I needed to get out of a stifling marriage. And she told me to meet a friend of hers, Jack Cassidy. After ten years or so when we lived in different places, Lynn ended up in San Diego, teaching at SDSU; I was able to see her regularly, and she was at Jack’s and my wedding. So many times, since she died in 1995, there’s been something I wanted to share or discuss with her.

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