Dana Mack

Dana Mack just published her first work of fiction, All Things That Deserve To Perish:  A Novel of Wilhelmine Germany.  A musician, journalist, and historian, she is the author of two non-fiction books,  The Assault on Parenthood:  How Our Culture Undermines the Family (Simon & Schuster; Encounter Paperbacks) and The Book of Marriage:  The Wisest Answers to the Toughest Questions (Eerdmans).   Her essays have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Commentary, The New Criterion, The Washington Post, USA Today, The Christian Science Monitor, and many other publications.  She lives in New Canaan, Connecticut with her husband. 

Twitter: @Danamac90928723

Is there a genre of music that influenced your writing?
I am a classical pianist and wrote music criticism for years, though I don't think of my journalistic prose as ever having been particularly musical. But when I sat down to write an historical novel – and a novel in which music is something of a character – music became a writing obsession! I even toyed with borrowing the organization for my novel from the classical sonata form. I resisted that impulse as being far too ambitious, and settled for the idea of modest changes in tone and tempo. I work very hard to make my writing pleasing to the ear, but I never listen to music while writing. I cannot do anything else when I listen to music – not even drive. If I listened to music while driving, I would probably have a traffic accident!

Is your go-to comfort food sweet or savory?

When it comes to snacking and writing, I am an omnivore. In fact, I have something of an attention deficit disorder where comfort food is concerned --- most especially while editing drafts. I go from sweet to savory and back again. When getting up to stretch, all roads lead to the tea kitchen behind my office – where I have both a pretzel cupboard and a cookie cupboard.
But when I am fully immersed in the more creative aspects of writing -- for example, the first draft of an article or book – I often totally forget to eat. I work in a studio which is separate from my family's living quarters. There is no refrigerator, and no stove. While writing the initial draft of my novel, four years ago, I completely forgot to eat for days on end.  My husband had to force me to come to dinner.  I lost several pounds, and looked terrific by the time the draft was finished!

Not all books are for all readers...How long until you bail?
I am a member of two reading clubs, which means that I force myself to read to the end a lot of books I wouldn't necessarily have chosen for myself. It has been very rewarding to do that; I am a person of all too particular reading habits, and I absolutely need the social pressure of a book club to get me out of my reading ruts.. (For myself, I choose a lot of non-fiction – having a graduate degree in History, and having worked in journalism. And when I do turn to fiction, it is pretty exclusively 19th and 20th century literature.)
All of this said, I do bail more than occasionally – both on books that are assigned to me, and ones I choose for myself. For me the bailing is always a question of writing style, which has to be to my taste, and has to feel natural and emotionally authentic. I want to sense direction in a narrative, and beauty in the prose, especially if it is experimental. If the style strikes me as turgid, crude, rigid, hackneyed, or two “creatively” organized, I can bail pretty quickly. I bailed once on page 4. In fact, if I am honest, all I need to bail is to run into a sentence I absolutely hate. I recently tried to read a much praised novel of a famous contemporary writer. Somewhere around forty pages into it, I came upon a turn of phrase I thought was heedlessly trite.  I stopped right there; I just couldn't go on.

Is there another profession you would like to try?
Because I come from a family of musicians, my parents expected I would be a concert pianist. I had neither the talent nor the fortitude, despite a lot of practice and a great love of music. I have been a teacher of music – a profession that has great rewards when one has the occasional capable and interested student, but is mostly very boring There is nothing that could ever replace writing in my life. For me, there is nothing that can compare with the feeling of being immersed in the writing process. I have been lucky in that the results of my writing have been more gratifying than the results of practicing Beethoven or Scriabin. That is, a lot more people have liked my writing than have liked my piano playing.
Even if people, in the main, hated my writing, I would continue to write. And while there is little that brings me greater satisfaction than someone saying, “I've read your book and loved it!” I have no problem with negative, even hostile reviews! Every review I get gives me a sense of accomplishment. Every attention paid to my writing is an affirmation of the power of my words and the mental process that births them. After all, someone has taken the time to try to digest the phrases I've cooked up for them! That's a compliment, in and of itself!

Do you speak a second language?

We are actually a German speaking family. My husband is Austrian. I conceived much of the dialogue of my recently published work, All Things That Deserve To Perish: A Novel of Wilhelmine Germany, in the German language, and then translated it into my native tongue, English. The novel, which takes place in the 1890s and concerns a wealthy and talented German-Jewish woman who finds herself trapped in a fragile mixed marriage, is a nod to the great Prussian writer, Theodore Fontane., He has given me many hours and days of reading pleasure, as well as a brilliant literary window into the nineteenth century German mind.
The biggest challenge I faced in writing my novel was to transpose the English speaking reader into 19th century Germany -- a completely foreign world where culture and manners are concerned. I hope I was able to achieve this transposition. If I did, it is not only because I have read a considerable amount of German literature, but because I spent many years living in Austria and Germany, imbibing the German preoccupation with long outmoded social rituals, and exposing myself to the Germans' very annoying and deeply ingrained cultural prejudices. It probably should be mentioned here that German speech is both blunter and more formulistic than English speech. In the case of some of the dialogue in my novel, it took me many, many months of editing to find exactly the English words I wanted. Curiously, I have just gone through an agonizing experience choosing someone to translate All Things That Deserve To Perish into German. I  feel very blessed that after commissioning several excerpts which really missed the mark, I finally found someone who exactly captured the narrative tone I was looking for.
The themes of my novel – the struggle against systemic racism, and the subjugation of women in traditional societies – are as relevant today as they ever were – both in Germany and in America. Probably for that reason, both critics and readers have remarked on the contemporary feel of my book.  Still, in attributing thoughts and actions to my fictional characters of more than one hundred twenty years ago, I had to remain true to the values of the place and the period I was writing about. Some readers haven't liked that. They contend my characters' attitudes and decisions disappoint them.  It's impossible to please everyone where literature is concerned. One can only try one's hardest to write honestly, and from the heart.  And I have tried to do this with an eye to appealing to readers of two different languages and cultures.