Get to Know Our Friend Janet Skeslien Charles

Plus a Cocktail Pairing & 5 Questions with Judith Lindbergh

A Conversation with Janet Skeslien Charles

A writing tip, book recommendation, and other great insights from Janet that were not covered in our on-air interview which you can WATCH or LISTEN to now!

For any aspiring writers out there, would you please share a short bit of writing advice?
My advice to aspiring writers is to quit aspiring and do. In Paris, I’ve met tons of people who moved here to write the great American novel, but they never put a word on paper. Get started, even if it is a sentence or a paragraph. You don’t have to live in a big city or know where the story ends, you just have to begin. Personally, place is the main character of my work, whether it is Odesa, Ukraine; small-town Montana; or a beloved library. I believe that place shapes who we are and how we react, and I transmit that to my characters. A great pleasure of writing, and in real life, is figuring out what makes people tick.

What is the last book you raved about and what did you love about it?  
I adored Liese O’Halloran Schwartz’s What Could Be Saved. It’s about family and love and loss. It’s about how siblings deal with the same things differently. It’s about a mom who holds things together so tightly for so long, she becomes rigid. It’s about how things can go very wrong, and how we can make them right. The book left me feeling hopeful and in awe. It reminded me that life is fragile, we are fragile — yet we’re more resilient than we think.

What can you tell us about your work-in-progress?