An excerpt from Paul Dimond’s in-depth interview with Jorie from Jorie Loves a Story: Conversations with the Bookish, June 8, 2017.

Jorie asks, “What originally inspired you to become a novelist and did you know at that point in time you wanted to focus on the historic past rather than the contemporary world? What motivates you to write historical dramas in other words?”

An excerpt from Paul Dimond’s in-depth interview with Jorie from Jorie Loves a Story: Conversations with the Bookish, June 8, 2017.

Jorie asks, “How did you conceptualize the novel to involve the work of a poet? Did you find breaks in the sequences of the narrative where a poem could be inserted or used to highlight a particular evocation of emotion or was it an organic process which evolved through drafting the story? How important was it to you, a poet's poems were used to represent Belle’s voice?”

An excerpt from Paul Dimond’s in-depth interview with Jorie from Jorie Loves a Story: Conversations with the Bookish, June 8, 2017.

Jorie asks, “It’s an interesting premise in the Belle of Two Arbors — where you've put an incredibly strong heroine at the center of everything that is happening both on the local, state and national level and of the world during the timeline of her life. What inspired Belle’s character and is she rooted in living history by someone who actually lived?”

An excerpt from Paul Dimond’s in-depth interview with Jorie from Jorie Loves a Story: Conversations with the Bookish, June 8, 2017.

Jorie asks, “How did you initially create the capstone of Belle coming full circle in her life from her early tragic loss of her mother to how she defined her life through the adversities of her life and of History’s?”

Often authors are asked how much of their writing is based upon their own lives. Such a question was posed during the lively question and answer session following the author and poet’s presentation “A Feast of Poems: Belle and Roethke” at the Roethke House Museum in Saginaw, Michigan. The response to that question and related follow-up questions is addressed in this blogpost.