Interview with Author Maureen Morrissey

 

Welcome Readers to another installment of our author interview series. Today we have the pleasure of chatting with Maureen Morrissey, author of two historical fiction books.

JMR-Welcome to the Books Delight, Maureen. Tell our readers where you live, what you do for fun and what does the perfect day look like?

MM-I live in a small town just north of New York City, where I was born. I get the best of all worlds here, because I can be in the middle of the madness and mayhem in forty-five minutes and then wake up in my quiet solitude in the woods. I love both, so I’m very fortunate.

My husband and I just returned from a three-week, six-thousand-mile road trip that covered fifteen U.S. states, and traveling is something we do as much as possible. The world is truly incredible and full of stories, and I want to experience them all! The other thing I love to do is spend time with our kids and grandkids. I write articles about things like babysitting and being the mother of adult children.

My perfect day is fairly simple: I write for most of the morning, taking a break to run 5-7 miles every day that I can. I love to cook something gourmet for dinner and then we become couch potatoes and binge on some series. During the summer, I’ll do a treading-water workout in the pool and read novels.

JMR-What’s your favorite historical time period? Why?

MM- The World War II time period has so many achingly heart wrenching stories that we know of, and so many that we don’t. It directly affected my family, as I am the child of holocaust survivors and refugees.  I love Herman Wouk’s books that show different points of view of the period leading up to WWII and during the war itself. The novel I’m sharing here today features some fictionalized versions of my family history during and after the war.

I taught history during my thirty-seven years as an educator, and I loved learning more about the American Revolutionary war and the Native American history before Europeans arrived to this continent. It’s hard to choose a “favorite!”

JMR-Who is your favorite historical figure? Why? If you could ask them one question, what would it be?

MM- Hands down, I’d love to be in the same room with Benjamin Franklin. He was a brilliant human being who did not feel beholden to societal expectations. He was the original multi-tasker and self-actualized person who probably had undiagnosed ADD. I’d ask him to tell me the most outrageous thing he ever did that people did not know about. I think there would probably be a lot.

JMR- How did you come to be a writer of historical fiction?

MM- I grew up hearing stories about my own family and the families of my many immigrant friends, not unusual for 1960’s-70’s in NYC. I became intrigued very early on with the way people survive and thrive through adversity. I loved reading historical fiction, which helped me learn facts and their effects on ordinary people in a personal way. When I was trying to figure out how to tell my family stories, I realized I didn’t have enough information to write a memoir, so I began to research to fill in the gaps and wrote historical fiction to give myself creative license and make the stories interesting to others.

JMR- Did you visit anyone of the places in your book? Where did you feel closest to your characters?

MM- Because I was a first-generation American, I had close family in the Netherlands through my father, and Colombia, South America through my mother. We traveled to and spent a lot of time in both, and I connected deeply to the language, culture, people and history of both. It helps that I speak Spanish and Dutch fluently!

JMR- Maureen, tell us about your book,  Woven.

MM- The day after I retired from teaching, just as the pandemic started, I sat down to finally write the book that had been nagging me for ten years. I wrote and researched five to six hours each day and had a first draft in four months.

Woven: Six Stories, One Epic Journey went through so many iterations, with the support and suggestions of beta readers and patient family members. One of my biggest struggles was how to put all the different characters and their stories into a cohesive novel. The idea to keep each character’s story as a unique novella that intertwined to form the whole story was the last missing piece of the puzzle. I’d always thought history should be taught as the story of what happened and how it affected the lives of people who lived through it, and that’s how I wanted to tell my story. The early part of the novel covers 150 years and is more like a timeline of lives; the second and third parts slow down and zoom in on a more current period of history.

I wanted to portray the intertwining of lives as well, so I wrote the novel in three parts: “His”, “Hers”, “Theirs”, to show how the characters came together.

JMR- Tell our readers how to find you on social media and the web.

MM- I am on ALL the social media!

Instagram/Threads: https://www.instagram.com/maureenmorrisseyauthor.com

TikTok: www.tiktok.com/@momoauthor

Facebook: www.facebook.com/mmorrisseyauthor

Medium: www.medium.com/@mobility61

My author website: www.maureenmorrissey.com

My Amazon Author website https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B08NFCT89C/about  

JMR- What question were you hoping I’d ask but didn’t?

MM- “What’s the craziest thing you secretly wish you have done but never will?” I love experiencing thrills like roller coasters and jumping off 30-foot-high platforms into lakes, and I have always thought skydiving would be amazing. But then two things happened: When I was a teenager, I saw a girl my age wrapped in bandages from head to toe like a mummy being pushed around in a wheelchair, and when we asked, her mother said it was a skydiving accident. I still considered doing it, but then our son got a job at a skydiving company. He was eighteen years old, and his job was packing parachutes and when he told me what went on behind the scenes, that was it for me!

Let’s keep it between us, but I still might change my mind.

JMR- Thank you, Maureen, for stopping by. Your books look really great! Readers, I’ve included a link to Maureen’s books below. Please be sure to check them out.

 

I will add a button and link to the book.