BookOpinion

Poisoned Pen Press and Bookstore released an interview with Sara Paretsky, the author of the popular V.I. Warshawski mystery novels. The six-part interview is about an hour long and covers a wide variety of topics.

The bestselling author recently published a memoir, “Writing in an Age of Silence,” which covers her politics, activism and art.

“There were no expectations of me, and I think I became a writer by accident,” Paretsky says in the video interview below. “I certainly wrote my whole life a lot, both poetry and short stories as a way of exploring my emotions but I never thought, ‘Oh, I am a writer and I’m doing this.’ So, to be a professional writer I thought was a great accident that happened to me.”

She discusses living in Chicago and how the different parts of the city influenced her books. She also hits on her love for the Cubs, her various jobs outside of writing and a range of other areas.

“One of the fun things that I did in a lot of the earlier books was take a neighborhood for each of the books,” Paretsky says. “And one that I love was Burn Marks, which was the sixth book in the series, where I went down to the old industrial quarter along the shipping canal there. You can create characters that you just fall in love with. And I had someone in there — this woman who was just horrible, but I loved her she was just so bad. She sat on her porch with a fire extinguisher. She was a great heavy woman who was always being taunted by the neighborhood boys. It was a little bit of urban warfare between the two of them and she’d sit there with a fire extinguisher, and if they got too close she would spray at them. She was a dreadful person, but I loved her so much. She was just so real and so part of that community.”

Watch the six-part interview in its entirety with the links below:

Sarah Paretsky Interview - Part 2
Sarah Paretsky Interview - Part 3
Sarah Paretsky Interview - Part 4
Sarah Paretsky Interview - Part 5
Sarah Paretsky Interview - Part 6