Featured Interview With Rachel Veznaian
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
I grew up in Massachusetts and much like everyone else in New England didn’t go too far, so I now live in Boston. While when I was young i did have a cat named Peanut (she was the runt of her litter and tiny like a peanut), I now live in an apartment that sadly must remain a pet free zone. I do get to hang out with a corgi named Phoebe at my day job though, so that’s something. It’s kind of like pet ownership minus all the responsibility.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
I was lucky to have found my fascination with books when I was pretty young. And by that I mean I was lucky that I was frequently in trouble as a child. We would go through the motions in where I’d do something I wasn’t meant to and they yell at me to go to my room and somewhere along the way, I discovered that the joke was on them, because my room had books in it and as it happened I liked to read. So, much to their chagrin I didn’t curb any attempt to get into things I shouldn’t, because what was the worst thing that would happen? I’d get to go upstairs, chill out, and read!
It didn’t really occur to me to consider actually writing until I was in college though. I majored in English and was focused on technical writing. I know, it sounds scintillating. My advisor, however, relentlessly tried to get me to go for a creative writing focus. Though I initially fought this, because why listen to a person with decades of educational experience under her belt, I finally took an elective course in creative writing and at that point I was a total goner. Tech writing was still the plan for work, but my heart was officially in fiction.
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
I would say that my favorite genres to read vacillate between science fiction and contemporary fiction. I think Ray Bradbury’s short stories were some of the first science fiction I was every exposed to which was followed up throughout school as my readings were always peppered with George Orwell, Anthony Burgess, and Jules Verne. Of course I also have a penchant for contemporary fiction, which up until now is what I have mostly written. A good coming of age tale will always get me, both in film and books.. Khaled Hosseini is a favorite I always look to, I think I read the Kite Runner in one sitting, as well as Stephen Chbosky, Celeste Ng, Jojo Moyes, and more recently Phil Hogan as A Pleasure and a Calling is one of the coolest and strangest books I’ve read in a while.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
My latest book, A Life Stage Soundcheck, would fall into the former category of contemporary fiction, more specifically women’s fiction, but if I could, I would call it an unromantic comedy. It focuses on the story of a debt collector in her mid-twenties named Carla who’s true passion in life is to be a song writer. As her life is chugging along at a steady and even pace, she finds her whole set up disrupted when she meets someone new out at a bar one night, causing her to spiral out and question everything. This is set in Cambridge and Boston, Massachusetts and one of the things I really wanted to focus on was music and how hearing a song can bring you back in time to a memory. Music is important to Carla as that’s where her true passion lies, and I wanted to really try and paint pictures with the songs mentioned in the book.
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Rachel Veznaian Twitter Account
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