Featured Interview With Sheri T. Joseph
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
My family lived in a small beach town in New York until I was 10, with lots of messing around with boats with my brother and sisters. Then my Dad, a judge, realized his John Muir dream and moved us to Marin County in California, for wild sailing on the bay and endless hiking. I inherited his restless traveler genes, and backpacked and traveled around much of the world. A love of language and writing led me to some stressful years as a trial attorney before becoming Executive Director of a nonprofit that supports creation of affordable housing for families, veterans, and refugees. I married a Texan (gig ’em), and we raised three kids here in Marin. We also have a very hungry one-eyed yellow Lab named Bailey.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
I was lucky to grow up in a house crammed with books, where the favorite expression was “You could look it up!” I was reading what in hindsight were overly-adult books at a very young age, and in third grade won a writing contest with a poem about a flea and a fly getting drunk in a saloon. Seriously.
Jury trial work was a blessing and a curse for writing — you learn to craft persuasive and compelling stories, but the law still demands very linear thinking. I went back and took a series of writing courses from fantastic professors, moving from poetry to novels, and found my own creative voice.
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
I love the authors who don’t give a damn about genre, have big imaginations, take risks, and explore complex ideas as well as feelings. They perform that magical shift from heartbreak to humor in a flash. Most importantly, they create characters you care about deeply. A short list of those who have inspired me over the years includes Margaret Atwood, George Saunders, Mark Helprin, David Eggers, Emily St. John Mandel, Simon Rich, and Kazuo Ishiguro. Patrick O’Brien’s historical fiction series is a master class in everything and stole several years of my life. And I’m in awe of Jennifer Egan — the last scene in The Candy House, seamlessly moving a family through time, just pierced my heart.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
To me, Edge of the Known World is a multi-faceted love story — the wild passions of first romantic love, the love between brothers, between father and daughter, and the tangled love of families. That story is wrapped in a speculative fiction thriller set in a near future when genetic screening tests, like 23andMe or Ancestry.com, make it impossible to hide a secret identity.
The idea came from a mention in a lecture about how Hitler had tried to develop a blood test to detect Jewish and Gypsy children who looked Aryan enough to be hiding in the open with German or Polish families. Such a test was not possible back then, but made me wonder how that would translate with modern science and tech—not just for any of the “inferior” ethnic groups during WWII, but in other historical events around the world, where people who did not stand out by physical appearance, and were perhaps even themselves unaware of their background, would have faced deadly consequences. What if in the Rwandan genocide, the Hutu militias had a screening test to detect Tutsis? Dalits who blended with the upper castes in India? Serbs and Bosnians, Chinese in wartime Japan, too many slices of American history, and countless others.
The problem, of course, is that technology has evolved, but people have not. Recent news was a hack into 23AndMe that stole information on accounts with Ashkenazi and Chinese ancestry to sell on the dark web: https://www.wired.com/story/23andme-credential-stuffing-data-stolen/
In my novel, Alexandra Tashen is a brilliant student, adoring daughter, merry wit, and exuberant prankster. She is also hiding in the open.
After a blissful childhood on a Texas ranch, Alex learns the truth: She is a refusé from a brutal regime, smuggled into the Allied Nations as an infant. Everyone from her birthplace carries a harmless but detectable bit of viral DNA from a regional vaccine. If detected by the rapid genetic testing now standard at security ID screens, Alex will be returned to the Federation and a likely death. Her adoptive father developed a gene therapy to mask her g-marker, but it is not fully effective. Every g-screen presents a nerve-racking one-in-ten chance of getting caught.
When her father goes missing, Alex abandons her cloistered academic life in San Francisco for a globe-trotting Commission in a desperate race to warn him of a trap. As Alex dodges g-screens on her precarious and often-hilarious adventure, a love triangle develops between her and two men: Eric Burton, a commanding and disgraced intelligence officer, and his sworn brother, Strav Beki, a charismatic and dangerously unhinged diplomat. Betrayals mount and secrets unravel, building to the most confounding choices that people can face—choices between love, family loyalty, and moral obligation.
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