What is your writing process like?
What are you working on now?
Where do you get your ideas?
What were your favorite books as a kid?
What are your favorite books as an adult?
When did you start writing?
Which teacher influenced you the most?
How do you pronounce your last name?
What is your writing process like?
I write best in the mornings, when everything feels fresh, when I'm still lingering in the world of dreams. I fix myself a cup of green tea with milk and lots of honey, sit down at my computer, and gradually slip from my grogginess into another place. For first drafts, I try to let everything gush onto the page, uncensored. Then I go back and trim extra things, add details, develop characters, improve the dialogue, and smooth out the language. Then my writing group and my mom read it and give me feedback. (My mom is always the toughest!) Then I do another draft. Then my mom and my writing group read it again. Then I do another draft. . . and, well, you get the idea!
What are you working on now?
I'm co-writing a book with my good friend Maria Virginia Farinango-- a memoir about growing up as an indigenous Quichua girl in the Ecuadorian Andes. And from time to time, I write short stories and travel essays for youth and adults. I'm also writing a young adult novel set in Ecuador.
Where do you get your ideas?
I see my fiction as a kind of mosaic - bits of life and myths and dreams pieced together to create something unique that hopefully tells an engaging story and speaks to some deeper truths. When I run across a person who fascinates me, I write about her and speculate on how she'd feel in certain situations together with other people who fascinate me. Eventually each character takes on a life and identity all her own, which is often quite different from the person who inspired her... but a core spark remains.
What were your favorite books as a kid?
The books I loved had a mystical flavor and made me feel that there was much, much more to existence than meets the eye. I walked to the library often and checked out armfuls of books - I was a greedy and voracious reader. I remember once telling the beautiful librarian, Ms. Levi, who had shiny hair down to her waist, that I was worried I'd read all the good books out there. She laughed and found me an armful of new good ones. My favorite authors I read as a child (in the 1980s) were Natalie Babbit (Tuck Everlasting), Madeleine L'Engle (A Wrinkle in Time), Lois Duncan (Locked in Time), Mary Stewart (The Merlin Trilogy), Roald Dahl (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory), Zilpha Keatley Snyder (all her books are a wonderful blur), Cynthia Voigt (Dicey's Song), William Sleator (House of Stairs), Scott O'Dell (Island of the Blue Dolphins), C.S. Lewis (The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe)... I could go on and on!
What are your favorite books as an adult?
I tend to gravitate toward books about other cultures and books infused with a sense of other realities - Amy Tan (Joy Luck Club), Louise Erdrich (Tales of Burning Love), Paul Auster (Moon Palace), Haruki Murakami (Wind-up Bird Chronicle), Barbara Kingsolver (The Poisonwood Bible), Isabel Allende (The House of Spirits), to name just a few. As far as books for teens and kids, it's hard to keep up with all the fabulous new books coming out. I enjoy reading all the usual suspects - the Newbery winners rarely disappoint.
When did you start writing?
In elementary school, I wrote a series of stories about 'Bottlebugs' - creatures that lived in our world (in bottles) and encountered a 'mean old witch' who put a spell on them. My friends and I developed a song and dance routine representing the Bottlebug creation myth. I also wrote fantastical choose-your-own-adventure stories that branched into a number of possible pathways and endings. In middle and high school I occasionally wrote in journals and relished the creative writing opportunities my teachers offered. College is when I started writing seriously, for hours every day, journaling and writing short stories and trying my hand at a novel about dragons (which fizzled.) Traveling and living in Europe and Latin America in my twenties gave me an endless supply of material to write about.
Which teacher influenced you the most?
In France, during my junior year abroad, I took a course entitled something like "Fantastical Nineteenth Century French Literature." The class took place in "La cave" - the cave-like basement of a seventeenth century convent - and the teacher was a sprightly French man with a neat, triangular white beard. He bounced around the room excitedly, parlay-ing about Maupassant, and gave us interesting writing exercises based on the stories we read. For one assignment, we had to come up with an alternative ending (yes, in French) for one of the stories. I let my imagination have fun, and scribbled page after page. His comment scrawled on my paper was, "Laura! Tu devrais être écrivaine!" You should be a writer! That little man's words come to my head when I'm doubting myself. It amazes me that four words can have such a big effect on someone's life. Remember that!
How do you pronounce your last name?
When the cashiers at the grocery store drone, "Thank you, Mrs. Resau. Did I pronounce that right?" I always say yes, even though each cashier pronounces it differently. Really, it's fine with me however you pronounce it. All my relatives pronounce it REE-saw as in SEE-saw. Or, as in you're doing carpentry and you sawed something once but you did a bad job, so you need to re-saw it. According to family lore, a great-great-grandfather said we used to have an "e" and an "x" in our last name, which would make it the French word réseaux (ray-ZO) which literally means "networks", but which I translate as "labyrinths". Much more poetic.
