Cranberry Queen
by Kathleen DeMarco

List Price: $12.95
Pages: 256
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0786890371
Publisher: Talk Miramax Books

Kathleen DeMarco is a screenwriter and producing partner of John Leguizamo at Lower East Side Films. She attended the University of Pennsylvania and has written for HBO, NBC, ABC, and CBS. Kathleen grew up in New Jersey and holds the prestigious title of 1982 New Jersey Blueberry Queen. She lives in New York City.

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Q: Most of the book takes place in the Pine Barrens in Southern New Jersey. Is this near where you grew up? Did you travel these same back roads and explore the cranberry bogs when you were younger, or just when you researched this book?

KD: I grew up in a terrific small town called Hammonton, NJ, which is smack in the center of the southern portion of the state --- equidistant between Philadelphia and Atlantic City. The majority of the book takes place in and near a town called Chatsworth, NJ, which is exactly 28 miles from Hammonton, driving north on Route 206. The reason I know the exact distance is because almost every day during every summer, from 1970 until 1984, my family and I drove to Chatsworth to work on our family's cranberry (and at the time, blueberry) farm. When I was a child, my mother would drive my three siblings and myself to the farm to pick blueberries; beginning at 11, I "packed" blueberries --- meaning I put the cellophane and rubber band on top of the fresh-picked pints of blueberries that just came in from the fields. Also, when I was a teenager, I used to spend my lunchtimes cruising about the back roads in the Pine Barrens on a dirt bike with other "packers" --- and I still can't remember a moment more blissful. In fact, I haven't been on a motorcycle through the Pine Barrens since I was eighteen --- which, alas, is now many years ago --- but the memory remains as potent as ever.
Q: Have you ever attended a cranberry festival?

KD: While there is a cranberry festival every year in Chatsworth during October (the time of the cranberry harvest), and while I've attended it one time (and was sort of aghast at the 40,000 people crowding this tiny, one-road town), the cranberry celebration in the book was invented --- drawing from some of the smaller barbecues we used to have at the farm, as well as some of the bonfire celebrations we had in Hammonton while I was growing up.
Q: Aside from the setting, did you draw on aspects of your own life and experiences for the plot and characters in this book?

KD: Whenever I hear this question I want to say "well no, because clearly I'm a happily married grandmother with six children with a background in astrophysics. Diana and Louisa, etc., are completely made up." But as I am a single woman in her thirties living in --- yes, a fifth floor walk up in the West Village --- I certainly did draw on my own life experience for many of the novel's plot and characters. I do want to be clear that my mother, father, older brother (and sister, and younger brother) are all alive and well --- there is no immediate autobiographical truth to the tragic accident Diana confronts early in the novel. (As I say in the acknowledgments, however, the accident I describe in the novel is the way my grandfather was killed in 1964, before I was born.)
Q: Cranberry Queen is a very visual book. Did your work in film influence your writing?

KD: That was sort of inescapable for me --- I have written hundreds of treatments for films and television movies, and have read probably thousands of movie scripts over the past nine years. The cardinal rule in screenwriting is "show, don't tell," and while a novel is certainly a forum through which I can tell (and do tell, some would say, ad nauseum), I don't think I could write anything in prose form that wouldn't have a strong visual component. It is, for all intents and purposes, my "training."
Q: Diana uses humor to help cope with the despair she is feeling. Do you also use humor to deal with tough times?

KD: No. Instead I do what I think any self-respecting adult should do in times of trouble: I beat myself to a pulp with whatever apparatus I have nearby --- a hairbrush, a keychain, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, whatever. All right… I suppose, however, that I do sometimes resort to humor, but only if it's very serious. Otherwise Breyer's vanilla ice cream usually does the trick.
Q: Do you relate more to Diana or Louisa?

KD: Well… there's certainly parts of me in both characters… but I suppose Diana is the character who is closer to me, since her inclination is almost always to hide what she's truly thinking and instead say only that which she thinks other people want to hear. Not the most wonderful of traits, I don't think, but it certainly keeps confrontations to a minimum.
Q: This book has at its center an extremely emotional issue --- not only the loss of someone close to you, but also the loss of three people, an entire immediate family. Was it difficult for you to write about this topic?

KD: Without question, this was the hardest part about writing the novel. I didn't intend on killing everyone on page four --- I just knew very quickly that I couldn't sustain an entire novel about Diana's heartbreak. I am extremely close to my entire family --- so to have to think about living without them, which is what I had to do to write about Diana post-accident, was not only grim, but torturous.
Q: Each chapter contains a number of subheadings. Did you plan to do this from the start, or is it something that evolved during the writing process?

KD: I didn't plan on this at all --- what happened is that I would tell myself I had to finish one chapter every morning, so it just helped me psychologically to name each one so I had a definitive goal, i.e. "Finish Foxhole Girl now… and then go and eat a cupcake."
Q: What is the one "message" you would like people to come away with after reading this book?

KD: I'm not really a "message" person --- but I will say that last October, when I turned in the final manuscript, I told my editor excitedly "the book is about hopelessness to hope!" To which he replied, "You're just getting that? Well, they say authors are the last to know…" I suppose Diana learns to engage again in life, i.e. to hope once more, but on her own terms --- which I think are based on a whole different set of internal structures than what is commonly depicted. (No "stiff upper lip" for Diana --- she willfully falls apart in public, uncaring what others think, until she figures out herself, and with the help of some friends, how to put her toe back in the water again.)
Q: Are you working on another novel?

KD: Yes. It's called Pheasant King… okay, that's a lie. In truth, the next novel will be another character-driven story set today in both LA and NYC, although I wouldn't be surprised if some of the characters end up (if only for a moment) in the Pine Barrens --- I'm too attached to the place for it not to reappear!


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© Copyright 2009 by Kathleen DeMarco. Reprinted with permission by Talk Miramax Books. All rights reserved.

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