{"id":21833,"date":"2015-05-11T00:30:23","date_gmt":"2015-05-11T07:30:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/barbarafalconernewhall.com\/?p=21833"},"modified":"2015-05-11T00:30:23","modified_gmt":"2015-05-11T07:30:23","slug":"a-newspaper-story-with-my-name-on-it-that-i-didnt-have-to-write","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/a-newspaper-story-with-my-name-on-it-that-i-didnt-have-to-write\/","title":{"rendered":"A Newspaper Story With My Name on It — That I Didn’t Have to Write"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Bay<\/a>
Georgia Rowe’s interview ran in yesterday’s\u00a0Contra Costa Times, the Oakland Tribune and other Bay Area Newspapers. Laura A. Oda came to\u00a0my writing room to take photos.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

By Barbara Falconer Newhall<\/em><\/p>\n

It was a very pleasant 45 minutes; for once I was the interviewee and someone else, a newspaper reporter, was doing the hard work of being the interviewer.<\/p>\n

Freelance writer George Rowe and I met for the interview\u00a0at the Book Passage bookstore in Corte Madera. She had been assigned by the Bay Area News Group<\/a> to do an author interview for its various San Francisco Bay Area newspapers — papers like\u00a0the Contra Costa Times, the Oakland Tribune and the San Jose Mercury News.<\/p>\n

And Georgia had come\u00a0prepared. She’d actually read the book, Wrestling with God<\/a><\/em><\/strong>, for one thing, which most newspaper reporters just don’t have time to\u00a0do. And she\u00a0had a bunch of questions at the ready. All I had to do was sit back and\u00a0chatter away. Let the tape recorder and the hardworking newspaper reporter do the heavy lifting.<\/p>\n

The Newspaper Reporter Asks<\/h5>\n

One of Georgia’s questions caught my attention. It’s one I’d never thought to ask in all my years as a newspaper reporter, and I’m going to add it to my arsenal of interview questions (For the next book? And what’s that going to be, I’d like to know?)<\/p>\n

Georgia’s\u00a0question was this — of everything\u00a0I’d learned in the course of writing my book, what surprised me\u00a0most?<\/p>\n

The\u00a0question surprised me. I had to scramble for an answer. What I came up with was, after the hours and hours I’d spent interviewing the people who inhabit Wrestling with God<\/em>, and after the weeks and months I’d spent editing those interviews, I couldn’t help but feel a deep affection for every last one of them. All of them. From the atheist to the Zoroastrian priest. From the fundamentalist Christian to the progressive Muslim.<\/p>\n

Wrestling with God for\u00a0Answers<\/h5>\n

Hours later a\u00a0better\u00a0answer came to me, as the\u00a0better\u00a0answer so often does. \u00a0It was this: at the beginning of the writing of Wrestling with God<\/em>, I felt something — God — was missing from my life. But as I wrote the last paragraphs of the last chapter, I realized that nothing was missing. Everything I needed was right there in front of me\u00a0and that is — the life that I already have.\u00a0And\u00a0that realization\u00a0surprised me deeply.<\/p>\n

Here’s Georgia Rowe’s story, which ran in the Sunday, May 10 paper: “Barbara Falconer Newhall’s ‘Wrestling with God’ began with a personal quest”<\/a><\/p>\n

More newspapering stories at “Writers Need Editors and Mine Wants My Manuscript Turned in Now”<\/a> and “Armistead Maupin — The Man Who Wrote the Quintessential San Francisco Novel on a Newspaper Deadline.”<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

“A Newspaper Story That I Didn’t Have to Write”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\"A<\/a><\/p>\n

For once I was the interviewee and someone else was doing the hard work of conducting the interview. A newspaper reporter\u00a0was asking my about my new book, “Wrestling with God.” Read more.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":21844,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[50,52],"tags":[1038,34,1462,1463,1323,81,82,1464,53],"class_list":["post-21833","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-on-writing-reading","category-the-writing-room","tag-contra-costa-times","tag-dont-miss","tag-georgia-rowe","tag-interviews","tag-newspapers","tag-oakland-tribune","tag-on-the-funny-side","tag-publicity","tag-wrestling-with-god"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21833","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21833"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21833\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21833"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21833"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21833"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}