Today, Feathered Quill reviewer Katie Specht is talking with Dorothy Love, author of A Season of Saigon.

FQ: Tell our readers a little about yourself. Your background, your interests, and how this led to writing a book?

LOVE: I can't remember a time when I wasn't obsessed with stories, both writing them and reading them. In high school  I fell in love with journalism and edited my school paper. I worked at the University Press as a college student first as a volunteer general stories reporter and later I had a paid position as co editor. After graduation I taught for several years, earned a master's degree and a doctorate before pursuing a full time career as a novelist. I wrote a dozen novels for YA and middle graders before turning to writing for women. A Season in Saigon is my twenty-first novel.

FQ: Tell us a little about your book – a brief synopsis and what makes your book unique.

LOVE: A Season in Saigon is inspired by the women who worked in Vietnam as writers and photojournalists during the war.  Many of them worked for newspapers but in the 1960's discrimination against women in the newsroom was pervasive, and many women were confined to writing about food and fashion. So they funded their own travel to South Vietnam in order to write important stories, but  were then humiliated and obstructed by the military and the male journalists who regularly told them they didn't belong there. Tallis Reed, my protagonist, is a fashion writer who is essentially black-balled after making a wrong decision at her magazine. She buys a one-way ticket to Saigon to redeem her mistake and to salvage her career. But she's unprepared for life in a steaming, wary city teeming with refugees and orphans, soldiers and spies.  And she's unprepared to fall in love with Nick Landry, an American doctor volunteering at a civilian hospital. This book was completed, but not yet published when Kristin Hannah's novel The Women came out last year. Her book opened the door for conversations about the war and the toll it took on the nurses who served, and its publication increased my confidence that A Season in Saigon is arriving at a time when readers want to know more about this chapter in our history. No book is truly unique, but A Season in Saigon, like Hannah's book is told from a woman's point of view, and shines a light on the experiences of another group of women whose stories have been largely unexamined in fiction. Most of the fiction about the war is written by men, for men. A Season in Saigon is a woman's story. It's both an adventure tale, and a sweet love story that I hope will educate readers too young to have lived through the tumultuous 1960's and the war, and that it will entertain older readers who can recall the music, the politics, and the culture of the times.

FQ: What was the impetus for writing your book?

LOVE: As a former journalist working at the university in 1969, I was in the middle of that era, so this story is a part of my lived history. A couple of years ago I discovered a handful of nonfiction books about the women who covered the war, and as the author of many other historical novels, I was fascinated by their stories, and a bit annoyed, really that they had done such important work over there, and for the most part, nobody knew about them. A Season in Saigon is my attempt to rectify that oversight.

FQ: Please give our readers a little insight into your writing process. Do you set aside a certain time each day to write, or only write when the desire to write surfaces?

LOVE: After twenty previous books of various lengths and set in various time periods, I've developed my own system. Historical fiction done right requires a tremendous amount of research, background reading, tracking down primary sources. I usually spend however long it takes to complete this process. Then I develop an outline, and follow it through to the end. In  the revision stage, some of that research gets weeded out and then there are gaps in my knowledge that must be filled in during multiple rounds of revision.  I am not infallible; I'm certain there are details I have gotten wrong, but readers are usually forgiving if they see that you've made a real effort to be accurate.

FQ: What was the hardest part of writing your book? That first chapter, the last paragraph, or something else?

LOVE: With this particular novel, getting the details right was a huge challenge. It's set in Saigon, a city halfway around the world and takes place fifty-seven years ago amid the chaos of a controversial war. I've traveled to the locales of most of my other books but it wasn't possible to visit  Saigon. I relied upon memoirs and upon more than six hundred photos in an effort to paint an authentic portrait.  I've tried to balance the various American perspectives with the perspectives of the Vietnamese, using  countless official  transcripts, newspaper clippings,  and interviews. Thanks to the magic of the internet, I was able to chat online with a few of the men who were there.  Some of their comments were funny, some were poignant, some profane, but underlying all of it was the sense of having been part of a brotherhood. This book is the most emotionally challenging one I've written.  I'm sure I have made mistakes but I  hope I have done justice to everybody.

FQ: The genre of your book is Historical Fiction. Why this genre?

LOVE: Historical fiction from a female perspective has always been my favorite to read and to write. Among the historical novels of which I'm most proud are Mrs. Lee and Mrs. Gray (TNZ Fiction/HarperCollins) based on the journals of Mary Custis Lee and on her correspondence with Selena Gray, an enslaved woman at Arlington; and Carolina Gold from the same publisher, based on the life of Elizabeth Allston Pringle, a woman rice planter.  I hope A Season in Saigon, while set in the twentieth century, also will engage and entertain readers.

FQ: Do you have any plans to try writing a book in a different genre? If so, which genre and why?

LOVE: I'm currently at work on a murder mystery set in a small Texas town in 1956.  There's a romance element to it but I hope to serve readers a slice of life of Texas in the 50's.  It's new territory for me but I enjoy a challenge. We'll see how it goes and whether I can pull it off.

FQ: Who are your favorite authors?

LOVE: I read widely for research but for pleasure I love historical fiction. A few of my favorite authors in the genre are Susan Meissner, Lisa Wingate, Erika Robuck and Kate Quinn.  They're masters not only at creating characters to root for, but their attention to detail has earned my admiration. Susan's novel about the San Francisco earthquake and Kate's novel about the women who worked at Bletchley Park during the Second World War are outstanding. And I don't think there's anyone left on Planet Earth who has not read Lisa's searing Before We Were Yours. Erika has a novel coming out in August set in Vietnam, about Dickey Chapelle, a female photojournalist who worked there until her death in 1965. I can't wait to read it.

FQ: If you were to teach a class on the art of writing, what is the one item you would be sure to share with your students and how would you inspire them to get started?

LOVE: I have taught at writers' conferences and workshops nationwide and enjoy it. Here's the lesson I try to impart: The building blocks of fiction are actually pretty simple (it's only the execution that is difficult). Someone has a high-stakes goal. Some force, either internal or eternal, or both, motivates her to pursue it. Conflicts, both internal and external stand in the character's way. Readers read to find out whether the character will reach her goals, and how she reaches them and how she is changed, or not changed, by the experience.  I inspire them to get started by having them read The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers by Christopher Vogler.  It never fails to get writers excited and to get the creative juices flowing.  I use it to varying degrees in my own work.

FQ: Are any of the characters based on real people you know? If so, how closely does your character mimic the real person?

LOVE: The only real person portrayed in A Season in Saigon is Ann Bryan, the woman who most inspired this novel. Like many of her contemporaries, Ann worked on the women's pages at a newspaper before heading to Saigon. In her case, she went to Germany first to work at Overseas Weekly, and was then assigned as bureau chief for the Weekly in Saigon.  In Saigon she developed a reputation for truth telling that so infuriated the US military that they tried to take her paper off the streets. Ann took them to court and won. At her death in 2009, one of the Major Generals who had worked with her said she was beloved among the troops and that the Weekly was the only paper that told the truth as it was happening, As a single woman, Ann adopted an infant daughter from a Saigon orphanage and later, after her marriage to Frank Mariano, a reporter for ABC News, they adopted a second daughter. Ann was one of the last Americans out of Saigon in 1975. I have tremendous respect for her, and wanted to acknowledge her in the pages of the novel. In the story, she becomes Tallis's boss, mentor, and friend. I hope she would be pleased with my story.