Read the Interview:

This was my first interview with a published author and I was rather nervous about it. Mari (pronounced Mary by the way...) SanGionvanni made sure that I felt relaxed and comfortable about interviewing her. I was struck by how down to earth she is and how willing she is to connect with her readers. 

Michelle Kneisel from Ultra Violet (UV) interviewing Mari SanGiovanni (MS), author of Greetings From Jamaica, Wish You Were Queer .

UV - What got you started in writing?

MS - I had an interest in it just as a kid but I never really pursued it very much but then I started reading Lesbian literature and I thought a lot of it being published was not very good to be be brutally honest. So it was really out of a sense of well if they are publishing THAT then what am I worried  about, (laughs). So that was really what kinda gave me the guts to do it because there was alot of bad stuff out and I thought there was way too much focus on the gay part and not enough focus on relationships and you know whatever you are writing about. Your family, your work, your friends, whatever it is and the fact that you are gay sort of being in their as a character but not being the entire one hundered percent focus of the book. Um blonde ponytail gets with brunette ponytail end of story kind of thing, that was was what got me started.

Mari SanGiovanni

Out of college I wrote a couple of really bad books and could not get them published and decided to throw them in my closet for a few years while I punished the publishing industry, they'll will miss, you know. Of course it went on without me. Um, and then one day I saw this publisher that I am with now had an anouncement up on there website that they were having a writing contest. I thought what the heck , so I dug through my closet, found one of my books which was not very good. I had gotten rid of the actual computer files and I only had a paper copy. Wow what the heck, it's gathering dust and I sent it. They said: "we like 4 pages of it." (laughs) "But if you would be willing to rewrite the whole thing, we might consider it". They never thought they would ever hear from me again, but I did it.

They said: "If you write about things you truly know about like your family, you know your Italian heritage or whatever, that was good".  But I had abandoned that after about 4 pages in the beginning of one of my horrible books. So I thought maybe she has a point and maybe I should stick with those family characters and drag them along on an adventure and it may be funny the whole way through. They thought that was funny. Ho-hum. That was that.


UV -Did you always know you were going to be writing a comedy?

MS - No, um it's just to me when I'm reading, even if the book is not necessarily a comedy, if the writer has a sense of humour it tends to keep me reading. I bail on alot of books I read, I probably only get through maybe half of the books I start because I get frustrated or bored, my attention span is horrible. I just find if the story is not sucking me in then I can hang with it if the writer has a good sense of homour. And then if they don't then I just get bored so I was thinking when I was writing, make sure that every couple of pages their is at least or even every page their is some sort of amusing thought running through the characters head that  I could put in there to keep people interested, to hang in there through the story, that was what I tried to do. I wasn't necessarily thinking comedy, but I was thinking this particular publisher only liked the 4 pages when I was being funny! And I thought I would stick with that!

UV -What was the hardest part of writing GFJ?

MS - You know that it was not that hard because I based the characters, I want to say loosely but not all that loosely on my family. I really knew what all the characters were going to do, when put in the situation that I put them in. I really wrote, although this sounds, you know, you hear people say this, it really kind of wrote it itself. These are people I really know really well and if they were in this situation, this is pretty much how it would go down. So, I would say I wrote the book probably in under 3 months and I have very limited time to work on writing because I have a day job. I commute 4 hours a day to work, there is very little time for me to write. I was writing it very fast so I think it was the rewiting that took a long time, the editing the going back and combing each page. If you think about when you write a one page report for work or something like that how many times you reread all those  paragraphs. You are doing that to hundreds of pages and it goes very slowly, but the writing of it goes very fast. So it was not difficult.