Interview with Laura Lee, Author of Saturn’s Favorite Music

  Saturn’s Favorite Music

by Laura Lee

Clara Jane is an alternative music-loving graduate fresh out of broadcast school in Detroit. Determined that she will be one of the lucky ones to make it in a competitive field, she lands her first job at a small market radio station in northern Michigan in the summer of 1992.

The station’s hyper-local programming (featuring lost farm animal reports and radio obits) and its mix of light hits and great oldies is a far cry from the rock star glamour she craves, but it is all part of “paying her dues.” Clara must adjust to small town life and to being the only woman in an all male airstaff.

Clara’s biggest supporter is the recently-divorced morning man Seth Jones. Clara and Seth share a sense of humor and a mutual love of different genres of music. They develop a deep friendship that might become something more.

But just as Clara starts to become comfortable operating the board, the station is sold and staff members start to be replaced by automation. Will Clara find the radio fame she craves before the station goes completely robotic?

Saturn’s Favorite Music is a fun voyage back to the days of analog radio with all of its skipping records and clashing egos. It is full of nostalgia and 90s music references, but its theme of technological change and what it means for messy human creativity and relationships is highly relevant in the age of AI.

Author Interview:

Is there anything you would like people to take away from your book?

Saturn’s Favorite Music is set in a radio station as it changes from analog to automation. The theme of technological change, and how it changes our human communities, is of the moment, even though the story is set in 1992. What I tried to do was to put the reader in that old station, hanging out with the people, cueing the records and all that so that at the end you would feel like you’d been there and you missed it a little bit.

Have you been able to incorporate your previous experience in your jobs/education in your writing?

Saturn’s Favorite Music is not the story of my life, but it is more autobiographical than the novels I have written in the past. I worked in radio for about five years in the early 1990s. I started at a station that was very old school with vinyl records and reel to reel tapes and so on. I then worked at two different stations that transitioned to two different automation systems. I realized that I had lived through a period in radio that provided its own narrative arc. Often in my novels I take the settings from places I know and then populate them with fictional people.

Do you identify with your main character, or did you create a character that is your opposite?

Clara Jane is a young broadcast school graduate who loves alternative music and dreams of making it to a major market where she can hang out with rock stars and enjoy the counter culture, but she finds herself paying her dues at a small market station in a rural part of Michigan. Certainly the experience of trying to learn the ropes in radio at a small market station is something I know personally.

What is your favorite line from your book?

One of my favorites is when the main character, Clara, complains to her friend, the morning DJ Seth, that she doesn’t want radio to end up being “just something I did for a while when I was younger.” Seth replies, “Well, eventually everything ends up being something you did for a while when you were younger, when you think about it.”

Have you ever experienced writer’s block? How did you deal with it?

I accept writer’s block as a normal part of the process. It is your subconscious telling you that something is missing and you need to step away for a while. Sometimes you just need to go away for an hour or two. Sometimes you put it aside for years. You need to give your subconscious the space to process the work.  It is important to have both immediacy and distance in fiction. There are the observations you make in a situation that capture the details of it, but then you tend to need some space to understand the meaning of an experience or how a particular piece of writing fits into a larger theme.

What have you found to be most challenging about writing fiction?

I have a particular voice as a writer. My humor is dry, and I have always enjoyed more literary fiction. So the challenging part tends to come when you try to sell it and explain what it is. Some of the industry professionals who considered publishing this said they liked the description, the music references and characters that “popped off the page” but that it was a bit “too literary” for their marketing. I decided that “literary” isn’t really a problem, it’s just a matter of finding the reader who is looking for something full of music and 90s nostalgia, dry humor, eccentric characters and also realism, and observations about change, impermanence and the foibles that make us human. In the end, you can only be the kind of writer you are.

What has been the toughest criticism you have received as an author?
What has been the best compliment?

Writing a book is only half of the process. The process is completed by the reader who brings her own preferences and experiences to the text. The longer I persist in this business (Saturn’s Favorite Music is my 22 or 23rd book) the less personally I take feedback. What you will find is that the thing that one person likes will be the very thing that someone else hates. If you get the same note over and over, then you probably didn’t do the job of communicating something you were trying to communicate. It might not be the thing they point to. For example, maybe a reader doesn’t like a particular character because some aspect of his story wasn’t laid out early enough or clearly enough. You can generally separate out the types of feedback. There are views of characters and situations that simply differ from your own, and that’s fine. Then there are notes that are worth taking on board. Then there are times when you decide that the way you did it is right and you just have to stick with it and find another reader who loves that.

 

Author bio:

Laura Lee is the author of more than 20 books including biography, humorous reference, fiction, and children’s literature. The Metro Detroit native brings a unique background to her work. She holds a degree in theater and worked as a professional mime, improvisational comic, and radio announcer before becoming a full time writer. She now divides her time between writing and producing (and traveling on) ballet master class tours with her partner the artistic director of the Russian Ballet Foundation.

The San Francisco Chronicle has said of her work, “Lee’s dry, humorous tone makes her a charming companion… She has a penchant for wordplay that is irresistible.”

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