New Author, Good Blood
Today I’m happy to introduce you through Q and A to my former student, K Pastore, who recently published the novel Good Blood (Wipf and Stock).
K Pastore's debut novel released this winter. Great read!
Your main character is a girl caught in a culture of patriarchy and violence. How do you think she would respond to today’s political and religious misogyny?
Rosie goes from a place of ignorance to restraint and fear to activism. She’s definitely an activist, but not like in the writing-blog-articles or speaking-winsomely-in-front-of-a-crowd kind of way. She is very localized. She sees unjust actions done in front of her and names them as evil. But she doesn’t just condemn the individuals who act unjustly. Her main goal is redemption, redeeming the perpetrators from evil and leading them back to goodness. And sometimes that means arranging judgment and harsh consequences. I suppose today she would do just as she did then—love her enemies.
Good Blood takes place in a specific location—your hometown, New Castle. Yet, you didn’t live there as you wrote it. How does “place” affect your storytelling?
You’re right. I lived in Dallas and in LA while I wrote the book. At first, I think being far from New Castle helped me to “nostalgialize” it, which was important, especially for the first part of the book. But, more so, I believe specific places—like the house that you live in, your roommates, the pace at which people walk on the street—all of that creates a particular imaginative environment in which you ask specific kinds of questions and also give specific kinds of answers.
How does faith have an impact on your writing?
It’s an informed and aware leap done blindly. I trust that the way that I pray, embrace the saturation of God’s grace, love, study and serve will affect my writing. But I don’t really know what I truly think and feel about my faith until I see it come out through the actions or words of my characters.
You can follow the link above to the book's Amazon site. Congrats, K!
