Guest Post: Ten Things About Me by Catherine Wallace Hope

My novel Once Again is out this year, and you can find out about it and about me on my website, catherinewallacehope.com — and here are ten other things to know about me.

• If I could host fantasy dinner parties with literary guests, living or dead, I would start with: Leonardo da Vinci, Nora Ephron, William Shakespeare, Octavia Butler, Margaret Atwood, David Foster Wallace, Dorothy Parker, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, David Sedaris, Sappho, Horace, and Agatha Christie. I would set the feast in a grand ballroom and serve ten courses and create a unique artisan alcoholic beverage for each one. Imagine the conversation!
• Autumn is my favorite season.
• I would love to start an artists’ retreat on an huge, rambling estate near the Côte d’Azur where we could spend the day by the shore and then have long, lovely dinners on a candle-lit terrace, followed by poetry and book readings, music and dance performances, and unveilings of new pieces of art.
• My favorite style of art is Art Nouveau, with special fondness for Clara Driscoll, Louis Comfort Tiffany, and Maxfield Parrish.
• My greatest concern is that we might make an unlivable hell of this beautiful paradise we’ve been given.
• I don’t know how to knit, but I can crochet, and I have a collection of carved wooden hooks. Once, I was traveling across the country on a train, and the elderly woman in the seat next to me saw the yarnwork I had with me and taught me how to create stitches that look like waves. Years later, I crocheted baby blankets in that style for each of my three sons during my pregnancies. We still have those blankets, somewhere.
• When I was a kid, I used to run away from home quite often. I created adventures for myself as a forest princess, a midnight thief, a refugee from a royal murder plot. Though I never got into any serious trouble, I scared the living daylights out of my mother. By comparison, when she was four, she tried to run away from home too. She packed her little suitcase with her favorite doll and took off. However, she didn’t get far because she wasn’t allowed to cross the street, so all she could do was go to the end of the block.
• I used to spend summers in Beach Haven, a little seaside town on the East Coast, with my father and stepmother, and I loved nothing more than walking to the beach, diving into the clear water, swimming out to the sandbar, and then body surfing for the rest of the day. One morning, I arrived at the beach earlier than usual. There had been a storm the night before, and the shoreline was sparkling with thousands of tiny silver fish that had been stranded at the edge of the surf — alive, flipping and flopping in the sunlight. The other swimmers and I spent the morning tossing the fish back into the sea where they belonged — with our felicitations to the sea gods.
• I love hiking and photography.
• My favorite soup is tortilla soup, my favorite sandwich is grilled cheese on sourdough, my favorite salad is Waldorf, and my favorite dessert is chocolate ice cream — or German chocolate cake, or chocolate chip cookies, or chocolate brownies with vanilla ice cream, or chocolate pudding with cream — okay, anything chocolate really.

ABOUT THE BOOK:

What if you had the chance to save someone you lost? Isolated in the aftermath of tragedy, Erin Fullarton has felt barely alive since the loss of her young daughter, Korrie. She tries to mark the milestones her therapist suggests – like this day: the five hundredth – but moving through grief is like swimming against a dark current. Her estranged husband, Zac, a brilliant astrophysicist, seems to be coping better. Lost in his work, he’s perfecting his model of a stunning cosmological phenomenon, one he predicts will occur on this same day – an event so rare, it keeps him from being able to acknowledge this milestone alongside Erin. But when Erin receives a phone call from her daughter’s school, the same call she received five hundred days earlier when Korrie was still alive, Erin realises something is happening. Or happening again. Struggling to understand the sudden shifts in time, she pieces together that the phenomenon Zac is tracking may have presented her with the gift of a lifetime: the chance to save her daughter. As Erin is swept through time, she’s unable to reach Zac or convince the authorities of what is happening. Forced to find the answer on her own, Erin must battle to keep the past from repeating – or risk losing her daughter for good.

You can buy the book here.

Thank you Anne at Random Things Tours for the invitation to take part in the blog tour and to Catherine Wallace Hope for this post.