J. Herman Kleiger on The 11th Inkblot

Posted by Jocelyn on April 16th, 2020


Tell us the story behind the story. How did THE 11th INKBLOT come to be?

I love inkblots and mysteries!  I love being moved and surprised. Hermann Rorschach’s creation of his eponymous test has fascinated me for 40 years.  As a psychologist and psychoanalyst, I’ve immersed myself in the science and art of using the Rorschach Test as a diagnostic instrument.  As a writer, I’m drawn to the layered meaning of the inkblot – the appeal of complexity, ambiguity, and navigating the unknown reaches of our personal experience.  

When I completed my first book, Disordered Thinking and The Rorschachtwenty years ago, I was struck by the idea of an “11th inkblot.”  Rorschach’s test has 10 blots, administered according to standardized instructions for the last 100 years.  I thought that someday I would imagine a story about “the 11th inkblot.”  So the concept percolated for decades but came to fruition a couple of years ago.  Much of my professional life has involved in writing clinical reports, which, in some ways, tell stories about an individual’s inner life.  I’d authored three books about the Rorschach and wanted to create a story about the origin of the test.  

A confluence of events in my personal life gave birth to the story.  Long fascinated by my ancestry in Ukraine and the number of watch makers in my family, Eastern Europe and the centrality of timepieces became an important theme in my story.  While writing The 11th InkblotI lost my father, a WW II combat veteran. Although I dismissed decades of his war stories, they snuck into in my book as I was preparing for his death.  In some ways, The 11th Inkblot is an homage to my fathers – Pvt. Ralph Kleiger, my dad, and Hermann Rorschach, my professional father.  I don’t think the story would have ever found life without a third father-presence, that of my analyst, Irwin Rosen. 

What was the most challenging aspect of writing THE 11th INKBLOT?

“Killing the darlings.”  The often used phrase for writers helped me prune the manuscript and cut characters or storylines that got in the way.  Working with my editor, my wife, was challenging as her reasoned, objective perspective pushed me to see what I could not see on my own about my writing.  

Researching many content domains was both work and fun.  Learning elementary details about the history and mechanics of horology, studying maps of battles in the Easter Front of WWI, and learning about the Romani culture were challenges that I embraced.  

What is the message you hope readers take away from your book?

More of an experience than a message.  Beyond anything else, I want readers to enjoy this story, which is a journey in a man’s life, across time, and space.  Moreover, I hope to touch the reader – move them to laughter and, in some places, tears.  In the end, I hope to leave the passengers on the reading journey with a warm feeling, but also, with a sense of mystery, with questions that remain unanswered.

Describe your background. Did your background play a part in your book?

Clearly, my 40+ years as a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst provided a personal and professional canvas for my story.  My work as a therapist and psychodiagnostician paved the way for writing a book that took fact and history as a basis for imagining people and events. Having written over 30 professional papers and book chapters and 3 nonfiction books, I learned that writing provided a creative space for describing concepts and telling stories about people’s inner lives and experiences. 

Describe your writing schedule. Do you outline? Any habits? 

My friend and mentor told me, “research cold and write hot.”  I think that meant spend lots of time reading about the background topics and content that will inform the story and then, write!  I wish I wrote on schedule.  That is hard because I am still working and writing professional reports and papers.  When I’m writing fiction, I usually begin with an idea or premise that draws me in.  The scary, yet exciting, part of the writing process is discovering where the story is going as I’m writing it.  I usually have a broad-brush sense of where I want to end but the pathway leading there evolves as I write.

What books are on your nightstand? What are you currently reading?

I’m finishing Topeka School by Ben Lerner.  My roots at the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, KS make this an especially appealing read.  Plus, Ben Lerner is a poet, turned writer of fiction, who writes prose like poetry.  Cutting for Stoneby Abraham Verghese is another book I want to finish.

Which authors do you admire? 

Anthony Doerr and Richard Powers.  Wish I could write like them.  

What have you learned from this experience?

Writing fiction is hard work but brings me ultimate joy.  Writing will be my 4th quarter passion.  I love writing about odd and interesting people, inventing characters and their back stories, tinkering with the details of their behavior and inner lives.  

What is the best piece of advice you have ever received? What is one piece of advice you would give your younger self? 

Some of it crept into the novel in the voice of several wise characters – the power of memory and holding onto the most important people in your life during hard and sad times.  My wife, my children, sister, family, and friends.  

What are you working on now?

I’ve begun a story about another psychologically damaged character, who becomes caught up in a mystery, wrapped in the genome, but neither he nor the readers know how much of this is a product of actual events or the mutterings of his own confused mind.  

Books to Read During a Pandemic

Posted by Jocelyn on April 16th, 2020


Severance by Ling Ma is becoming one of the hottest novels right now despite being published in 2018. The reason for its recent rise in sales is because the novel’s pandemic, Shen Fever, mirrors our own struggles with Covid-19. Ling Ma explores how it affects life around the world and specifically New York City. Not sure if reading about a pandemic while living through one will provide much solace, but it’s worth a shot.

Jane Hu at The Ringer discusses this and more in her essay. Also if you’re looking for another book about loss and epidemics, Joshua Keating has an article on Slate about how the Orwellian novel The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa mirrors how things we’ve taken for granted are disappearing in the age of Sheltering in Place and Social Distancing. Another dystopian tale that mirrors our current reality.

Living (and Writing) in the Quarantine

Posted by Jocelyn on March 23rd, 2020


These are unprecedented times and as we wait, with bated breath, for a solution/remedy/anchor for this swirling storm we will continue to live our lives. Our lives, here at Kelley & Hall have always, and will always, revolve around the world of literature. We are going to use this space as an outlet for updates on how the Coronavirus is impacting the world of publishing and how writers can continue to move forward in an uncertain world.

To get started, here are a few gems we found over the weekend:

Sloane Crosley on writing about a pandemic on an emotional level – NYTimesBut like everyone else, writers feel the need to distill life as a means of surviving it.

National Book Critics Circle Announces Winners – Library Journal

What to Read During Quarantine. – The Strategist

Jami Attenberg on dysfunctional families, forgiveness, and women’s fiction. –The Guardian

Booker Prize 2019

Posted by Jocelyn on October 16th, 2019


The literary awards circuit took an unexpected turn on Monday when the judges for the Booker Prize made a revolutionary (and stubborn!) decision to award two novels with this honor. Margaret Atwood’s THE TESTAMENTS and Bernardine Evaristo’s GIRL, WOMAN, OTHER. This is not the first time the award has been split in two. According to the New York Times, in 1992 Michael Ondaatje’s “The English Patient” shared it with Barry Unsworth’s “Sacred Hunger,” but the prize’s organizers then changed the rules to only allow one winner to avoid undermining either book.” This year, after hours of deliberating and repeatedly being told they could only choose one winner, the judges threw caution to the wind and broke the rules…again.

If you’re looking for some award-worthy weekend reading, here is some information on these two riveting novels.

THE TESTAMENTS by Margaret Atwood is a #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER. It brings us back into the world Atwood introduced readers to in The Handmaid’s Tale, (winner of the Booker Prize in 1986). Now she brings the iconic story to a dramatic conclusion in this riveting sequel.

The hit Hulu adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale starring Elisabeth Moss won the 2018 Golden Globe for best television series and the 2017 Emmy for outstanding drama.

More than fifteen years after the events of The Handmaid’s Tale, the theocratic regime of the Republic of Gilead maintains its grip on power, but there are signs it is beginning to rot from within. At this crucial moment, the lives of three radically different women converge, with potentially explosive results.

Two have grown up as part of the first generation to come of age in the new order. The testimonies of these two young women are joined by a third voice: a woman who wields power through the ruthless accumulation and deployment of secrets.

As Atwood unfolds The Testaments, she opens up the innermost workings of Gilead as each woman is forced to come to terms with who she is, and how far she will go for what she believes.

GIRL,WOMAN, OTHER by Bernardine Evaristo

“Joyfully polyphonic and vibrantly contemporary, this is a gloriously new kind of history, a novel of our times: celebratory, ever-dynamic and utterly irresistible.”—Booker Prize citation

Evaristo is the first black woman to win the Booker Prize. Girl, Woman, Other is a magnificent portrayal of the intersections of identity and a moving and hopeful story of an interconnected group of Black British women. Girl, Woman, Other paints a vivid portrait of the state of post-Brexit Britain, as well as looking back to the legacy of Britain’s colonial history in Africa and the Caribbean.

The twelve central characters of this multi-voiced novel lead vastly different lives: Amma is a newly acclaimed playwright whose work often explores her Black lesbian identity; her old friend Shirley is a teacher, jaded after decades of work in London’s funding-deprived schools; Carole, one of Shirley’s former students, is a successful investment banker; Carole’s mother Bummi works as a cleaner and worries about her daughter’s lack of rootedness despite her obvious achievements. From a nonbinary social media influencer to a 93-year-old woman living on a farm in Northern England, these unforgettable characters also intersect in shared aspects of their identities, from age to race to sexuality to class.

Sparklingly witty and filled with emotion, centering voices we often see othered, and written in an innovative fast-moving form that borrows technique from poetry, Girl, Woman, Other is a polyphonic and richly textured social novel that shows a side of Britain we rarely see, one that reminds us of all that connects us to our neighbors, even in times when we are encouraged to be split apart.

So you be the judge. Read both books and decide for yourself if the judge’s tenacity and stubbornness was warranted. I think you will find yourself understanding why they broke the rules.

Motivating Marketplace

Posted by Jocelyn on July 24th, 2019


Here’s what we believe to be true, published writers and writers aspiring to be published will always find motivation and inspiration when they read about book deals being signed. It is a clear indication that the publishing industry is not dead and is, in fact, always looking for new material to share with the reading public. So keep those fingers typing, that pen scribbling and that word count rising. Who knows, you might be written up here one day and inspiring future writers.

Imbolo Mbue, bestselling author of Behald the Dreamers, the PEN/Faulkner award-winning novel and Oprah Book Club selection has sold her next book to Random House. How Beautiful We Were is “a story told through multiple perspectives about what happens when an African village decides to fight back against an American oil company that is destroying their land.” It is an understatement to say that Mbue is a “writer to watch,” Lit Hub even called Behold the Dreamers a perfect example of the Great American Novel.

Photo via Toronto Star

Debut author Ashley Audrain’s The Push, has left the publishing industry reeling.

Former Penguin Canada publicity director Ashley Audrain’s THE PUSH is pitched as a modern-day WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN for fans of Celeste Ng and THE PERFECT NANNY, about the making and breaking of a family, told through the eyes of a woman whose experience of motherhood is nothing at all what she hoped for; in fact, it’s everything she always feared – via Publisher’s Marketplace.

Major auctions over the course of six days resulted in a pre-empt, two-book deal for publication with Pamela Dorman Books in early 2021 with nearly two dozen countries following suit.

“It’s the combination of that momentum, the few publishers that got in early having a lot of passion for it and also a major agent, Madeleine Milburn, who has an outstanding reputation and track record for discovering bold, new, almost certain to be bestselling talent,” explains Nicole Winstanley, publisher of Penguin Canada, which followed Penguin UK, as the first publishers to get on board with the manuscript.

“One of the international publishers, in his offer letter, referred to Ashley as ‘one of the biggest talents to have emerged in this century.’ I think that was the Dutch publisher and I think that gives you an idea of the sense of excitement around this,” said Winstanley.

This sale is creating buzz and excitement in the publishing industry because it is almost unheard of for an unpublished debut novel, sold outside of a book fair, during the quiet summer months to draw such attention.