From Shogunate Japan to the Bayous with Sam Snoek-Brown
by Marie Marshall
If you have fifteen minutes to spare, I recommend watching this video clip of Sam Snoek-Brown, a writer for whom I have enormous respect. In this televised interview he talks about such things as how he teaches his creative writing students all about getting rejected by publishers. But the main topic of the interview is his forthcoming novel Hagridden, and the influence of classic Samurai movies on his writing. The novel is set at the time of the American Civil War, but its action happens well away from the battlefields, cities, and plantations of North and South.
Marie Marshall 
A good interview to watch, and a most original theme for the novel. It will be interesting to see the ‘touch’ he applies to it – whether some lightness can be injected into what is essentially really heavy.