Day 25: Character & Event with Katherine Sherbrooke & Lise Haines

To paraphrase Henry James: Character Determines Incident; Incident Reveals Character. Writers Katherine Sherbrooke and Lise Haines explore the complicated but necessary relationship between character and event in your story, how to discover that relationship, and how to deepen it as the story progresses.

Lise Haines’ fifth novel, Book of Knives, is just out from Sourcebooks. Rick Moody says of her work: "Haines is an astute psychologist, a cool, unsentimental investigator of humans, who often locates the hard truths.” Her four earlier books are When We Disappear, Girl in the Arena, Small Acts of Sex and Electricity and In My Sister’s Country. Her work has been optioned by HBO and other production companies. She has been a fellow at VCCA and Ragdale, a Briggs Copeland Lecturer at Harvard, and is Senior Writer in Residence at Emerson College. 

Katherine Sherbrooke is the author of a family memoir called Finding Home and three novels: the New York Times notable Leaving Coy’s Hill, which was selected for 2022 MA Book Award’s Honors in Fiction prize, and Fill the Sky, the winner of a 2017 Independent Press Award and finalist for the Mary Sarton Award for Contemporary Fiction. Her newest novel, THE HIDDEN LIFE OF ASTER KELLY is set to publish in April of 2023. She currently serves as Chair of the Board of GrubStreet, the nation’s largest creative writing center and Boston’s first public arts space dedicated to the written word. She shares her newly empty nest in Cohasset with her husband and black lab.