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• Anna Quinn is a writer, teacher, and the owner of The Writers’ Workshoppe and Imprint Bookstore in Port Townsend, WA. She has thirty years of experience teaching and leading writing workshops across the country. Her writing has appeared in Writer’s Digest, Psychology Today, Literature Circles and Response, Practical Aspects of Authentic Assessment, Instructor, Tidepools, Manifest-Station, Lit-Fest Anthology, 2016, and Washington 129 Anthology. Anna’s first novel, “The Night Child”, was published Jan. 30^th, 2018 by Blackstone Publishing. Anna believes everyone has a remarkable story to tell, and when we listen closely to each other, everything changes.

• 1) We love your book The Night Child! What was your inspiration for it?
• Was any of it based on true events for you or someone you knew?
• I wanted to write a survival triumph story—a story about a strong and resilient child who endures difficult of circumstances and thrives. Some of the story of The Night Child is based on my personal history, but The Night Child has its own life, intelligence and energy.
• 2) So many of the views and thoughts in Night Child resonated with me and seemed so real. What research did you do and what helped you get into that frame of mind?
• I used pages and pages of notes from my own teaching experience and psychiatric history. I also spent hours and hours researching trauma and the brain, as well as interviewing psychiatrists and others who had experienced dissociation and childhood abuse.
• 3) What made you decide to write a book? And why this book?
• I wanted to write the  book I most wanted to read. I also wanted to take a destructive situation and create something meaningful and life-affirming from it. Writing is a way of not silencing—it allowed me to give voice to a child and a woman who hadn’t been heard for decades
• 4) Tea or coffee? and how do you like it best?
• Espresso in the morning and chamomile tea at night.
• 5) If you could live in any book world which would you choose? Why?
• The Bone People by Keri Hulme. The main character lives alone in a tall stone tower looking over the New Zealand Sea. Why? Because solitude and beauty.
• 6) What was the first book that you remember loving as a child?
• Charlotte’s Web—I  remember falling in love with the innocence of Wilbur, and being fascinated that Charlotte, a tiny spider could stand up to authority and save lives because of language.
• 7) What is one of your biggest fears?
• One of my children or my husband dying
• 8) What do you have to have do to be able to sit and write?
• Take a long walk and read poetry before I begin. Oh, and close the door to my writing space. 
• 9) What is one thing you would like your readers to know?

• How essential listening to the child within is, how essential loving her is – gentle, steadfast, absolute, and fierce love – is to survival.

• 10) What are you writing next and what can you tell us about it.
• A novel set the San Juan  Islands in Washington State. Can’t say too much more about it, but there’s free will versus destiny, and women pushing boundaries, and I’m loving writing it.
• The Night Child was a Beautiful and Raw book that will stay with me forever!
• see our review Here
• To purchase Anna Quinn’s The Night Child on Amazon click Here

A Huge Thank You to Anna Quinn for taking the time to answer our questions and being a part of our blog!

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