Interview Phyllice Bradner and Morgan St. James

by

W. J. Calabrese

1) On your web site,  http://www.silversistersmysteries.com , you describe your main characters as follows:” The Silver Sisters (are) identical Twins as Different as Tofu and Truffles. Goldie Silver is an aging, sweet tempered hippie who owns an antique shop in Juneau, Alaska. Her twin, Godiva Olivia DuBois is a manipulative wealthy widow who writes the popular advice column Ask G.O.D. from her Beverly Hills, California mansion”. How closely does this describe your own real-life situation?

(Phyllice) Following the sage advice “write about what you know”, we patterned our central characters roughly after ourselves. That gives us the ability to understand how each would respond in a given situation. I am, in fact, an aging hippie who lived in Alaska for almost 40 years. At one time in my checkered career, just like Goldie, I did own an antique shop on Franklin St. in downtown Juneau. I have been told that I am much too kind, I can’t help giving everyone the benefit of the doubt. I am an easy-going artist, I have never cared about fashion or the social world, and am uncomfortable driving more than 55 mph. By the way, Morgan and I are not twins, we are about five years apart.

(Morgan) I don’t live in Beverly Hills, but darn close in Marina Del Rey. Godiva has some of my qualities and quite a few qualities of one of my best friends who is pretty self-centered, rather spoiled and very materialistic, but you gotta like her. I am not as selfish as Godiva, but I certainly am manipulative and I consider myself quite the “networker”, always on top of who to contact to get something done. Unfortunately I can’t afford Godiva’s designer clothes although sometimes I indulge myself when I find one in a “greatly reduced” sale.  Still, I do have two large closets full of fashionable outfits, shoes, belts, purses, etc. in Marina Del Rey and another full walk-in closet in my home in Las Vegas. As far as being an advice columnist... well, I do spend a lot of time on the phone advising my grown children and all my friends and business associates seem to call me for advice whenever they hit a snag. My philosophy has always been: don’t do it for them, tell them how to do it for themselves.

2) Are there also real life counterparts to “Jewish mother Flossie and cantankerous Uncle Sterling, who were vaudeville magicians back in the day.”

(Phyllice) Oh, you bet! There are not exactly real life counterparts of our quirky octogenarians, but they are composites of many of our family members and friends. Our mother was the youngest of ten children who sang and danced their way through life. None of them were actually magicians, but every one of them could turn a frown into a smile as if by magic. Flossie does have many characteristics of our dear mother, Rosetta, whose keen “sense of the obvious” made her the first person everyone turned to for advice and our Aunt Edna who was really feisty.

(Morgan) Our family album consists of photos of our Mom and aunts and uncles cutting up in costumes with banjos and ukuleles. One uncle played the coronet with John Phillip Sousa’s band, another was a professional drummer, and our dear old Uncle Sam entertained residents of retirement homes with his harmonica and guitar well into his nineties. “I’d rather be up on stage than have to sit in the audience and listen to myself,” he would say. He was the inspiration for the Home for Hollywood Has Beens. One more thing. One of my best friend’s mothers was Flossie to the max when it came to the tarot cards and séances.  While I never attended one, another dear friend’s wife told me that he conducted several séances that scared the living daylights out of everyone when things started to happen.

3) You talked about the musical background of your family. Does either of you play an instrument, or have any other experience in or aspirations toward the performing arts?

(Phyllice) I definitely can’t carry a tune, in third grade when everyone participated in the school chorus at Christmas time, I was asked to stand in back and just “mouth” the words. The only instrument I was able to master was the kazoo.

(Morgan) I can’t carry a tune either and don’t play an instrument. When I was a kid, my sister, my cousin and I shared a violin for a short period of time.  A teacher came to the house to give us lessons.  I gave up because I didn’t like the bowing exercises.  They were boring.  My cousin scratched out tunes, like Ruby, that set the cats off meowing in high C. As for Phyllice, I don’t recall her learning anything but we have a great picture of her with the family violin when she was about seven. Later, as an adult, I decided to try the guitar but changed my mind when I learned I would have to cut my nails.  (Oh, no... shades of Godiva.)

4) A Corpse In The Soup is the first in a series about the adventures of the Silver Sisters. Do you have a second book underway? Can you tell us a bit about it?

(Phyllice) The second in our series, Seven Deadly Samovars, takes place mostly in Alaska. Godiva visits Juneau for a birthday salmon bake honoring Goldie’s mother-in-law, Belle Pepper. The day of the party a shipment of Russian samovars arrives at Goldie’s antique shop and the exquisite pieces begin to sell immediately.  When the proprietor of a tea shop is killed after buying two of the samovars, the Silver Sisters get sucked in to proving that a homeless man is innocent of committing the crime. They discover that the Dumkovsky brothers are after those samovars and will stop at nothing, not even murder, to get them. They chase the elusive Russians to Seattle and Los Angeles where they set a trap with the help of their mother, Flossie and Uncle Sterling.

(Morgan) The readers meet all sorts of Alaskan oddballs, most of them based on real people that Phyllice knows, and lots of goofy things happen in their pursuit of the bad guys. The family takes time out to attend the Icons of Illusion Banquet in Seattle, which is honoring their late father as one of magic’s “Three Great Harrys”. We are working on “Samovars” now, and we have our third book on the back burner... the working title is “A Corpse In The Condo”.

5) How do you go about planning a story? Do you have brain-storming sessions? Is there a particular methodology that you use?

(Morgan) We do have brain-storming sessions, but since we live in different states we have to schedule week-long retreats to bounce ideas back and forth in person. The telephone and e-mail work very well as writing tools once we have the book mapped out, but nothing beats the face-to-face “think tank”. I have devised an outline sheet that maps each chapter. It works quite well to explore the possibilities in each scenario we come up with. We try to nail down our story line, an event calendar and what details go in each chapter before we proceed with the writing.

(Phyllice) We definitely have a lot of fun bouncing weird ideas around until we settle on the ones that might work. Until Morgan came up with an organized chart, we jotted ideas on napkins and the backs of junk mail or whatever was handy, now we actually can go back and make sense out of our ramblings. If we are brainstorming while driving together, we try to tape what we are saying or it will all be lost by the time we sit down to write.  Sometimes, however, the story writes itself, taking a twist or turn that we hadn’t planned on, then we rearrange things to accommodate the new turn of events.   

6) Do you ever get into arguments regarding a plot turn, the role of a character, or other details of your stories? How do you resolve them?

(Morgan) We butt heads sometimes but seldom actually argue. Usually the one with the strongest point of view wins that round.

(Phyllice) Or, as is often the case, the one with the weakest resolve backs off. We find that most of the time if one of us really feels strongly about something then we should go with that instinct. In the end, when we do the final edit, it might get cut anyway. Our biggest disagreements actually revolve around what to cut in the final edit.

7) Would you ever consider the possibility of writing books separately, or is this to remain a sister act?

(Morgan) I am writing a darker novel with a working title of “Deadly Dance” on my own.  I started writing it years ago before I knew how to write fiction.  Now I am cutting, editing, rewriting and polishing.  It definitely is not a cozy mystery. I also have a short story, “Shopping for Dancing Shoes” that will be the lead story in “Chicken Soup for the Shopper’s Soul” due for release in October.  I have a few magazine articles in mind that I want to write, a short story mystery and a few other projects.

(Phyllice) The light cozy mysteries will remain a sister act. I am primarily an artist who writes with my sister because it is a fun activity that has brought us close together. The work I do on my own is pretty much focused on my art. The writing is quite intense for me and when left to my own devises I prefer to kick back and make prints of whimsical cats and dogs.

8) Phyllice, you are the artist and Morgan is the writer. Have you eve ever thought of doing a children’s book together?

(Phyllice) Bill, even though I think of myself as an artist first, I am very definitely a writer and have been all my life. I started with poetry as a child, then journalism, advertising copywriting, political PR, travelogs, etc. And, yes, we have kicked around children’s books. Morgan wrote one many years ago, I’ll let her answer this one.

(Morgan)  In the late 70's I did write and illustrate a children's book called "LaRue the Llama Helps His Mama".  Although I’m not a professional artist like Phyllice, as an interior designer I drew and painted full color presentation renderings and have dabbled in painting abstracts.  To my surprise, the illustrations in “LaRue” were cute enough that another children's book writer asked if I would be interested in illustrating her book (but I wasn't interested), people felt the message in my book was good but at least at that time picture books in rhyme about talking animals weren't selling to publishers!  My two youngest kids, who were only 6 and 7 1/2 at the time, remember the whole book to this day and they are now 35 1/2 and 37.  I still have the full color mock up.

Thank you so very much, Phyllice and Morgan, for sharing the information about your book and your lives. The book sounds like fun and so do you.