LOCAL Houston | The City Guide JUNE 2015 | Page 49

Local June_FinalEDITED.qxp_002houston 5/21/15 7:24 PM Page 49

people | places | things

Q&A WITH AUTHOR RENÉ STEINKE
NPR called René Steinke’s novel Friendswood “one of the most interesting novels to be set in the Lone Star State in quite a while.” Oprah Magazine,
Cosmopolitan and Eat Pray Love author Elizabeth Gilbert also offered praise, calling it “masterfully observed,” “explosive” and “beautiful.” To be sure,
Friendswood is the kind of novel that keeps you up long after everyone else in your house has gone to bed. It is a cinematic page-turner, full of complicated, earthy characters knotted together by unfathomable yet somehow all-too-familiar tragedies. Steinke is an accomplished writer and teacher, the
director of the Fairleigh Dickinson University Master of Fine Arts program in Creative Writing, as well as a National Book Award finalist. She grew up
in Friendswood, but today calls New York City home. I recently sat down with her in a Texas-themed watering hole in Brooklyn, called, aptly, “South.”

LOCAL: Did you have to leave Texas to write about it?
RS: With distance you see things differently. I needed that distance to imagine

LOCAL: Congratulations on Friendswood being optioned for a film. What does

LOCAL: Friendswood is structured around two intense events,
and is told through the eyes of four main characters. What
inspired you to write about both environmental degradation
and sexual assault in this way?
RS: I wanted to go deep into the minds of the characters and
give the reader different perspectives on a single event. The
campus sexual assault issue was in the news just as
Friendswood was coming out. If we say “boys will be boys,”
or conversely, if we say that all assailants are monsters, then we
never get to the real issues behind the actions.

Entertainment. Dannielle Thomas (a good friend of mine from high school),
Elizabeth Fowler and Susan Duff, all of whom have ties to
Texas, are the producers who optioned Friendswood. They are
putting together the pieces that go into making the movie – the
screenplay, financing, actors. It’s very exciting!

a fictional story, to not be beholden to the facts about a place so familiar to me.

RS: Madonna co-optioned my first novel, in partnership with Handprint
that actually mean?

LOCAL: What advice would you offer aspiring writers?
RS: Find your community. Write every day and read everything
you can get your hands on. Pay attention to your life.

By Cameron Dezen Hammon | Photography by Anna Sneed

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