I had to confront a lot of my own anxieties about how to raise a child well, how to keep a child safe and whole in crazy times and in what seemed to me like a crazy place--Miami. There'd also been a lot of stories in both the local and national news about runaways and missing kids and I started imagining a situation in which a mother might know where her daughter had run away to, and yet not be able to do a darned thing about it. The tension between the known and the unknown, the sense of a lost child just within fingertips' reach, and yet light years away, began to grow into the center of Birds of Paradise, the story of Avis and Felice.

JH: Which character did you start with first, Avis (the mother) or Felice (the daughter)?

DJ: I was sitting in my back yard, sort of wool-gathering, watching some tiny ants creep around on my orchids, when I had a clear image of a woman in a chef's apron; her back was to me, and I knew that I had to write about her. I sensed her perfectionism, her love of physical beauty, and her fear of the larger world. So Avis became my jumping off point and then Felice's voice came to me a little later after I'd started in the mother's perspective.

JH: What was your biggest challenge in developing this story?

DJ: I'm such a slow writer and a novel takes me so long to write that simply enduring the rewrites, keeping faith that the story will hold, and getting to the ending is my great challenge with each of them. There's always seems to be a point about three-quarters of the way through the writing process where I tend to question the entire project and wonder if I can take on a whole new career, like river boat captain.

But with Birds of Paradise in particular, the big challenge might have been the sheer amount of research I had to do to cover its range of subjects. It was daunting. For example, I realized that I needed to learn a lot more about its setting of Miami: simply living here wasn't enough. The dimensions of this city-its neighborhoods, history, moods-are so complicated and intricate, I had to really get out there, talking to people, walking, reading-to do it justice. It wasn't just a matter of memorizing statistics or maps, but of trying to broaden my own perspective and deepen my emotional response to this city. It took me years and I continued studying throughout the writing and revision of the book, trying to take it all in.

JH: Do you have any writing rituals or superstitions?

DJ: I do like to write at night: I have a little book light that I'll turn on when I can't sleep and I can often peck out a couple extra paragraphs in my writing notebook that way. I also write all my novel first drafts longhand, which seems to amaze my technology-loving students. But I feel like I trust that writing more somehow-longhand slows me down, forces me to be more careful and to think more, to imagine more deeply. And I like the sensation of my hand against the paper, the feeling of being physically linked to the act of writing, from mind to fingers to ink.

JH: How long did it take you to write this novel, and how did it change you as a writer?

DJ: Almost all my novels take at least three years to write. I'd guess that I was actually thinking about this book for at least a year or two before I started work on it too. It was fun to work from different perspectives-that was an experiment I'd tried years earlier with another novel that never coalesced. So I'd had to overcome some anxiety about tackling a different sort of narrative approach. And I feel like the multiple points of view and settings gave me such a nice big palette to paint with-depicting the big, wild city and all its unique neighborhoods and scenes. That was new for me and very exciting: I feel it helped me make the leap from writing more interior, thought-centered novels to looking at and describing bigger stories, scenes, the contemporary, urban world, and, in that sense, to move toward a deeply "American" novel.

JH: What's the one true thing you learned from Avis and Felice?

DJ: They're both brave characters and both of them take enormous risks. I hope I learned that even though risks are scary, even terrifying, you can't lead let fear run your life. I hope I learned to be braver in general: my husband and I finally did make the leap into parenthood, which might have been the scariest thing I'd ever done, and in some way, I think the novel helped me do that.

JH: What's next for you?

DJ: I'm writing a new food memoir, sort of a follow up to my earlier one, The Language of Baklava, but this one is an attempt to trace some of my journey toward becoming a writer and then, years later, a mother. I'm writing about the ways I was told that, because I'm a woman, I'd have to choose between writing and family, and how I tried to move past those preconceptions. And naturally I'm returning to the theme of food and cooking: you might say the new book offers feminism with recipes.

Diana Abu-Jaber's newest novel, Birds Of Paradise, is an Indiepicks selection. Her novel, Origin was named one of the best books of the year by the LA Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Washington Post. Her second novel, Crescent, won the PEN Center Award for Literary fiction and the American Book Award. Her first novel, Arabian Jazz won the Oregon Book award for Literary Fiction.
The Language of Baklava, her memoir, won the Northwest Booksellers' Award. She teaches at Portland State University and divides her time between Portland and Miami.