On Monday I posted the first few questions I asked Connie and now it’s time for the rest.  The first part of the interview is here.  My review of her book, Laughing Through Life, and a giveaway is here.  Connie’s website is here.  Enjoy!

Yes, I loves my  movies!  Every year, we have a traveling trophy Oscar-predicting  contest with friends and predict ALL categories.  (I hold the  trophy, this year.)  Ryan Gosling is one of my favorite male actors  working today. I also like George Clooney. “The Ides of March” was wonderful.  [Two for the price of one!] My husband kids me about my Richard Gere  phase—[which, actually, secretly endures today]— where my college  roommate and I rented every film of his with a love scene and watched just the love scenes one summer when we  were vacationing together. However, “King David” was a horrible film of  Richard’s (Sorry, Richard) and we quit after we rented that one. I just saw  Tilda Swinton in “We Need to Talk About Kevin”  at the Chicago Film  Festival, and she turned in a truly powerful performance, with John C. Reilly  starring opposite her in the film. On TV, I like Julianna Margulies in”The  Good Wife” (which I regularly review for Yahoo) and Cate Blanchett in  “Homeland.” I recently met Chicago native John C. Reilly who sat and  watched his own film with us, and he couldn’t have been nicer to me,  as were Colin Hanks and Forrest Whitaker when I met them. I’ve been following  Colin’s story arc on “Dexter.” [I don’t want him to leave the plot!]  

On the top of my blog (www.WeeklyWilson.com), [on which I often  review film], I have a Shakespeare quote: “There is a tide in the affairs of  men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; omitted, all the voyage  of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries.” Or, as the Bard  also famously said, “We must take the current when it serves or lose our  ventures.” Those quotes really speak to me, because, even today, I  have risked to get where I am, giving up a tenured 17 and 1/2 year teaching  job to write for a living (in 1985), starting 2 businesses from scratch in  wintry economic climates (in 1986 and 1995, after the writing job pretty  much crashed and burned). Selling two successful businesses while really  too young to retire  to (try to) come full circle  and write “one of everything” before another of my favorite poems  applies (Edna St. Vincent Millay), “Dirge Without Music:” 

“I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard  ground.  So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:  Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely.  Crowned with lilies  and with laurel they go, but I am not resigned. Lovers and thinkers, into the  earth with you.  Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.   A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew, A formula, a phrase  remains,—but the best is lost. The answers quick and keen, the honest look,  the laughter, the love,—They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses.   Elegant and curled is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not  approve.  More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in  the world.  Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave Gently they go,  the beautiful, the tender, the kind; Quietly they go, the intelligent, the  witty, the brave.  I know.  But I do not approve. And I am not  resigned.”

So, now that I’ve cheered everyone up with that poem.

I’ll give you a couple of “Iowa” book  references/recommendations. The obvious choice (and a good one) would be Jane  Smiley’s “A Thousand Acres,” which is based on King Lear. She’s also  written Ordinary Love and Good Will, which is  also set in Iowa, but I haven’t read it yet, although I hear it is  excellent. There are also references to “Iowa Bob” in one of John Irving’s  books, but the book, itself (The Hotel New  Hampshire), is set in New Hampshire although that   character is based on former University of Iowa football coach Bob Commins, I’m  told (now deceased: see poem above). For fine nonfiction,  try Methland by Nick Reding,  a searing  documentary-style look at Oelwein, Iowa, 12 miles from where I grew up and how  meth labs have destroyed the town. (It’s a quicker read, and a  worthwhile one.)

And, if you want to read something by a struggling genre author trying to  gain a foothold at least in E-books, I will happily send you  The Color of Evil, which is set in Cedar Falls, Iowa absolutely free!  It should be out in 2012. It is the  first book in a trilogy about a boy with paranormal abilities. The second book, Red Is for Rage, will take Tad McGreevy on into his  senior year of high school, just as the first book focuses on his junior  year in high school. [You could tell others that you are “a beta  reader” for a struggling novelist who has just completed her second  novel. It’s strictly genre reading with echoes of Stephen King. And, after  I publish the first one, I’m thinking of writing up my political adventures in  2004 and 2008 (nonfiction) to coincide with the upcoming presidential campaign.  I’m a movie and a political junkie, I guess, and it’s just as addictive as meth,  I fear.