• Courtesy of Steven Painter

Tucson author Steven Painter is an expert in film studies, and he’s sharing his expertise with his latest book, Take Her For A Ride.

The book, which follows a film producer in 1930s Hollywood as he tries to save his studio from demise during the Great Depression, calls on a number of actual events that Painter said he researched during the course of his writing. A graduate of the University of Arizona’s media arts program, Painter holds a master’s degree, and researched events from the period using the help of a few professors.

Inspiration for the novel’s premise, Painter said, came from a long-standing interest in movies from that era.

“I’ve always been entranced by classic film,” Painter said, adding that the 1942 classic Casablanca, despite being from a later decade, served as a basis for “Take Her For A Ride’s” storyline. Many of the characters, he added, are based on actual Hollywood actors from that time period.

Though Painter decided to take on the challenge of self-publishing the book, it wasn’t quite as difficult as it can be for some authors, he said, adding that his job with a local publisher gave him an inside look at the process. Additionally, Painter added that the story itself is what counts, regardless of who’s behind it.

On Tuesday, April 23, volunteers will give away half a million free books in more than 6,000 locations across the country. Tucson's Antigone Books (411 N. Fourth Ave.) is a partner in World Book Night U.S.

The goal of World Book Night U.S. is to seek out people without the means or access to printed books and give them free, specially printed paperbacks. Thirty specially chosen books have been printed for the giveaway; authors and publishers forgo any royalties. (See the list here.)

Volunteer "book givers" choose a book from the list and get 20 copies of the book to distribute. Antigone serves as a pick up spot for the volunteers. Once a volunteer has the books, he or she decides where to give the books away—at VA hospitals, nursing homes, schools, shelters and so on.

Trudy Mills, co-owner of Antigone Books, says that 45 volunteers signed up and are using her store for their book pickup. She also notes that Tucson ranks 12th in the United States for per capita book givers.

Although it's too late to be a volunteer this year, interested parties can sign up for the World Book Night newsletter for information on World Book Night 2014. Visit www.us.worldbooknight.org for info.

Stephen Chbosky, author and director of Perks of Being a Wallflower, will host a reading, signing and Q&A from 3:30 to 4:30 p.m. on Friday, April 26, at the Bookmans at Grant and Campbell.

After releasing the novel in 1999, Chbosky went on to write the screenplay and direct the film adaptation, which was released last October. The book had garnered a cult following by the time the film was released.

Though Chbosky began this project as an author, he also has an extensive background in film. A graduate of the University of Southern California's filmic writing program, his first film, The Four Corners of Nowhere, debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in 1995. Chbosky also wrote the screenplay for the film adaptation of Rent, and helped create CBS's Jericho.

The signing is free and open to the public.

It may have been over 40 years in the making, but Raymond Keen’s first volume of poetry hardly fails to resound in the here and now.

Love Poems for Cannibals, which Keen self-published using the Amazon company CreateSpace, is the result of decades of accumulated inspiration. His dabbling in writing began when Keen was finishing grad school in the early ‘60s, but hit a peak when he spent a year serving as a Navy clinical psychologist in Vietnam. He filled entire notebooks with “sentences and particles” during his time there, a rough framework of poetic snippets that resurfaced in 2011.

The framework began to evolve into a full volume of work, and in the meantime Keen’s work was published in a series of literary journals, including the American Poetry Review in 2005. Publishing a book, though, remained a goal, and CreateSpace proved a relatively easy outlet for achieving just that.

Described by Keen as at times “topical and political,” other times “dark and difficult,” the poetry of Love Poems for Cannibals is often a bitter reflection of a lifetime of experiences. Controversial figures from Richard Nixon to Charles Manson are referenced and routinely mocked, immersing readers in moments of history that often leave a bad taste their mouth.

Model, Olympic gold-medalist, wife, and mother Amanda Beard has had her share of success and happiness through her career and her family, but as well as many hardships.

"In The Water They Can’t See You Cry", a memoir written by Beard with Rebecca Paley, is an honest and raw account of her life in the spotlight as a swimmer and her battle with clinical depression.

In three Olympic games, Beard won a total of seven medals. Her first Olympic appearance was in the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games when she was only 14, tightly holding her teddy bear, Harold. She was a student at Irvine High School in Irvine, Calif. at the time and managed to take home two silver medals and one gold medal.

She also competed in the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games and the 2004 Athens Olympic Games. On top of her swimming career, Beard also got into modeling, gaining status as a sex-symbol.

With all this success came an immense amount of pressure. She found herself feeling unhappy and unworthy of all that she had in her life, unaware she was suffering from clinical depression.

Santana and Saul tells the story of a long-time friendship between two men who lived completely different lives and hold different religious beliefs.

The "dual memoir," as the author Saul Diskin calls it, tells the story of Santana, a guy who spent 30 years in and out of prison, was addicted to heroin and influenced by the the gangs, drugs and violence on the streets of southern California.

Diskin met Santana in a California prison, where Diskin was an undercover investigator. There, the two became friends as young men, but later separated when Diskin moved to Arizona to be a farmer.

In 2005, 48 years after they'd met, Santana contacted Saul and the men rekindled their old friendship. By then, Santana had been out of jail and completely turned his life around. After hearing that Santana was a husband, father and devoted preacher, Diskin said he had to go visit Santana to see such an unbelievable change.

But Diskin said the book doesn't just tell the story of Santana and the two men's friendship, it also shows a relationship between two completely different people with a different set of beliefs.

"People of different backgrounds, different classes, different intellectual interests can be friends without having to want to persuade the other one to his point of view," Diskin said. "I remain a non-believer, he remains a committed Christian but we still have great affection for each other."

Diskin is not religious at all, so when Santana called and asked him to write a memoir about his (Santana's) life, Diskin was hesitant at first. Santana had recently read Diskin's first book, a memoir about how his twin brother died, before contacting Diskin with the idea of a book about how faith and the church completely changed him.

Diskin finally wrote the dual memoir, 75 percent of it being about Santana. In order to write it, he had to spend hours shadowing Santana, learning about his life and taking notes. After sending it to multiple publishing companies known for religious writing, and being turned down by all of them, Diskin decided to self-pubish the memoir.

"There wasn't enough religion in it," Diskin said. "A great deal of the book had to do with his life as a criminal because it's the Christian story. You know .... they say 'hate the sin, love the sinner' ... but what they really wanted was for that market was all redemption and no sin and ... that would've been impossible to put my name to something like that."

Santana and Saul: A Dual Memoir was published by Author House, a self-publishing company, and can be ordered at any bookstore. The hardcover costs $29 and paperback costs $20. Both are available on Amazon and at Barnes and Noble. The eBook version costs about $4.

Tea Leaves, which was self-published earlier this year by Tucson author Andrew Sandner, features 50 life lessons, each accompanied by short prose and an illustration, drawn by Victoria Hollins. After finding its way to the Weekly's booth at this year's festival of books, we caught up with Sandner to find out how Tea Leaves came to be.

What was the inspiration for Tea Leaves?

Originally, the inspiration for the book came from wanting to help kids gain the confidence and mental courage to standup to bullying, or at the very least, to shrug bullying off if it happened to them. But it morphed into a manual on prosperity and becoming a well refined person thanks to a book I had been reading (and still read) called The Art of Worldly Wisdom by Baltasar Gracian. Gracian's blunt, Machiavellian prose inspired the writing style. I wanted the book to be aesthetically pleasing as well, and that's where John Tenniel's art in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland provided the inspiration for the illustrations. I wanted to capture that "cartoonish/Victorian-esque" feel that helped catapult Carroll's wonderful story into the children's classic it is, and will forever be.

Is this your first self-published book?

Yes.

What is the self-publishing process like?

Self-publishing is a lot of fun, but a lot of hard work. You wouldn't think it so; write and print, right? But everything is up to the self-publisher. Writing, editing, layout, formatting, print decisions, cover design, web-design, social media presence, promotion, etc. Obviously you can hire out some of these jobs, which is recommended, especially when it comes to editing, and web-design if you have no experience, but it is up to you to actually get it done one way or another! I am told that self-publishing is becoming more popular than traditional publishing amongst traditionally published authors these days because of the amount of control the author has on the process now. I would say to anyone who is thinking about self-publishing to go for it. Jump in with both feet and learn all you can about the process. Once your book is in print, it becomes part of your legacy, and consequently part of literary history forever. And that is pretty cool to me.

• Photo of Benjamin Alire Sáenz from Flickr Creative Commons by Alex Briseño.

The winner for America's largest peer-juried prize for fiction was announced March 19. Judges Walter Kirn, Nelly Rosario, and A.J. Verdelle viewed more than 350 novels and short story collections published in 2012 for the 2013 award.

When discussing the process of choosing a winner for the award, Verdelle said in a press release that, “judging the 2013 PEN/Faulkner contest proves that even in the advent of this digital age, American letters continues to thrive. American writers grace the page from small and large publishers, from traditionally known outfits like Random House and FSG, and from a great number of smaller entities like FC2 and Coffee House Press. Both the PEN/Faulkner competition and the impressive breadth of the submissions celebrates the hard work required to invent and imagine, to reimagine and revise.”

Artist, poet, novelist, and current chair of the Creative Writing Department at the University of Texas at El Paso, Sáenz won a $15,000 prize for his seven story collection he submitted for the contest.

The other four finalists for the award also received monetary prizes of $5,000, including Laird Hunt for her novel, Kind One, T. Geronimo Johnson for his debut novel, Hold It ‘Til It Hurts, Thomas Mallon for Watergate and Tucson native Amelia Gray for her debut novel, Threats.

Tucson author Donna Grisanti’s experience as an up-and-coming novelist isn’t as rooted in a creative writing background as many typically are.

Grisanti, a Chicago native who attended college at Arizona State University, studied nursing, psychology and sociology (and eventually went on to business administration) — not your average precursor for a career as an author. But the transition from being a nurse with an MBA to a fulltime novelist was still quite natural, she says.

“I had always had an interest,” Grisanti says. “People said that I wrote well, and, in a third act of life, after our family was grown, I decided to try to learn how to write fiction.”

Though a natural shift, the move to a life as an author wasn’t a quick one. It took Grisanti 12 years of writing as a hobby before publishers picked up her first book, Wandering Hearts, and put it on shelves in August of 2006. Since then, Grisanti has found her voice, primarily as a historical novelist.

Her second and latest effort, Paths of Promise, follows Ruth Yuell, a black woman “dusting close to her 30s” in 1960s Chicago during the Civil Rights Movement. After being injured during a peaceful demonstration, Ruth tells her life story to a journalist friend as she awaits medical attention. The book winds through a number of sub-stories that explain how Ruth has made it to where she is in the present, detailing each experience’s significance.

To local author Nicholas Campanella, sacrificing any trace of realism to tell a fantastical story is the first way to lose your audience - and your voice as a writer.

“I want people to smell the air in my book. I want them to know what the sky looks like, how the characters feel,” Campanella said. “I don’t want to just bombard them with action figures and guns going off... That kind of science fiction never impressed me.”