DAY 1
Welcome to our first interactive author interview at the Examiner. I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone, Stephanie Kuehnert's debut novel from MTV Books(an imprint of Simon and Schuster), will be released in bookstores nationwide on July 8th. On July 9th, she'll be reading and signing from the book at Women and Children First Bookstore, and July 10th at her local dive, The Beacon Pub (101 Circle Ave. Forest Park, IL).

Every day until the tenth, I'll be an online moderator for any questions you have for Stephanie, about the book, the writing life, her process, her fondness for Forest Park and lithe tattooed fellas. Every day, there will be a new question culled from your comments. The first question/ answer is below. Stephanie and I will be checking the site for your comments and questions.

Emily Black has been pursing rock gods since her mother Louisa abandoned her husband and baby girl to follow the punk scene. That’s the fairy Emily eats up from her steadfast father, who is also her musical mentor. But on the dawn of rock stardom of her own, Emily discovers that there’s much more to her mother’s absence. Getting out of Carlisle, Wisconsin to track down Louisa jeopardizes what once mattered most to Emily: the music.
 
With chapters alternating between Emily’s coming of age as a woman and musician and Louisa’s failed quest to run away from her past, Kuehnert uses parallel narratives to show what binds not only mother to daughter, but ambition and one’s roots.

QUESTION 1
Joey takes place over two generations and spans the punk scene from Boston to L.A., New Orleans to Seattle. Chicago and your Forest Park are formative places for Emily’s band and Emily’s parents. But the nexus of the novel, the place that binds the characters and moves the narrative, is an abandoned warehouse-turned-punk-venue, River’s Edge, in podunk Wisconsin. What was the genesis of River’s Edge and at what point in the process did you realize how central it was to Joey? Ever see the indie-flic by the same name featuring Keanu Reeves?

ANSWER 1
I knew that River's Edge was a central place from the get-go. Though I wrote the chapters in the book out of order, I did start with the first chapter and the first scene I wrote was the one where Emily loses her virginity at River's Edge. So it was the first place I saw Emily and I immediately knew how important it was to her and the story. Since my characters are from a small, rural town I knew they wouldn't even have a cool record store to hang out at let alone a proper rock club nearby, so I needed to create a place where the kids who felt like outcasts could gather and discover the kind of music that appeals to them.

I'm a big Nirvana fan and of course Kurt Cobain came from a very small town in Washington and I remember reading an interview where he talked about reading about punk rock before he ever heard it and how he made up what it would sound like and tried to emulate that. I was really fascinated by that story and always thought about how that probably influenced Nirvana's sound. So I suppose my idea from River's Edge came from that a little bit. Also I liked the idea of transforming an unusual venue into a punk club. I spent many nights during my teenage years at the Fireside Bowl in Chicago. I loved that place and loved that it was a functional bowling alley. So I drew from that some, but made it more of a collective 'cause I thought that would be cool.

And lastly, I personally have an affinity for the places that kids who feel like outcasts go. When I was a teenager in Oak Park, all the misfit kids basically took over this park in the center of town, Scoville Park. I would walk by and see all these pierced, dyed kids in thrift store clothing smoking cigarettes and just wanted to be a part of it so bad. Eventually, I ventured in and started hanging out there. So River's Edge has a little bit of Scoville Park in it, too.
 
And I guess this showcases my somewhat twisted train of thought, but River's Edge is actually named after Riversedge Hospital in Forest Park, which is a mental health facility where several of my friends got sent when I was in high school because their parents would just give up on figuring out how to deal with them and I always thought if we had somewhere to go besides the park and people's basements, maybe we wouldn't be so crazy. So I created the more positive, fictional River's Edge.

And yes, I have seen the Keanu Reeves flick.