The following interview and questions are intended to enhance your group''s reading of Paula Sharp''s Crows Over a Wheatfield, and to give you starting points for discussion. An Interview with the Author Q: Do you think of yourself as a writer or a lawyer? How has your legal work influenced your writing? A: I am a writer first, and a lawyer second. I wrote and translated fiction for years before becoming a lawyer, and I don''t usually write on legal topics. Still, my legal work has enriched my understanding of human nature and made me pay more attention to character in writing. You spend a lot of time as a criminal lawyer puzzling people together making sense of their motives and figuring out how their lives'' circumstances led them down the wrong roads, or in some cases, why nothing led to where they are but their own questionable selves. Watching trials also had a profound effect an how I perceived the nature of narrative authority in writing and on my assumptions about truth itself. As a defense lawyer in any trial, you have to view a crime from many perspectives -- the defendant''s, the victim''s, the prosecutor''s the contradictory meanings From the day I watched my first trial, I was never able to write the same way again. Q: What inspired you to write Crows Over a Wheatfield ? A: Most of my novels start with a character who captures my imagination, and whose presence evokes other characters.

In this case, it was Joel Ratleer -- a criminal defense attorney as brilliantly abusive in his personal life as he is in court I''ve often been struck by how many criminal lawyers share trains with their clients -- a love of living above the rules, a desire to shirk and trick authority a shifting sense of right and wrong. I wanted to create a lawyer-character with those traits to have him strut around on the page, talking and arguing and wreaking havoc in a bleak Wisconsin landscape. Once Ratleer was finished, I felt compelled to invent a character who could take him an -- and that''s how Mildred Steck came to be. Q: Would you say Mildred is a typical battered wife? A: I don''t believe there''s such a thing as a typical battered wife -- any woman can end up in a bad situation with a violent partner, especially if she marries young, or before she really knows how to size up someone who''s dangerous. I wanted Mildred to be strong and lively with her own engaging eccentricities, quite capable of laughter, and existing fully apart from her brush with domestic violence -- in short, a rich, vivid character, not a stereotype. She began with the line, "We are fighting the devil, and the devil is the law," and I built her from there: I longed to construct a believable person who would say and relish those words, who could start a riot if necessary. Q: Many reviewers have praised the novel''s comic aspects, and some called it straight out funny in parts. How do you reconcile using humor with such a tragic subject? A: The best comedy has real knowledge of grief behind it.

So, I never would have seen a serious subject as ruling out humor Toni Morrison has a great passage in Sula about laughter: to really appreciate its meaning, she advises, you must hear the pain behind it, and you also have to understand that laughter is part of the pain. Reading Group Discussion Points What is Mrs. Lookingbell''s role? Does her visit to the Ratleer''s home have special significance? Is she symbolic of domestic violence, or of a legal system gone awry? If, as Melanie says, she has seen the law as "a terrible monstrosity" since childhood, why did she become a judge? Do her family''s and friends'' comments about her work accurately highlight Melanie''s ambivalence toward her profession, or simply reflect their own personality quirks? What is the significance of Van Gogh''s painting, Crows Over a Wheatfield, in the novel? What does Matt''s statement that Hendrix''s music, like the painting, "understands him," reveal about Matt? How does the "craziness" of Van Gogh''s painting and of the residents of Steck''s halfway house echo or parody the "craziness" of the law and the media that feeds on legal dramas? What effect does Mildred have on Melanie before the facts of Mildred''s private life come to light? Why does the resolution of Mildred''s court case occur in the locked storeroom of the Pferd Beer Factory? Is Daniel a kind of devil? Is he a sociopath? What is Daniel''s relationship with the legal system? What does the Railroad mean when it announces, "We are fighting the devil and the devil is the law"? Is Nachtwey a character, or a comic foil for an American "type"? In serving as a commentary on the legal drama that enfolds, how does he resemble Mrs. Lookingbell?.