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That's My Story

That’s My Story: Janice Deal on chocolate, pilgrimages & supportive community

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RHP staff got the chance recently to sit down with Janice Deal, author of The Sound of Rabbits (releasing June 6), to ask those particular questions that we’ve always wanted to know! You know, the really important questions about chocolate and wine (in addition to the writing craft!), and we are delighted to share her answers with you! And don’t forget to pick up a copy of her marvelous book (either from us or from your local indie bookseller!)

1. Do you see chocolate/wine as an intrinsic aid to writing?

Oh yes. Yes, please. With an emphasis on chocolate. I operate well under the influence of the “three C’s,” in fact: chocolate, coffee, and cats. On days when I can get a little of all three, I believe I do some of my best work!

2. What questions would you like us to ask other authors?

What literary pilgrimages have you gone on? (The power of place is profound, and going to visit, either virtually or literally, the places inhabited by our favorite authors and their characters can create such a sense of connection to work we love. Visiting or researching a specific place can also deeply inform our own work.)

3. How much to you is writing a solitary activity and how much a communal one?

It’s a mix of both. A few times a year, I steal away on “mini writing retreats” with my close friends Katie (Katherine Shonk) and Sandy (Sandra Jones): we are all, always, working on some sort of writing project, and we’ll rent a house in Indiana or Michigan and spend a few days writing and exploring. Once a year, the three of us also participate in the residency program at Write On, Door County (special thanks to founding and artistic director Jerod Santek): we spend a week up in Fish Creek, Wisconsin, teaching a class, writing, and for me, swimming laps at the beautiful local Y (swimming never fails to clear my head and I have done some good thinking about characters while in the pool). We tend to land the residency in December, a quieter time in Door County. It suits us all well.

Sandy, me, and Katie at Write On

I also go with my husband David on short writing retreats: to a nearby cottage called Spring Bird

(shout-out to Anna Lentz!), and sometimes to Wisconsin. We work well together, toggling between writing and hiking.

Ultimately, when I sit down to work, that’s where the solitary bit begins. No one can get the words on the page but me, after all. As drafts develop, I turn to a few trusted writer/editor friends for feedback. But when writing, I tend to dig deep; “coming back” to the world is like emerging from deep water. Then it’s time to reconnect with “real life”! I love that balance.

4. What’s next for you?

I have recently completed an experimental short novel, The Blue Door, which is a mashup of a contemporary story and a fairy tale of my devising. My linked story collection Strange Attractors, about the fictional town of Ephrem, Illinois, and its denizens, is due out from New Door Books in September 2023. And I have an idea for a collection of linked short stories, tentatively entitled Whale Fall, that I envision will explore themes of death and resilience. I’ve been taking notes for that project and we’ll see where those ideas take me (presumably with the aid of chocolate)!

5. What is the last book that made you cry?

Claire Keegan’s novella Foster. Just . . . wow. Keegan’s compassionate, nuanced prose absolutely slays me. Foster is a quiet story but it hits hard—and goes deep. Keegan has such a clear-eyed understanding of what it means to be human.

Mark Cladis: That’s My Story

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Regal House staff are delighted to have the opportunity for a virtual sit-down with Mark Cladis in advance of the release of his book In Search of a Course, available in bookstores January 8, 2021.

How did you handle the balance between truth and ‘doing no harm’?  

In Search of a Course is about finding a course for your life and a course for “the University.” The two courses interweave on almost every page of the book. In my search for a course for my life, I recount my failed marriage, my loss of faith in things spiritual and academic, and the strength of a friendship that got me through it all. Finding a course for the University entails a narration about how I got into academia, what it’s like to work in a university, and, most importantly, what higher education is all about—and what it should be.

Given the subject matter of the book—the failure of a marriage and, to some extent, of higher education—you can imagine how it could be a tell-all book, revealing scandalous secrets about my marriage and about life inside the University. I’d probably sell more copies it were a tell-all book, but sadly it isn’t. Indeed, more than one editor pushed me to reveal more personal truths. Where I wanted to stick with general, abstract reflection I was told to offer more of myself and of the people in my life. And so the book evolved, it changed, it became more personal, and I found the need to keep asking myself, “How do I write a personal, honest narrative while doing no harm to those I’m portraying?” After all, I’m writing (in part) about an ex-spouse and University colleagues. What to tell, what to hold back?

In the end, I fashioned a narrative that was honest and intimate but not wounding or gratuitous. Complexities and limitations of the main characters are revealed, but especially my own.

What social issue or problem does your work address? What difference do you hope your book will make?

As noted above, In Search of a Course is about two, related courses: a course for your life and a course for the University. The “problems” or “issues” that my book addresses are both public and private in nature. On the one hand, I address what it is to have the ground beneath you give away in an instant, such that you suddenly lose all sense of who you are, what’s important to you, and what can sustain you in an onslaught of chaos. That’s the private side of the book. The public side addresses such issues as what education is really all about, and how can education, broadly understood, address anomic lifestyles, destructive consumerism, and the toll of a rapacious economy on the social and natural world. And as the two courses are related, so are the public and private problems and the ways forward—ways to greater public and private flourishing. My hope is that readers will see themselves in the pages of the book, find some solace in that identification, and discover helpful, practical reflections as they forge their own paths to meaningful lives.

How did you work to avoid writing a book or characters that feel “preachy” or self-righteous?

I’ll skip this question and take the next one, please. What’s that? I need to answer this one? Well, OK.

I’m a professor. My job is to profess. I can’t afford to worry too much about being sententious. (Did I just say sententious? Perhaps I should worry more about sounding pompous and moralizing.)  I’m certainly more comfortable with being “preachy” (to advocate for something of fundamental importance) than with being “self-righteous” (to be complacent and smug in my own moral standing). In Search of a Course, almost by definition, “professes” and “advocates” insofar as it seeks to help people on their way—their way to greater self-knowledge and joy. But it is an honest narrative. The characters—mainly myself—have more than enough flaws revealed to defeat any moral smugness.

But is it preachy? I’ll have to let my readers answer that.

What was your process like writing In Search of a Course?

The “process”—if it can be called that—was a long, rambling, fractured journey that kept pulling me along. I first starting writing In Search of a Course as a form of therapy. I was emotionally and spiritually crushed. I was writing for myself, and myself alone. Then, my friend Paul Kane and I went on an adventure—a road trip. We were searching for material, teachers, and life for a new course we wanted to teach at Vassar College—”It’s Only Natural: Contemplation in the American Landscape.” So we traveled through landscapes, met extraordinary teachers (including Native American teachers and the land itself), confronted various obstacles, and dipped into some contemplative practices. And as we journeyed through the deserts of the Southwest, I started to come back to life—both personally and professionally as an educator. I was making contact with the social and natural world around me.

Paul Kane, Mark’s friend and travel companion

That’s when the writing changed. I was no longer writing just for me. I imagined writing for a broader audience. My friends. My students. Strangers. All those seeking contact with life—a life with purpose and love.

There was a problem, however. I was soon to be hired by Brown University to rejuvenate a doctoral program in philosophy and religion that had been decimated by several faculty retirements. Brown was bringing me in to rebuild the program. Would it be prudent to craft and publish a trade book for a general audience at the very same time that I was trying to signal to the academic world that Brown is committed to relaunching a “serious”—that is, rigorous, academically acclaimed—doctoral program? Publishing a trade book can ruin a professor’s reputation. What would that do to the reputation of the new doctoral program?

 So I waited. And waited. After about 15 years I decided: to hell with reputation.

Mark Cladis is the Brooke Russell Astor Professor of the Humanities and Chair of his department at Brown University. He was named a Carnegie Scholar and has received research awards from the Fulbright Foundation, the National Endowments for the Humanities, and the Rockefeller Foundation. Cladis lives in Barrington, Rhode Island, with his wife, Mina, and his three children, Sabine, Olive, and Luke.

Kat Meads: That’s My Story

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On the release of Kat’s new work, Dear DeeDee, we were delighted to have a virtual sit down with her to discuss her writing process.

Who has supported you/your writing along the way?

I’ve been lucky. Over the years, I’ve had boosts and buck-ups from many folks. I’m especially grateful for a phenomenal group of women who, in the early going, helped me enormously in terms of support, inspiration and craft. We connected through UNCG’s MFA program and got together outside of class in each other’s houses for evenings of wine, food and rigorous, in-depth critiquing sessions. We called ourselves “Ladies Lit” for multiple reasons, one being, within our group, we treated what others dismissed as “women stories”—meaning stories that prioritized women characters and sensibilities—as serious, worthy fiction. In that group, I was very fortunate to learn from, among others, Lynne Barrett, Candy Flynt and Lee Zacharias. Still learning from their work today—but, alas, we’re too spread about the country to continue those great get-togethers on a regular basis.

How do you research your work?

Researching St. Petersburg

For historical fiction, I start by reading: history, cultural studies, biographies and autobiographies connected to the period and specific events. After that, I try mightily to visit the terrain. For my novel For You, Madam Lenin (Livingston Press/University of West Alabama) I managed to get to Russia. Despite the vast number of years between when I gazed upon the Neva River and my character Nadya Krupskaya did likewise, it was important to my process to experience St. Petersburg, her city—its air and light and atmosphere. My approach is similar when writing nonfiction. Although I’d finished the background research for an Estelle Faulkner essay published in “Full Stop,” before writing the piece, I badly wanted to lay eyes on Estelle’s Rowan Oak bedroom. And despite its “cleaned up” appearance and the thousands of visitors who’d traipsed through the Faulkners’ one-time home before me, that bedroom viewing was definitely worth the trip. Place—actual landscapes and physical structures—are a key component for me in any genre.

Estelle’s Faulkner’s Rowan Oak bedroom

How do you develop your characters?

Dear DeeDee

One of the reasons I was intrigued to try the epistolary form in Dear DeeDee directly relates to that question. How to exclusively address one specific recipient, reveal my own narrator self, and simultaneously have that “private” communication be universal enough in reach and content to interest an unrelated third party? That was the challenge. Eventually I settled on the “huh?” test. Whenever I wigged off on something too insular—a family tidbit that required knowing the entire backstory of all involved to appreciate its significance—that passage failed the huh? test and got nixed. For fiction, typically, I start with a visual of the character, then fast forward to the question: What’s troubling this character? That one-two usually dumps me into a narrative thicket fairly quickly. In Dear DeeDee, what’s troubling Aunt K is a bundle of stuff: time passing, where (now) to call home, were the life choices she’s made right or wrong or just inevitable—those kinds of probes. Fundamentally, it’s a book about identity, questions of identity.

What are the nuances differentiating memoir and autobiography?

I’m partial to Gore Vidal’s interpretation of those terms: autobiography requires fact checking; memoir is how one remembers one’s life. And “memoir,” Vidal went on to say, “is apt to get right what matters most.” It’s been my experience that I often discover “what matters most” during the writing process. You’d think I’d know beforehand—and sometimes do—but very often I find it’s the writing out that clarifies and confirms what’s what for me.

Where/when do you get your best writing ideas?

Cleaning house. I have no idea why—but there it is. Dust a lamp, sprint back to the desk, scribble notes; vacuum half a room, sprint back, scribble notes, etc. Needless to say, it takes me longer than it should to clean my house. Even so: side benefits.  

Kat Meads is the award-winning author of 20 books and chapbooks of prose and poetry, including: 2:12 a.m.; Not Waving; For You, Madam Lenin; Little Pockets of Alarm; The Invented Life of Kitty Duncan; Sleep; and a mystery novel written under the pseudonym Z.K. Burrus, set on the Outer Banks. Dear DeeDee, released by Regal House Publishing, is in stores December 4, 2020.

That’s My Story: Mandy-Suzanne Wong

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With what do you write? A computer? A pencil? A ballpoint/biro? Rollerball? Quill and the blood of virgins (male or female is fine, we’re all about equal opportunity at Regal)? A fountain pen (people who use a fountain pen get extra credit points)?

Regal House Publishing author, Mandy-Suzanne Wong

Ah, the fountain pen! All students at my British-modeled school were required to use blue fountain pens. Bloody hell, I loathed them. The cartridge running out when you need it most. The new cartridge vomiting all over your magnum opus. The horrible pink blotting paper. Ink all over your uniform, which would earn you a telling-off. Other children chewing the ends of their pens and winding up with disgusting blue teeth. How I longed for a biro! I faked my homework with my mum’s rollerball whenever possible. Now that I’m a professional writer with a professional writer’s income I scribble with whatever I can mooch for free, black biros given out at conferences preferred. But. How many plastic biros and biro refills must there be in the Great Atlantic and Pacific Garbage Patches? Have you ever wondered? According to Google, the most eco-friendly writing tool isn’t the biro or the computer but the hated fountain pen! It has to be a model that uses not disposable cartridges but an internal bladder which should not require replacing. However, it does require you to dip your pen in an ink bottle every once in a while, carefully squeezing ink into the bladder while not spilling it on your draft and hoping against hope that in the meantime your idea won’t sail clean out of your head never to return, and if your pen is on the asthmatic side, ink inhalation can take time. I have yet to solve the problem of eco-friendly writing in a way that satisfies my conscience. I have a terrible feeling I may never satisfy it.

We’ve all heard the advice that authors should “write what they know.” But fiction emerges from imagination and creation of new worlds. Do you feel a tension between what you’ve experienced and what lives only in your mind?

I’ve never found that advice particularly helpful. For one thing, none of us really knows much about anything. It’s questioning and wondering that make for good writing, not pretending to know it all. Even if I’d been groomed from birth to be a professional paper shredder, I wouldn’t know everything there is to know about being a professional paper shredder because I don’t know everything there is to know about being human. That very fallibility is essential to being human. We really don’t know much about ourselves. We know even less about other people. When characters run around shooting other characters or fling about sweeping generalizations, so sure of themselves that they never think to question their motivations—and much of the time it’s because their authors think they “know” that what they’re doing is justified by popular prejudices—well, as I reader I’m turned off, sometimes irreparably. Prejudices are not knowledge.

The idea that writers “write what they know” is misleading to readers too. My characters are not me. My characters’ families are not my family. I don’t write romans à clef. It is infuriatingly difficult to convince people of this. I’ve had to resort to asking aloud whether people really think that J.K. Rowling ever believed herself to be an eleven-year-old boy with magical powers—which I hate to do because people then assume I’m comparing my level of success to Rowling’s, and that is absolutely not the case—but it’s the only thing that seems to get the point across. Mind you, few people who offer to pray for me have actually read Drafts of a Suicide Note beyond the title. Someone offered to be my therapist (they’re not a therapist) on the assumption that, instead of raising difficult questions about the experience of depression, I already “know” it all and they “know” even better. When anxious, I just Add To Cart, books preferred. What could be healthier?

Who has supported you along the way? [or “The Hands of Aetna Simmons”]

Drafts of a Suicide Note has received some very special support in ways that are highly unusual for a novel of its kind. As far as I know, you can only die once; but Aetna Simmons has left behind ten suicide notes, all different: different voices, different looks, different inks and penmanships. Michelle Rosquillo, my truly magnificent editor at Regal House, suggested to the wonderful Editor-in-Chief, Jaynie Royal, that my wild dream of seeing Aetna’s documents rendered as illustrations—something I’d diffidently asked for but never dared to hope for—mightn’t be too wild after all.


Heather Kettenis and Mandy-Suzanne Wong at AWP

The cost of illustrations, however, was prohibitive. Jaynie suggested that I ask the photographer who’d taken my headshot if she might be able to help. Well, my photographer is my longtime bestie and soul-sister, Heather Kettenis. Heather has done papercraft, digital collage, and photography all her life. She’s also a hardworking physician. But she made the time to help to make my dream come true. We explained our idea and Aetna’s bizarre story to other artists who happen to have interesting handwriting, and they agreed to help as well. Rich Andrew, screenwriter and editor; Mark “Metal” Wong, breakdancer and performance artist; Kathryn Eddy, painter, collage artist, and sound artist: they became the “hands” of Aetna Simmons, some of her proliferous tentacles. I’d made up her words, they were already in my novel; the artists wrote them down in their distinctive ways; Heather photographed what they had written and made the images ready for print. She created more of Aetna’s documents on her own, using a combination of papercraft and digital techniques.

After that, Heather still had more to do. What image could possibly lend itself to the cover of a book called Drafts of a Suicide Note? Long story short: Rich, who’d read the manuscript, came up with an idea that Jaynie and Michelle and I refined in our minds. But how to execute it? Only one person we knew had the necessary skill and believed in the book enough to want to make it come to life.

I’ll never forget the afternoon Heather and I spent smashing pieces of my manuscript and photographing the balled-up scraps inside my piano bench. My job was to hold up black skirts and white tissue paper, absorbing and reflecting the Bermuda light as the sun moved slowly westward and Heather, bent over the camera on the tripod, said, “A little to the left . . .”

On my next birthday, my mom presented me with the actual smashed-up piece of paper that made it onto the cover, mounted in a black-box frame.

And the book? Well, it exceeds my wildest dreams.

Why are there so many Russian matryoshkas in Drafts of a Suicide Note? Those things are totally clichéd, and they’re probably symbols of reproductive fecundity, which couldn’t interest you less. What is up with the matryoshkas?

No matryoshkas appear in Drafts of a Suicide Note. But you’re right, I’ve been sort of mesmerized by Russian nesting dolls since I was a child. The best ones are unquestionably works of art, often painted by underappreciated women artists. But that’s not the main thing. I’ve spent some time staring at one of my favorite matryoshkas—a simple one with flowers—and wondering why I like these things, let alone find them mesmerizing. When you open the outer doll, which you do with a sort of splitting, not a twisting motion, there’s another doll inside with the same face. You open the inside doll, and there’s another one inside it with that same face. And so on. Yet you’re absolutely right that I’ve no interest in self-replication. I think the main thing is this. You break me open, but I’m still here. Break me again, but I’m still here, break me again and again until you reach the hard kernel at the very base of me that cannot be broken, that may have no resemblance to anything, and that is nonetheless still me. I think that’s what matryoshkas say to me.

What’s next for you?

I’ve got two novels in the works at the moment. One is still in its early stages, a novel about Ayuka Watanabe, the subsistence free-diver who stars in my fiction chapbook Awabi. The other I’m hoping to finish by the end of the year. Right now I’m calling it The Box. It’s a novel in six second-hand stories, each presented by a different narrator with a different voice and style, about a puzzle box that only some people can open as it’s lost and found and lost and found, changing hands again and again in a city that’s undergoing some strange effects of climate collapse. In no case is any narrator simply telling their own story; they’re telling stories they’ve heard from others. There’s no particular protagonist. It’s very experimental for me, really a lot of fun. The pay might leave something to be desired, but I do love my job.

Mandy-Suzanne Wong was the winner of the Digging Press Chapbook Series Award (Awabi, Digging Press, 2019) and the Eyelands International Flash Fiction Competition. Her work has also been shortlisted for the UK’s Aeon Award. Her stories and essays appear in The Spectacle, The Hypocrite Reader, Conclave, Sonic Field, Quail Bell, The Island Review, and several other venues. She is a native of Bermuda, where she’s writing a new novel and her first nonfiction book.

That’s My Story: William L. Alton

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William L. Alton’s book, The Tragedy of Being Happy, will be released by Pact Press, an imprint of Regal House Publishing, on January 12, 2019.

The Tragedy of Being Happy William L Alton

There’s a fair bit of interest, scientific and otherwise, in the links between creativity and insanity. How crazy must someone be to be a good author?

I find that for me, insanity is the core of my creativity. I have lived with Schizo-Effective Disorder since I was 13. I spent 2 years locked in a maximum security psychiatric hospital until I escaped. Yes, I am literally an escaped lunatic. It took until my early Forties to find the right cocktail of drugs. I still live with some symptoms but have found a balance that works for me. In the beginning, I made up stories to justify my feelings and symptoms. I used them to pass the time. I used them to create worlds in which I was more than the drug addled, angry young man I was. As I got older, writing became the lens through which I interacted with the world. I am always looking at people and situation and asking myself, What if? The balance between madness and functionality is what allows me be both an educator and a writer. I am driven to go out into the world but require a lot of “down” time. As a writer, I find that I need to be open and willing to let go while maintaining the drive and stubbornness and need to sit alone in a room believing that the shit in my head is interesting to more people than me. To me, writing is about moving from survival to thriving.

Who or what inspired you? How so?

William L. Alton, Pact Press author of The Tragedy of Being Happy
William L. Alton

I became a writer because I was a troublemaker. I grew up in Arkansas in the Seventies. Back then, they still had corporal punishment in schools. I was in the office three or four times a week getting paddled. In the third grade, I had a teacher who was a Quaker. Instead of having us paddled when we caused trouble she would assignment poems for us to memorize and recite the next day to class. The first time, I refused. The teacher called my mother. My mother was not a Quaker. She absolutely DID believe in corporal punishment. After that, I memorized the poems and recited them. Because I was a hellion, I memorized a lot of poems that year. Later in life, I became an addict and lived with mental illness. When I sobered up and started my recovery, I had a teacher who introduced me to Shakespeare and Milton and Poe and Hawthorne. As important as that was though, that teacher also gave me the guiding principle of my life. I had done something stupid and was making excuses and he looked at me and said: “Bill, you can be as crazy as you need to be. Don’t be an asshole.” These two teachers are the reason I write. They are the reason I perform. They are the reason I am the person I am today.

What social issue or problem does your work address?

I write about mental illness, poverty, addiction and survival. I write about the hidden things and the hidden people. I write about the monsters in the closet and hopefully, one way of kicking their asses.

What difference do you hope your book will make?

I want people to know that they are not alone. I want them to read my books and maybe see ways to love the unlovable. I want people to see that those of us in the shadows are people too.

William L. Alton, author of Pact Press's The Tragedy of Being Happy

William L. Alton has a BA and MFA in creative writing from Pacific University and has published a collection of flash fiction, Girls, two collections of poetry titled Heroes of Silence and Heart Washes Through, and two novels, Flesh and Bone, in 2015, and Comfortable Madness. He lives in Beaverton, Oregon, where he works with at-risk youth.

That’s My Story – J.L. Crozier

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Thats My Story, Regal House Publishing author interviews

With what do you write? A computer? A pencil? A ballpoint/ biro? Rollerball? Quill and the blood of virgins (male or female is fine. We’re all about the equal opportunity at Regal)? A fountain pen (people who use a fountain pen get extra credit points)?

Regal House Publishing author J.L. Crozier, author of What Empty Things Are TheseI use a computer. One of the best things my mother ever did for me was pack me (and my older brother) off to Stott’s Business College in Melbourne for a summer course in typing. She’d gone there herself about forty years before, and I have to say the place did seem to hark back a bit. We had huge typewriters that were possibly 20 years old even in the 70s. Perhaps one of them still had my mother’s fingerprints on it. We all typed in rhythm – one-two-three, one-two-three – and we’d bring our finished paragraph up to the teacher to check. Any mistakes and we’d have to do it again. My brother, a post-graduate at the university at the time, kept making so many mistakes he began to cheat and not take his paragraph to be vetted. Then we’d begin to have a bit of a giggle, outraging the teacher who, it turned out, thought I was flirting with this boy. Ah, the 70s. Recall this ‘boy’ is and was six years older than me, but, hey, it must be the girl’s fault. Still, she blushed fiery red when she discovered our surname was the same.

But I digress. Nowadays, I type a good faster than I write in longhand and, anyhow, with a pen in hand I can lose the thread or totally forget the trenchant point I was trying to make, well before I get to the end of a sentence. Also, bless this technology that allows you to hone and hone and hone without making a total mess.

I do, however, keep endless copies. I think somewhere in the back of my mind I fantasize that historians will actually want to know about all of my rewrites. You know… how did JL Crozier arrive at her great art? What were her methods? What can we learn from her? So my folders are full of versions 1 to 25, not to mention 4.5 and so on. Once I was on the verge of mass deletions of versions 1-24 (and the rest), but then I thought there were some passages that could be copied and dropped into the newest version. So now I am too paranoid to lose anything… and, anyway, what of posterity? Can’t you just see the PhD student of 2045 ploughing through the gems of #1-24, noting them for the gratification of other students of deathless literature?

No?

Maybe I should just relax.

There’s fair bit of interest, scientific and otherwise, in the links between creativity and insanity. How crazy must someone be to be a good author?

What are you suggesting?? Well, you’re probably correct. I think the answer is ‘reasonably’, though then again we could just spend a lot of time with a brandy balloon in front of an open fire discussing what exactly is sanity anyway.

Personally, I think the line between the two is far from clean-cut, as is any demarcation between what we think we know of as ‘normal’ and any number of syndromes. The mind is a remarkably plastic thing, and the brain can build itself back together after incurring great trauma. What we understand about the world is so largely taught a university department-full of philosophers could not really tell where essential reality lies. We take rather a lot on trust, but then we have to balance that with a learned capacity to balance evidence and probabilities. There is always the possibility of further refinement to edge us closer to a ‘truth’, which is I guess why the current enthusiasm for fakery in media is so deeply destructive.

Still, back to the question. We’re none of us absolutely steady, and we wouldn’t want to be. Where would life be, if we had nothing to improve on? And as writers, we need to understand the unsettling effects of emotion and trauma. We need to understand instability, if we want to write characters. We need to recognize frailty and we need to empathize with it.

That’s how crazy we need to be to be authors. But add to that a need for obsessiveness. Otherwise we’d never finish.

Are you fluent in any other languages? If so, do you find that knowledge has any effect on your writing? Is it important for people to learn other languages? Why?

Regal House Publishing author J.L. Crozier, author of What Empty Things
J.L Crozier, 4th from the left, back row.

I’m fluent in French, which comes from a childhood in Vietnam in the 60s at a French convent in Saigon. I’m living in France now (the choice of country made, obviously, because I had a head start from my very distant youth), and relieved that much of ‘learning’ is more ‘remembering’. Though there are moments – think of the number of French phrases you think you know… in fact many of these are not translations at all. A French person would not know what you meant as you enthuse about your ensuite. It does not mean your own private bathroom in French. Honestly.

I’ve discovered that the French can take a long time to finish a letter, what with all the linguistic flourishes; I have a French friend who can devastate tradesmen with politeness until has absolutely won her point and they are begging to be allowed to make reparations. I’ve also discovered that many of the differences in language lie in nuance and that English and French speakers can each inadvertently find themselves being rude. I myself can find myself in the middle of a sentence without a paddle, if you see what I mean.

No, it doesn’t have an effect on my writing, but it will be interesting to see what happens if it is ever translated. And will I know what to look for as the author? Scary.

Look around myself in France and noting how many anglophones here don’t speak French, I would say yes, it’s important. But I think too that some people find learning a new language very difficult, especially when they’ve reached retirement age, and especially when the anglophone diaspora makes it so easy to avoid it. But what they miss is understanding a culture that’s represented by its language. Forever, those community.

Languages can’t be directly translated; there’s a culture behind them and a millennium of simile and metaphor. English is awash with ocean-going and naval references (e.g. ‘room to swing a cat’ – that’s a cat ‘o nine-tails); I understand northerners and Inuit have a bag-full of words for snow. There’s about a dozen words for ‘rain’ in Scotland. Sometimes something really isn’t translatable at all. You just need to know its background.

That’s the kind of thing we need to understand about language. Well, about people, really.

Regal House Publishing author J.L. Crozier, author of What Empty Things Are These

JL (Judy) Crozier’s early life was a sweep through war-torn South East Asia: Malaysia’s ‘Emergency’, Burma’s battles with hill tribes, and the war in Vietnam. In Saigon, by nine, Judy had read her way through the British Council Library, including Thackeray and Dickens. Home in Australia, she picked up journalism, politics, blues singing, home renovation, child-rearing, community work, writing and creative writing teaching, proof reading and editing, and her Master of Creative Writing. She now lives in France.

J.L. Crozier’s historical novel, What Empty Things Are These, is available from booksellers all over the world.

That’s My Story – Lily Iona MacKenzie

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Thats My Story, Regal House Publishing author interviews

With what do you write? A computer? A pencil? A ballpoint/biro? Rollerball? Quill and the blood of virgins (male or female is fine. We’re all about equal opportunity at Regal)? A fountain pen (people who use a fountain pen get extra credit points)?

Lily Iona MacKenzieQuill and the blood of virgins took me down a narrative path that I finally had to opt out of. It became too messy. Before computers became an essential writer’s tool, and when typewriters were my only other option, I wrote exclusively with a pen on yellow lined pads. I couldn’t imagine ever being able to write creatively on a typewriter, and I never did. But when computers seduced me into their world, I could no longer hold out. Previously, I not only hand wrote my drafts of poems and fiction, but I also typed them up afterward so I could then revise them. That involved further (multiple) rounds of typing and revising. Those of you who are writers know how many revisions are necessary before a draft becomes viable.

Once I had purchased my first computer, a Kaypro, I soon discovered that if I could teach myself to create directly onto a disc, I could save myself a tremendous amount of time and effort. However, I also lost whatever dynamic existed between my right hand and my brain (I’m right handed). At times, when I was having difficulty letting loose on the computer with right-brain activity, I had to stop and write with a pen until I could enter the narrative again. And yes, I did use a fountain pen. What else is there?

Do you use chocolate as an intrinsic aid to writing?

I wasn’t a chocolate fan until recent years. I haven’t a clue why. But since I’ve discovered this delectable delight, I’ve had to make a bargain with myself (and the chocolate devil!). Pre-diabetic, I can’t eat the real stuff since most chocolate treats have a strong sugar base. But I’ve discovered a fudge recipe (that I’ll reveal only if you tempt me with lucre) that uses a sugar substitute and satisfies my newfound craving for chocolate. Since I’ve made this discovery, I’ve found that my writing has not only sweetened up considerably, but it also has turned darker. I’m sure none of this would have happened without the assistance of chocolate!

What do you read that people wouldn’t expect you to read? What’s the trashiest book you’ve ever read?

Since most people who will likely read this interview won’t know me, they may wonder, after learning about my novel Curva Peligrosa and the main character’s main focus on sex and eternal life, why I would spend so much time each day on the New York Times and the Washington Post. I confess. I’m a news hound, always searching for articles that deepen my understanding of worldwide problems. Unfortunately, there are too many difficulties to mention them all here, but I’m a political creature, and I seek the truth. The Post doesn’t always hit the right notes, but it tries. The Times has its biases, too, but it does attempt to present multiple sides of an issue. As a writer, though, it’s the sub stories that intrigue me. I always try to imagine my way into the emotional dynamics involved in these scenarios. It’s part of my writing practice.

And the trashiest novel I’ve ever read would me a tie between Amboy Dukes and Blackboard Jungle.

There’s a fair bit of interest, scientific and otherwise, between creativity and insanity. How crazy must someone be to be a good author?

Since I’ve never been diagnosed as insane, I may not be the right person to try and answer this question. However, I do know that the persistence and commitment required to hang in there and create a novel is enormous. I suspect that an insane person may not have the wherewithal to do it. I also think there’s a fine line between creativity and insanity, depending on one’s definition of the latter. To me insanity means that you’ve really gone over the edge and are no longer available for rational dialogue. I have a half-brother, a visual artist, who is psychotic. And while I appreciate those brief moments when he is “himself,” in recent years, they have become few and far between. He lives in a world that only he can inhabit. I can’t follow him there, and I’m certain that this would be true for writers who have a similar diagnosis. I think we’ve romanticized insanity because those who suffer from it seem to enter a world we don’t have access to. But I believe that it takes a sane individual to enter the underworld and return with material that s/he can share with others.

We’ve all heard the advice that authors “should write what they know.” But fiction emerges from imagination and creation of new worlds. Do you feel a tension between what you’ve experienced and what lives only in your mind?

I think the key to this question is the last part, “what lives only in your mind.” It assumes that what we fantasize or imagine doesn’t have roots in the outer world, but from my experience, both inner and outer worlds are indispensable. They interact with each other constantly, even when we think we’re writing about people, settings, etc., that we’ve never experienced directly. We humans are namers, Adam (or maybe Lilith) getting the task of being the first to give names to animals and more. We can’t name something that we can’t visualize, and once we visualize it, the item comes alive. That’s the magic of language and our power as writers to do “novel” things with it. So even if we are focused more on themes that originate in our unconscious than those we’ve actually experienced externally, they still are things that we know.

Lily MacKenize, Regal House Publishing author of Curva Peligrosa

Lily Iona MacKenzie has published books, reviews, interviews, short fiction, poetry, travel pieces, essays, and memoir in over 150 American and Canadian venues. She also has taught writing at the University of San Francisco for thirty years and was vice-president of USF’s part-time faculty union. When she’s not writing, she paints and travels widely with her husband. Regal House published Lily’s novel Curva Peligrosa in 2017, and Lily’s poem ‘God Particles’ was featured in Pact Press’ Speak and Speak Again anthology.

That’s My Story – Laurie Ann Doyle

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Thats My Story, Regal House Publishing author interviews

  1. The stories in your new book World Gone Missing all explore a central theme: that people don’t become fully visible until they disappear. What brought that theme about?

The truth is I didn’t pick that theme as much as it picked me. Before I even had a thought of a book in my brain, my brother-in-law went missing. Decades later, sadly he still hasn’t reappeared. Though the opening story in World Gone Missing—“Bigger Than Life”—has a similar through-line, I completely fictionalized the characters and specific plot points. What remains true to life is the feeling you get when a loved one seems to vanish into thin air. The best way I can describe it is a sinking, helpless sensation. As the years wore on, I began to see my brother-in-law in new ways. I appreciated his subtle kindnesses and sharp wit, along with his sometimes brash and irrational nature. Thought I’m not sure this would have changed anything, I wish I could have been more compassionate.

As I finished this story and embarked on others, I realized that losing a loved one can bring many conflicted feelings, and conflict is at the heart of fiction. Sometimes a person’s absence can free up a character to do things they’d never done before, wonderful things. Sometimes they find it almost impossible to move on. This realization got me going and I saw both the loss and liberation that absence can bring. Though I had to get a chunk of stories written before that unifying theme floated up.

  1. Why a book of stories, and not a novel?

Jim Shepard, winner of the Rea Award for the Short Story and many other honors, likes to joke that he writes short fiction “for the money.” The reality is it is harder to publish a collection than a novel, because collections don’t sell as well. I feel lucky that Regal House Publishing picked up my book. But I’ve talked to a ton of readers who live and breathe short stories. But given the economics of short fiction, does that mean the short story is a lesser art?  There are certainly professors and authors who view stories as “practice” before the writer settles down to create what truly matters in the world of literature: the novel.

I could not disagree more.

To me, it makes absolutely no sense to pit short and long fiction in competition against one another.  Both forms are art. I love the way I can hold a story in my head, relishing all its details right up to the ending. I also love immersing myself in the vast world of a novel, though I often have to reorient myself when I pick up the book to read more. Short stories have been made into more award-winning movies than most people realize, including Broke Back Mountain (Annie Proulx), The Birds (Daphne du Maurier), Breakfast at Tiffany’s (Truman Capote). The world needs short and long fiction.

In terms of my own writing, here again, I’d have to say the short story choose me, rather than me it. A while back, I got introduced to the magic of Alice Munro, then the bounty of Best American Short Stories. I started faithfully reading stories everywhere I could find them. At some point, I thought, why the hell not — why not try my hand at writing short fiction?  After a decade of work—most authors say writing a story collection is just as hard as a novel—World Gone Missing is now out in the world. It’s quite a feeling.

  1. I understand you teach writing at UC Berkeley Extension. How does teaching affect your writing?

Regal House Publishing author, Laurie Ann DoyleTeaching writing has given me many gifts. Maybe that sounds corny, but it’s true. Teaching requires that I make a deep study of masterful writing. In fact, the first writing class I taught was “Learning From the Masters: Techniques of the Literary Greats.” Of course, I had studied renowned authors in grad school, but now I had to go deeper. To prepare for the class, I examined how Hemingway constructed his dialogue so it sounds real, how Baldwin used imagery to create underlying meaning, what Grace Paley does to make us laugh. In identifying specific techniques and articulating for students what they accomplish, I have learned a tremendous amount.  Ten years later, I’m still teaching the “Learning From the Masters” course and it continues to feel fresh.

I find the dedication and inventiveness of my students inspiring. I’ve taught many talented student-writers over the years, from twenty-somethings to eighty-somethings. Their precise language, unique voice, and original plot lines amaze me.  The way students solve common writing challenges—for example, how to immediately plunge the reader into the story, or use suspense—often gets me thinking in new ways.  After class, though I’m usually pretty tired, I find myself scribbling down my own ideas to expand on the next morning.

  1. Can you describe the process of writing “World Gone Missing?” How long did it take you to write your book?

Regal House Publishing title, World Gone Missing by Laurie Ann DoyleWriting World Gone Missing took me a decade. During that time, I was also transitioning out of healthcare, teaching writing, and raising a son. As importantly, I was developing the intellectual and artistic autonomy that every writer needs to write the best words in the best way they can. The book formed slowly, like a Polaroid photograph coming into focus. Over that decade, I also started and put aside a novel, began a story collection based in the Arizona high desert, and penned and published several short memoir pieces. But time and time again I kept returning to the fledging group of stories that ultimately became World Gone Missing. The book is a collection of twelve pieces all set in the San Francisco Bay Area and linked by the overarching theme that people don’t become fully visible until they disappear. It’s an odd and interesting conundrum.

But I didn’t realize that I had a book-length work until I was about five or six stories in.  The first story I wrote for the collection, “Voices,” was initially drafted in grad school. The last story, “Lilacs and Formaldehyde,” was finished just a few months before the book’s final edits, after I’d decided the book needed a bit of magical realism.

What drove much of World Gone Missing were memories of places in the Bay Area that rose in my brain when I least expected them: the historic carousel in Golden Gate Park where my grandmother loved to take us, the Victory Statue in the center of Union Square, the pastel-colored homes across from Highland General Hospital, and the smashed shop windows on Telegraph Avenue that I saw one October morning after I first arrived at UC Berkeley as a freshman. All these details showed up in World Gone Missing

  1. What’s next for you, writing wise?

I’ve finished up several flash fiction pieces, which was enjoyable. Now I’m deep into  novel, which takes place (of course) in Northern California. Though I don’t want to give too much away, it continues my emphasis on characters who are missing from the present action, as well as illuminating the intimate connections between people and place, whether they be a shadowy forest, an immense lake, or simply a specific stretch of patched sidewalk.  Details of the physical story world always pull me forward.

Regal House Publishing author, Laurie Ann Doyle

Laurie Ann Doyle is an award-winning writer and teacher of writing. Stories in Laurie’s debut collection, World Gone Missing, have won the Alligator Juniper National Fiction Award, been nominated for Best New American Voices and the Pushcart Prize. Her stories and essays have also been published in The Los Angeles Review, Timber, Jabberwork Review, Under the Sun, and elsewhere.