RHP: When did you start to write?

Janko: I was a truant in high school, but I began writing a novel my junior year. I stuffed hand-written pages into an empty tinker-toy box until it was full. I have no idea what my novel was about, but my older sister, who never missed school, read a chapter or two and said, “This is sick.”

My early efforts aside, I am a person who must write. In 1974, while living in New Orleans and working as a flower vendor on Bourbon Street, my health broke down and I was in severe pain. Three years earlier, I had returned from the Viet Nam War, where I was a combat medic in an infantry battalion commanded by Colonel George Armstrong Custer III. Nowhere felt like home after the war, so I bought a backpack, a fishing pole, and wandered the country. Hitching rides was easy for a white male in the 1970s, and finding work—I wasn’t choosy—seldom took more than a day or two. I picked strawberries in Willamette Valley in Oregon, drove a truck during a Nebraska corn harvest, a taxi in Chicago, and so on. I lived the life of a drifter, but the war followed me, more intimate than a shadow. I remember lying in bed one night, hurting all over, when I heard a voice inside me: You must write. Write something, anything. Otherwise, you’ll die.

RHP: Has your education helped you become a better writer?

Janko: After my vagabond days ended, I went to college on the GI Bill and received a B.S. in Conservation of Natural Resources from UC Berkeley. The program revived me, breathed new life into me, and sparked my creativity and love for the earth. One class in particular––Ecosystemology––had a direct influence on my first novel, Buffalo Boy and Geronimo, which highlights the environmental consequences of war. For our final exam, Arnold Shultz, a delightfully unpredictable professor, led us outside of our cramped classroom and onto the campus. Each student was free to walk about for a time, then choose one square inch of earth to write about as an ecosystem, that is, to write about the relationships between organisms, about what sustained this patch of earth. I remembered, as I was writing, that a Cobra gunship, one of the most effective killing machines of the Viet Nam War, could put a bullet in every square inch of a football field in less than a minute. And at the same time, on a blue morning in Berkeley, I learned and am still learning about the complexity of life in minuscule, one inch containing innumerable organisms and inseparable from the ebb and flow of life, inseparable from the rest of the planet! I believe what Walt Whitman believed: “…a leaf of grass is no less than the journeywork of the stars.”

RHP: 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?

Janko: I can’t say I’m fluent in Spanish, but I’m competent enough to appreciate the untranslated poetry of García Lorca and Juan Ramón Jiménez and Antonio Machado and many others. The sounds of Spanish are sometimes supple on the tongue, sometimes fierce, and I hear, especially in Lorca, rivers and stones, love songs, castanets, and the wails of birthing and dying. What is more important in writing, meaning or sound? I don’t know, but I doubt there can be any profound meaning without close attention to sound.

I speak rudimentary Khmer, my wife’s language, and I can read and write Arabic at a first-grade level. I take great care when I write a word in Arabic. I pay homage to those long ago who invented the word, the meaning, the sound. I pay special attention to words of the earth and the elements. I can read and write in Arabic rain, waterfall, river, lake, and sixteen other words associated with water. The language finds a home in my body, the rhythm of my heart. How can this not be a boon for the difficult task of writing?

RHP: 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?

Janko: My best writing comes when I sit in a room, door closed, a cat or two at my side, and imagine my way into the lives of others.

I once said to my wife, “Forgive me if I seem distant. Sometimes I go far away when I write, but I go far away to come closer to you and the world.”

She replied, without hesitation: “Why are you nuts?”

RHP: How has Buddhist meditation supported you in your efforts to write?

Janko: I often meditate before I write. Silence is my first language. Nearly everything in the modern world encourages us to be occupied, to be addicted to our phones, to hitch a ride on the endlessly spinning hamster wheel called social media, to waste our precious lives on chats and messaging and online profiles and calculations for deepening our influence so that one day—this is the pipe dream of many writers––we’ll go viral, reach the masses, sell millions of books.

Buddhist meditation is revolutionary. There is no ambition, except to cultivate kinder and more compassionate ways of living and being. I believe there’s a deep kindness in most of my writing, and this is especially true of The Wire-Walker, whose narrator, Amal Tuqan, is the most loveable character to ever come my way. She found me in the silence, or we found each other. Amal understands the circus of life and the requirements of her profession: “The work of a funambulist is to walk in the sky on a rope, a wire, a prayer.”

James Janko is the author of the novels, What We Don’t Talk About, The Clubhouse Thief (recipient of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) Award for the Novel), Buffalo Boy and Geronimo (recipient of The Association of Asian American Studies Book Award and the Northern California Book Award), and The Wire-Walker, which was a finalist for the 2023 Donald L. Jordan Prize for Literary Excellence, a finalist for the 2023 Dzanc Fiction Prize, and was awarded the Juniper Prize by the University of Massachusetts Press in 2021. Excerpts of The Wire-Walker appeared in the Fall/Winter 2022 issue of Nimrod International Journal. Janko’s short stories have appeared in The Massachusetts Review, The Sun, and Eureka Literary Magazine, among others. His story––“Fallujah in a Mirror”––won First Place in the Jeff Sharlet Memorial Award and appeared in the Spring 2021 issue of The Iowa Review. Janko is the recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Award for Fiction.

Writers are not our characters, most times, though these characters may draw upon our lives, our experiences, our quirks.

Macbeth and Gruach, the main characters of Upon the Corner of the Moon, definitely are not “me” except that I was drawn to the story and felt the urge to tell it – an urge that stayed with me for almost 30 years.

I first came across the facts about the historical Macbeths when I was researching an earlier novel. I did not realize how thoroughly this story had been reversed: Macbeth was a rightful king based on Celtic traditions and ruled for 17 years, being called “The Righteous” and “the ruddy king of plenty.”

How did he become a villain?

Macbeth was cousin to Duncan, and yes, he did kill him – but in battle when Duncan invaded his territory. Duncan’s son Malcolm Canmore eventually claimed the throne through primogeniture and the Celtic system of electing kings was erased. Chroniclers grafted Macbeth’s story with various legends to shape a monstrous, murdering usurper. Shakespeare found this tale in Holinshed’s Chronicles, shaped it to please King James and included the witches that so fascinated the king.   

As to “Lady Macbeth,” we know little more than her name and her father’s name. We do know that she was married to a man called Gillecomgan, also killed in battle by Macbeth, and then married Macbeth. I had to do a great deal of speculation in building a plausible life for her but drew on scholarship from a number of areas including archaeology of the Picts and the study of ancient goddess religions.

This book is the first of two telling the story of the historical Macbeths, hewing to the record where it exists and speculating to fill in the gaps. The Last Highland King will come out in 2027.

My earlier book with Regal House, In the Lonely Backwater, featured the distinctive voice of Maggie, who owes a lot to the solitary girl that I was, simultaneously lost and found between the wonders of the natural world and the books she carried everywhere.

I grew up in New York State, near the headwaters of the Allegheny River. My parents owned fields and woods that I knew well before I learned to read. I fished with my dad and wandered a patch of old-growth forest. Books sustained me — Twain, Poe, and Tennyson in addition to Shakespeare, all in the tall bookcase upstairs – along nature guides, and A Girl of the Limberlost that featured another rural wanderer. Like Maggie, I brought back my finds and interpreted them, generally to amused interest.

After high school and a few erratic years where I took jobs in factories and donut shops while in community college, I slid south along the Allegheny’s path to find myself at the other end of that river system, attending West Virginia University on the banks of the Monongahela. Propelled by the desire to write, I’d determined to become a journalist, as a blue-collar kid lacking mentors to help me along the path toward becoming a novelist and poet.

For nearly twenty years, I worked as a reporter and editor for daily newspapers in the northern coalfields of West Virginia, covering everything from train wrecks to murders to acid spills in the rivers, along with government beats and the “hook and bullet” column that let me hang with scientists at the Department of Natural Resources. During that time, I homesteaded a hill farm with my then-husband, building a house and barn, planting an orchard and organic garden — and, of course, wandering with my dog and gathering wild foods and always writing.

My first poetry chapbook and my first novel, both deeply engaged with the natural world, came out in 1988. Neena Gathering, a post-apocalyptic tale based on the landscape around that farm, was long out of print before being brought back as a classic in the genre. Like In the Lonely Backwater, it features a teenage narrator, though at its debut, Young Adult was not yet a thing and it was listed with general SF paperbacks. I still love that book, and it has many fans who’ve applauded its reissue.

Things change. The marriage ended and I found myself with a small farm I couldn’t manage and the editorship of a newspaper destined for sale. I headed to the Piedmont of North Carolina for a job with the News & Record, living outside of Appalachia for the first time in my life. The move brought new adventures, from getting my MFA at Queens University of Charlotte, to the publication of more poetry and fiction, to learning how to sail. A 25-foot Hunter docked at Lake Kerr was direct inspiration for Maggie’s world of the marina and the landscape of the farms and piney woods of the coastal plain.

I had the pleasure of working with Kevin Watson at Press 53 for all three of my full-length poetry collections and my novel Blood Clay, set in North Carolina. I was delighted when West Virginia University Press, which had also released my short fiction collection, decided to publish To the Bones, a horror/mystery set in the coalfields. It was acclaimed as “a parable of capitalism and environmental degradation” and in the sequel, Dead Hand, Darrick and Lourana flee to Ireland in search of answers to questions raised in the first book.

And then my Queens classmate Pam Van Dyk made me aware of Regal House, and I met Jaynie Royal and all the wonderful folks at my most excellent publisher!

Another marriage came and went, and I found myself freed to wander more widely. Solo hiking was pure pleasure, even when I was quite lost on the trails near Les Eyzies-de-Tayac, slogging through the rain along the Great Glen Way in Scotland, or following the music in Donegal and Dingle. Trailheads beckon me, from the Mountains to the Sea trail in North Carolina to the coastal vistas of San Francisco Bay.

Along the way, I’ve published poetry widely, in The Georgia Review, The Missouri Review, Chautauqua, and journals across the U.S. as well as Scotland, Ireland, and Greece. Work has also appeared in some fine anthologies, including Eyes Glowing at the Edge of the Woods and Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology.

I have been a creative writing fellow for North Carolina and West Virginia, the Kentucky Foundation for Women, and the National Endowment for the Arts. I’m professor emerita of creative writing at North Carolina A&T State University and continue to teach writing workshops.

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?

This question was a big one for me in the writing of Possible Happiness; on the one hand, this is definitely the most autobiographical novel I’ve ever written, with a protagonist who’s a lot like me and who’s spending his teen years coming of age in the same place and time that I did (Philly in the late 80s), and the character spends the book going through a lot of all-too-familiar dramatic emotional experiences. On the other hand, almost none of this book actually happened, or at least not in this way, or with these exact people, or in this order, and so on.

Let me explain. I started working on this book by thinking about what my teen years were actually like and writing down what the major events were. So that was the foundation. But I was aware from the very beginning that I was going to need to make major, fundamental, continuous changes to this raw material to make it work as a novel. Life, after all, has too many people in it, and in the real world things happen in chaotic and plotless and often meaningless ways. Life therefore isn’t the best material for fiction—unless you transform it, do whatever you need to do in order to make it work. So I changed people, events, timing, feelings, consequences. Everything.

And yet still—the novel is kind of true all the same. In fact, that’s exactly why I changed and falsified so much: to make it true.

What’s the role of humor in Possible Happiness?

I think humor is a very serious thing. I didn’t think so when I was just starting out as a writer, when I was very concerned about being taken seriously, and so a lot of my early work is a bit humorless, which I can now see made it more one-dimensional than it had to be. But I now see that humor is crucial to fiction. It’s crucial in part because it’s a big part of life, not to mention a significant source of pleasure and meaning in my own experience. It’s also crucial because, as the writer Dylan Krider once observed, humor intensifies surrounding emotions. He said, in a lecture I once heard, something like, “If you want to make a story sad, make it funny. If you want to make it scary, make it funny.” I guess it’s like adding salt to a recipe; you add humor to make everything else more vivid. You probably also do it because it’s funny.

How long did it take you to write your book? How many revisions has it undergone so far?

Oh, boy. I started writing this book in 2018. So that’s six years ago! And—*consults notes*—the final version of the novel is apparently version #22. Though that doesn’t mean that I wrote twenty-two full drafts of the novel—not at all. I just like to create a new draft (with a new number) whenever I make any kind of significant change, even if it’s just to a single chapter or scene. So that number means that there were twenty-two times when I made a big-enough change to save the document as a new draft. But the book certainly did go through a lot of revision. Characters were dropped altogether, events rewritten or replaced, threads added. Scenes and sentences interrogated like murder suspects. It’s part of the deal. I passionately hate revision, but I do it because the book needs it, and my job is to make sure the book gets what it needs.

Do you belong to any writing groups or communities, either online or offline?

Yes! I wouldn’t be any kind of writer at all without community. For starters, I am buoyed every day by the positivity and energy of my online communities on various social media platforms. (I’m not kidding! I know people say terrible things about social media, but I get a lot of positivity from my connections there.) But I also depend on feedback and support from the more focused writing group I’m in. We meet about once a month to share prose, and the people in the group—Angie Chuang, Melanie McCabe, Emily Mitchell, and David Taylor—are not only wonderful writers (go check out their books if you don’t believe me—or even if you do believe me!), but also incredibly wise readers with excellent advice, and lovely human beings who help me stay at it when I’m thrown off by doubt. Without them, Possible Happiness probably wouldn’t exist, and, even if it did, I bet it wouldn’t be worth reading.

What’s your favorite joke?

Do you know the one about the duck who goes into a bar to ask if they have any grapes? I love that one. That duck is so persistent! Do ducks even eat grapes? The first time I heard the joke, I laughed off and on for several hours. I won’t bother you by retelling it here, though, because it’s long and not too many other folks think it’s quite as funny as I do. But, if you’re interested, you can find a retelling of the joke in my short story “Out of Grapes,” which is in my collection The Guy We Didn’t Invite to the Orgy and other stories (which, maybe it goes without saying, is not a YA book). And anyway I’m a big believer in holding tight to a joke that you love, even if (especially if) you love it more than anyone else does. And maybe, now that I think of it, that advice applies to a lot more than just jokes.

What’s your process for writing: do you outline, create flow charts, fill out index cards, or just start and see where you end up? Do you use the same process every time?

I find rough outlines invaluable for working out story arcs for first drafts of novels, and for helping me complete those drafts in a reasonable time frame. In the absence of such advance planning, I once spent 12 years writing and revising a novel, which I vow to never do again.

But I never hew strictly to outlines. They’re just general guides, and once I get down to writing, stories and characters inevitably take on a life of their own, which is one of the things I enjoy most about writing.

I’ve created a rough outline for every novel I’ve written since the one that took 12 years to finish, and I can’t imagine I’ll ever skip this step in the future. My life isn’t getting any longer!

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

Personally, I find it most engaging to write about situations–and from perspectives–that are quite different from what I’ve experienced. To take my most recent novel, The Inhabitants, as an example, the protagonist is a portrait artist, and she moves into a house built by an architect whose creations were said to influence the mind. Although I’m not a visual artist, and the protagonist’s house is purely my own invention, I loved the possibilities that arose from placing someone who’s visually attuned into such a mentally, and emotionally, stimulating space. (And the space is haunted, no less!) To give some examples from my other novels, I’ve also written from the perspective of a (male) rocker-turned-gravedigger and a Depression-era corsetiere.

For me, novel writing is perhaps my greatest source of adventure–a way to immerse myself in diverse characters’ inner lives and to see how they confront various challenges, both internal and external. To my mind, writing about someone who’s a lot like me, and who shares many of my own experiences, would be the opposite of an adventure, and I think I’d lose interest pretty quickly.

I wouldn’t say that there’s a tension between what I’ve experienced and what lives only in my mind, because when I’m deeply immersed in my writing and in a character’s world, I kind of lose my sense of self. However, I certainly draw on my own experiences when I’m writing about characters who are grieving, falling in love, dealing with an upheaval in their lives, or going through just about anything else that most of us typically face over time.

What role has friendship played in your evolution as a writer?

A huge role. I’m thinking in particular of a dear friend, the poet Beth Gylys, whom I’ve known since first grade, when both of us attended a since-demolished elementary school outside of Pittsburgh. When Beth and I first met, I’m not sure that either one of us sensed that writing would be the thing we most wanted to do with our lives. But storytelling was part of our relationship from the start. For one thing, we used to wander around a cemetery near our suburb, read the names on the gravestones, and make up stories about some of the people buried on the grounds.

During recess, instead of playing hopscotch or kickball with the other kids, or swinging our way across the monkey bars, we’d make a wide circuit around the playground, talking and talking. I can’t remember the topics of our conversations, but it seemed as if nothing could be more important than whatever we were discussing. Through experiences like this, we built a bond that lasted for years and across many miles after Beth’s family moved back to New Jersey and mine moved to Ohio. Beth has remained a beloved friend and an inspiration to me as a writer, and we’ve supported each other through many ups and downs when it comes to writing and life in general. Beth has also been a thoughtful, insightful, and generous commenter on my work.

What surprising skills or hobbies do you have?

One kind of odd hobby I have is sewing dresses by hand. Although I have a sewing machine, I don’t like being rushed by the mechanics of it, and I find it far more relaxing and rewarding to set my own pace and to have the sensory experience of working with a needle and thread.

This all started when I was working on my début novel, Marion Hatley, whose eponymous protagonist is a Depression-era corset maker. The retro nature of the novel inspired me to order some vintage patterns and sew some older-style dresses. It’s been a lot of fun, and I love it that so many old-school patterns are available online.

What’s next for you?

I’m in the early stages of writing a novel that’s set on a farm inspired by a fourth-generation farm in my family. The story involves a land dispute that threatens the ongoing existence of the farm, which the protagonist has been left to run by herself, for the most part. The dispute stirs the protagonist’s great-grandmother to return to the world of the living and step into the action, on the protagonist’s behalf. But it turns out that she wants more than to just save the land, setting the protagonist up for a struggle that’s far bigger than what she’d bargained for.

Beth Castrodale is the award-winning author of three novels: Marion Hatley, In This Ground, and I Mean You No Harm. Her latest novel, The Inhabitants, will be released by Regal House Publishing in fall 2024.

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.

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.

We, at Regal House, had the delightful opportunity to sit down with Stephanie Cowell, author of the upcoming The Boy in the Rain, a love story of two young men in Edwardian England, releasing May 1, 2023, and ask her all the particular questions we had regarding her writing process, her hobbies, and her inspiration for her upcoming book. We’re thrilled to share that interview with you!

What surprising skills or hobbies do you have?

Before I threw myself into writing novels, I was a high soprano, singing both traditional folk music with guitar, and opera. With folk songs, I sang everywhere from prisons, schools, on a cruise on the lake around Stockholm, and the most elegant private parties in New York City apartments. I sang in several languages though my favorite was British songs, particularly “Greensleeves” and “Flow Gently, Sweet Afton.” I performed many roles in opera, among them Gretel wearing my hair in braids and Gilda in Rigoletto, the young Renaissance Italian girl who is seduced by the Duke of Mantua. Her father vows vengeance and death, and the baritone singing the role and I had a very dramatic duet, when he keeps singing “Si, Vendetta!” (Vengeance!) and she begs him to forgive the scoundrel Duke because she still loves him. At the end Gilda must sing a very high note: the Eb above High C. I was terrified, and my throat would close which meant no high note. So, my old Italian voice teacher discovered I could manage if I ran while singing. Everyone thought I was wonderfully dramatic with my long hair streaming behind me, running across the enormous stage while sustaining that note. But I could not do it otherwise!

I still sing a little when I do the dishes, but nothing nearly that high.

How do you research your work?

When I first began to write novels (1984) there was no internet, and I had very little money for books, even if I could find them. I would go to the research libraries which still had index cards cataloguing books. There was always tremendous excitement finding a book. The New York Public Library’s main reading room (the Rose Room) where I sometimes went to study is unbelievably huge and gorgeous. You wrote out a call card and handed it to the librarian and after a time someone from somewhere in the seven stories below the ground where the books were stored, the book you wanted would be fetched. My new novel, The Boy in the Rain, was researched in old book shops and libraries and later, books bought online. I also went to England several times to research it, to London and to Nottingham where the two young men in the book lived. But research also is sensory memory. I stayed many summer weekends as an adolescent in an old country house which was security for me. I heard the heavy tree branches moving against the house. It became the house in my novel.

How long did it take you to write your book? Revisions?

It took forever! The Boy in the Rain was the first novel I tried to write, begun on a dare from two friends. It was very short and undeveloped, but a friend remembers, “it had tremendous passion.” So, I hid the printout in my closet and every four or five years, I’d miss it awfully, and bring it out to revise and share it with a few friends. Agents would fall in love with it and some editors but in the end, they thought it was too unusual and wanted other books from me. I’m terribly glad actually because it took that long to develop into its full strength, 

Have you published anything before? If so, what and where?

I have published three novels with W.W. Norton: Nicholas Cooke, The Physician of London, and The Players: a novel of the young Shakespeare. Then came Marrying Mozart through Viking Penguin, and after with Crown Random House, Claude & Camille: a novel of Monet.  My books have been translated into nine languages and the Mozart novel was made into an opera. I am the recipient of an American Book Award. I have at least six novels in draft, always hoping to finish them. Maybe eight….

LAST QUESTION: When you are writing which is more real, the world all of us live in or the one only you can see? How does to feel to share that world??

When I am writing, the world of the novel is as real as the one I physically live in. I feel the characters walking next to me in the street. When I was an only child (until the age of nine), I would be taken to school and brought back again to my room where I was alone most of the time until dinner. We lived in NYC and I had no way to go to other kids’ houses, as little kids don’t walk the streets alone! Actually, I kept changing schools, so I don’t remember having any friends until after the age of nine when we lived in one place for a few years, and I was able to walk a few streets to visit my first friend or go downstairs to visit a girl in the building. So, I made up people.

I had a made-up friend called David, and I believe he was the genesis of some of my characters, especially Robbie in The Boy in the Rain. Everyone has imaginary worlds in them, but most people are private about them. Writers share them in books. For a long time, I felt The Boy in the Rain was too private to share, that it was just for me. When I first saw the novel printed between covers, I was a little terrified. It is such an intimate world to me. Writing these words, a month before publication day, I am still not sure I want to stand up and talk about it before people.  So, there was a great tug between keeping it a secret forever and sharing it. I guess sharing it won. 

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.

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.

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?

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.

How do you develop your characters?

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.

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.

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.

Martin Oliphant hated horses but he didn’t, it must be said, wish horses dead. It must be said because horses died around him. Died or almost died. At Martin’s hand or almost at Martin’s hand. And it was horses, dead ones mostly, that blazed the trail to his life-forging passion. Horses brought Martin to cowboy poetry, and horses, live ones mostly, were cowboy poetry’s central theme.

Opening lines of KT Sparks’ Petrichor Prize winning novel Four Dead Horses (Regal House, spring 2021)

Regal House: So, as a debut author who no one has ever heard of, isn’t it a bit pretentious to start an interview quoting yourself? It’s not like you just finished penning Profiles in Courage.

KT: Oh, absolutely. But I’m a complete egomaniac. It’s why I’ve been able to start writing novels at my late age (I’ll be 116 when Four Dead Horses comes out). It takes a unique brand of self-focused tunnel vision to say to your family: “Yeah, I’m sure you all need college funds and health insurance and not to have your decrepit old mother showing up on your doorstep having blown through her retirement savings and needing a loan for a knee replacement. But the world is calling on me to lock myself in a trailer, drink an Olympic swimming pool of coffee, and send forth 300 pages worth of words on the subjects of folk literary arts, midwestern men, western values, and equine mortuary science.”

But that’s not why I wanted the book’s opening up top. It’s because, when you decide to title a book Four Dead Horses, you better be ready to explain quickly why that’s the case.

Regal House: Four Dead Horses is the story of a corpulent middle-aged Midwestern pet mortician who, despite hating horses and occasionally (and always unintentionally) contributing to their deaths, dreams of performing with the real cowboys at the Annual Elko Cowboy Poetry Confluence. Is the novel autobiographical?

KT: Well, I’m neither male nor in the business of burying animals nor residing in Michigan (any longer). And my BMI is in the normal range for a woman my age, though I’d love to do something about that visceral fat, but hormones, what are you going to do? The small town on the shores of Lake Michigan in which Martin is raised is based on my home town as it was in the early eighties, and Martin and I would have been at the University of Chicago around the same time (I’m sure he was in my Political Order and Change class). I also, much to my own surprise and like Martin, fell in love with cowboy poetry while writing the novel. I even went to the Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada on which my fictional Annual Elko Cowboy Poetry Confluence is based. It was fantastic—cowboys (and cowgirls and Mexican vaqueros and Native Americans) with rodeo belt buckles the size of dinner plates and dents in their foreheads from bull busting in standing-room-only crowds straining to hear other identical cowboys (and cowgirls, etc., etc.) perform poetry. It was art integrated with real life and hard work and dusty open plains in a way you just don’t see on the literary circuit out East.

Regal House: What led you to hone in on Martin Oliphant as a main character? Aren’t you afraid the sad-sack-Midwestern-white-guy-hero’s-quest market is already saturated?

KT: There’s always room for another entry in the poetry-spouting-pet-mortician canon, don’t you think? And I’m a sucker for a character who, despite relentless failure, pursues a completely improbable and inappropriate set of life goals. It’s funny (I hope) and also tragic in a particularly Midwestern way, the lengths to which Martin will go and what he’s willing to sacrifice to hitch his chuck wagon to an idealized vision of the West. He misses out on a lot of opportunities for a rich life at home in order to pursue a version of the American dream that probably doesn’t exist, and certainly not for him.

Regal House: So you’re saying Martin’s a MAGA-type?

KT: Absolutely not. He supports the arts! He’s with Hickenlooper all the way.

Regal House: OK then, what about the movie? Who plays Martin?

KT: Jonah Hill, no question about it. But he’d have to put the weight back on.

KT Sparks is a farmer living in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. Her short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in a numerous literary magazines. Her first novel, Four Dead Horses, won Regal House Publishing’s 2019 Petrichor Prize and will be published by that Regal House in spring 2021.