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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.

The Boy in the Rain: Catching up with Stephanie Cowell

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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?

Stephanie as a balladeer age 25

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?

Stephanie researching in Eccleston Square in London

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?

The Boy in the Rain, releasing May 1, 2023

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. 

My line to writing was not a straight one

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By Lisa Cupolo, winner of the 2020 W.S. Porter Prize for Short Story Collections

I was not a voracious reader from childhood, nor did I come from a bookish or scholarly family. I wandered in creative circles and it took ages for me to uncork my truth, that I wanted to write.  Winning the prestigious 2020 W.S. Porter Prize for short story collections was nothing short of thrilling, and a happy confirmation that I had finally arrived at the right place.

As it turned out, my gateway to writing began when I was thirty-one, and working as a server at the River Café in Calgary. I love to tell this story as a tale of assurance, that your destiny will indeed find you.  I was figuring out my next move, having returned from a year volunteering at an orphanage in Kisumu, near the border of Uganda. My friends were all established in their lives, buying houses and getting married and I was waiting tables and writing scripts with my roommate. I desperately wanted to get into publishing but felt that the bloom was definitely off my rose and that I was too old to start from scratch.

One night, I had a large table of middle-aged businessmen speaking Latin languages, the kind of men who snapped their fingers at me and ordered things like Kir Royale and Negronis. Luckily, I speak French and could just about handle their rudeness. But I noticed that one man stood out, he was kindly and younger than the rest, and he was buying $600 bottles of wine for the table. It became clear that this smiling man was in charge. He was the big cheese.

Pillars of Faith Orphanage in Kisumu

When I decanted another bottle of our cellar’s finest red, the kindly man touched my arm while I poured. “Listen,” he said, in his perfect Parisian accent, “I’m just a small town Canadian boy.” He looked me in the eye; he was flirting.

“I’m from Niagara Falls,” he said.

“Quoi?” I shrieked. “Qui êtes-vous?”  I couldn’t believe it. Call it divine timing, but I also come from that strange and wonderful tourist town. I recognized his surname; his mother had been an alderman when I was a kid.

When I told him my name, he jumped out of his seat. “Is your father Jerry Cupolo?”  Yes, I said. My parents owned the mom-and-pop sporting goods store in our small city. “I idolized your dad,” he said, “Your father gave me my first break. He loaned me a bike to start my own business.”

For the next hour, the two of us sat at a tiny table, captivated by the coincidence, and how many people we knew in common, much to the dismay of his snooty colleagues and the floor manager of the restaurant, who was steaming. At the end of the night the gentle hometown boy left me a $900 tip.  Yowza. That was very near the amount of money for a six-week publishing course in Vancouver that I thought I couldn’t afford. I quit that night, and signed up for the course.  Probably I would have been fired anyway.

Sometimes it’s hard not to believe that the universe is conspiring in your favor, as Paulo Coelho, famously said. One thing leads to another.  I was offered an entry level job at HarperCollins from a teacher at the course, and in March I drove across freezing cold Canada to take an entry level job at one of the big five publishers in Toronto.

In the past, I had worked as an editor in corporate photography and I’d just returned from that year in Kenya so I was hardly a wallflower when I started at HarperCollins. And yet.  I gophered for the vice president, who sent me home with stacks of books on weekends assuring me of a quiz on Monday morning.  He also sent me to Starbucks and to get his wife a Christmas present, and he pawned me off to the president to fetch his A&W root beer and burger every Friday lunch. 

Working as a publicist at Brick Magazine

My big secret, of course, was that once I got into publishing I had to acknowledge that I’d been writing for years. Why else put in the exhausting hours and take on the patriarchal bullshit. First, I loved being around books and writers, and second, I needed a job to survive.  I would begin writing at 5am every morning and then catch the subway downtown for work by 8. I barely covered my rent and subway fare with my take home wage and I was expected to eat and sleep publishing, which I did. It was an exhilarating time and I ended up working as a publicist with many of my favorite writers, Elmore Leonard, Neil Gaiman, Helen Humphries, Ann Patchett and many more.

Still, when my students ask me if going into publishing is a good transition to being a writer, I say no, absolutely not. I’ll never speak to you again if you do it.

But then, I smile.

With an MFA in fiction from the University of Memphis, Lisa’s stories have been published in Ploughshares, the Virginia Quarterly Review, Narrative, The Idaho Review, and others. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and was a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writers Conference.  She now lives in Southern California and is at work on a memoir. She teaches creative writing at Chapman University.

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.

How to Start a Novel

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By Martha Anne Toll

People frequently tell me that they want to write a novel, they just don’t know how to start. Unfortunately, I have no advice, only a few thoughts on how I came to write Three Muses, which has found a wonderful home with Regal House Publishing.

An author is the worst person to describe her novel, but this was my 100-word pitch for Three Muses:

John Curtin, né Janko Stein, finds his way in America—damaged and traumatized—having survived a concentration camp singing for his family’s killer. World famous ballerina, Katya Symanova, née Katherine Sillman, fights her way from a lonely home and an abusive and intense creative partnership with her choreographer. Ultimately, she must face the impossible choice between art and love. How John and Katya find one another and unlock their futures forms the heart of this novel, which is framed against the power of three muses: Song, Discipline, and Memory. 

I know what year I started writing my novel, and I know some of its sources. Most of its origin story remains shrouded, however.

♪ ♪ ♪

In 2010, I was casting around for a frame on which to hang a new story. I stumbled upon a tradition from the Greek island of Boeotia that honored three muses. Song, Discipline, and Memory were said to be the original muses, and, in at least one version, Memory was said to give birth to the nine muses who came down to us through history.

I don’t know ancient Greek, but I was intrigued by the translation of their names: Aoede (song or tune), Melete (discipline and the preparation for prayer), and Mneme (memory). Beyond these translations, I found virtually nothing from the few Greek scholars I consulted, nor from inquiring at the National Archeological Museum in Athens, nor from the internet.

Nevertheless, I couldn’t let go of these three women. What difference did it make that I knew nothing about them? The novelist’s job is to weave fictions.

As I started writing, I came to know my protagonist, John Curtin, who was pulled out of line to sing for the Kommandant at a Nazi concentration camp. Would the Muse of Song abandon John once he reached safety? I began to worry that music would be a lifelong torture for him.

I spent hours at my computer, trying to inhabit the ballet studio with Katya, a woman who lives to dance. Was she working too hard? Too enmeshed with Boris Yanakov, her choreographer?

They haunted me, these characters—John for the agony of his experience and Katya for the consequences of her iron will (Discipline). I watched the Muse of Memory hover over both of them. Memory tends to do that with all of us.

I took in more than a few skeptical comments about the muses. After multiple re-writes, I reached an accommodation with their role in the story. Readers will need to have the final say. It’s up to them to decide what impact the muses have on Katya and John.

♪ ♪ ♪

On the other hand, I wonder if my lifelong passion for ballet was the source of my novel. I adored ballet from my earliest memories of it. At age five, I started taking lessons with Miss Corinne, who wore a bright red leotard.

And yet. I’m not sure that memory is accurate. It could have been my two older sisters who took from Miss Corinne. Maybe I came with my mother to pick them up when lessons were over.

I do remember my later enchantment, waiting for class to begin at the School of the Pennsylvania Ballet in Philadelphia, peering into the window, watching professional dancers rehearse. I would have happily spent all my time in front of that little window. It was an opening to a magical world of hard work and beauty.

Or maybe it was my long years playing viola and studying music. My compulsion to try to get music on the page. My need to explore what became a fraught and painful relationship with my instrument.

Music is backbone to Three Muses—it is the vehicle for Katya to express herself, and for John, the means of survival.

♪ ♪ ♪

Alternatively, it’s true that the inspiration for Three Muses was my feverish interest in the Holocaust. The older I get, the closer the Holocaust feels to my birth. I read and read about it. I listen to people’s harrowing family stories.

The Holocaust is more than a living memory, it was part of my upbringing. I come from a generation who knew Holocaust survivors. They were my relatives with German accents, my friends’ parents, my extended family. They were familiar; they visited our high school classrooms. I played music with them; they were my dentist and later my bosses.

Too, they were blanketed in silence. Like so many in her generation, my Nana avoided talking about them; she declined to discuss “that Nazi business.” My parents acted similarly.

My family was assimilated in the same ways that our German relatives were. We were not religious or observant. We were Americans first, just as our relatives were Germans first.

It was the poison of anti-Semitism that separated Jews from their compatriots, that made entire societies collaborate in their roundups and murder. Now we call it “othering,” the toxic process by which a group of people is made so onerous and reviled that they become non-human, opening the way for oppression and mass slaughter.

Never forget, we Jews say, meaning never repeat, no matter which group of people are the objects of derision. Here in the United States, the president and his henchmen have been relentless in their efforts to other. Their practice is not only cruel and vicious; it is also extremely dangerous. America is in peril. We need stories to help awaken us to hatred’s risks.

♪ ♪ ♪

In the end, I can’t describe the origins of Three Muses. I only know that we humans are angry and loving; we are selfish and injurious and kind.

How to express the trove of unique stories each of us carries around? We can sing and dance; we can remember out loud. Or we can we suppress our traumas and live in freighted silence, hermits sitting atop memories that are too shattering to voice.

I prefer to break the silence.

Martha Anne Toll is the 2020 recipient of the Petrichor Prize for Finely Crafted Fiction. Her novel, Three Muses,is forthcoming from Regal House Publishing in Fall 2022. She is a regular contributor to NPR Books and other outlets; and was the founding executive director of the Butler Family Fund, a social justice philanthropy. 

To Pants or to Plot? In Defense of a Middle Way

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By Rebecca Baum

I first encountered the terms pantser and plotter on a writing retreat in New Hampshire on Squam Lake. As dusk gathered and the loons wailed, a writer asked which approach I’d used for the middle grade novel I was working on. She went on to define the plotter as the writer who outlines a beginning, middle and end before the first keystroke of the novel itself; and the pantser as the thrill-seeking, fly-by-the-seat type. All they need is a snippet of a scene, glimpse of a character, or flash of setting — and they’re off!

I confessed to being a pantser. My middle grade book emerged in caffeine-fueled bursts, my outflow hindered only by my too-slow fingers. It was my first novel and the process of discovering the story as it was being written was unbridled fun. The downside (as early readers reported) were moments where the story felt rushed or where plot and character motivation didn’t always jibe. Unsurprisingly, that novel was never published. But it was a valuable exercise in showing up every day to slay the dragon of the empty page until eventually I’d hammered out over 60,000 words.

My novel, Lifelike Creatures, started as a pantser affair but morphed into a plotter-pantser hybrid. I started with a visceral sense of the landscape, lifted from my childhood in Cottonport, La. — fresh, turned earth and muddy fields stretching to the horizon, the stultifying heat of high summer, a gray sky both endless and oppressive. Within this rural setting a girl appeared, 13 years old, most comfortable with her toes in the mud. A boy, perhaps a brother, briefly bobbed into view then disappeared, replaced by the girl’s mother. Soon their relationship took shape, a claustrophobic constellation propelled by addiction, resilience, pain, and fierce love. The girl became “Tara” and the mother became “Joan.”

I brought these green shoots into a writing workshop. Each week, as I worked and reworked a chapter, or even a few pages, the contours of Tara and Joan’s relationship solidified. The details of their home came to life as did the intimacies and tensions of their days. The workshop facilitator challenged me to widen the lens and discover a larger community or cultural conflict against which Tara and her mother could struggle and transform — or falter and fail.

He also encouraged me to write a chapter outline, nudging me into the realm of the plotter.  An early outline, which is very different from the final novel, has Tara losing her way in a salt dome mine during a visit to Avery Island (home of Tabasco Pepper Sauce ). Salt domes are massive underground deposits, some as large as Mount Everest, which feature prominently in Louisiana’s geology. I’ve always found them fascinating and mysterious, an interest I share with Tara:

Before fifth grade, when her class had studied salt domes, she’d pictured the New Orleans Superdome made out of salt, buried a few feet below her front yard. But the teacher had explained that the domes were more like underground mountains, formed when an ancient seabed buckled up over millions of years through the surrounding crush of earth. The salt behaved almost like lava, flowing upwards until it capped near the surface. For a time afterwards, whenever Tara salted her food, she imagined tiny flecks of bizarre prehistoric sea creatures mixed in with it.

–Lifelike Creatures, pg. 36

So the impulse to somehow include salt domes in the story emerged early on, even before I’d plotted the larger conflict that would come crashing into Tara and Joan’s world. With salt domes on my radar, it was inevitable that I should happen upon the other geologic phenomenon of Lifelike Creatures, the one that became the larger conflict — a sinkhole. Turns out the two often go hand-in-hand.

Salt dome cutout, from Louisiana
State Exhibit Museum

Salt domes and sinkholes have made headlines in Louisiana several times over the years, most dramatically at Lake Peignur in 1980, when the drill from an oil rig barge punctured a salt dome beneath the lake. The miscalculation created a sinkhole, triggering an enormous whirlpool that drained the lake and even reversed the flow of a nearby canal, temporarily creating Louisiana’s tallest recorded waterfall.

More recently, the Bayou Corne sinkhole was precipitated by a collapse in the Napoleonville Salt Dome. Or more accurately, the wall of a hollowed out cavern within the dome, near the dome’s outer wall. The cavern was manmade, as are dozens of others nested deep within the dome’s interior. Adding to the mystique of these underground marvels is the fact that they are uniquely well-suited for storing hydrocarbons, natural gas, and even crude oil. If the earth shifts, the salt walls flex and flow. Integrity is maintained as long as the surrounding salt is of adequate thickness. It was not in the case of the Bayou Corne sinkhole. As a result, an entire community was displaced with many residents leaving behind what they’d assumed would be the golden years of retirement.

The Bayou Corne sinkhole

The sinkhole in Lifelike Creatures is modeled on this real-life industrial disaster. My fictionalized version not only connects the “small” story of Tara and Joan with larger, catalytic forces. It also mirrors the downward spiral of drug and alcohol addiction and the corrosive effects on the parent-child relationship. I’m fortunate to have a close friend who is a geologist. He generously shared his expertise, allowing me to plausibly plot sinkhole and remediation events that force Tara and Joan into “adapt or die” situations.

So pantser or plotter? Based on my experience with Lifelike Creatures, I’ve embraced a middle way. The tools of the plotter kept me grounded even as the chapter outline changed and evolved. The pantser’s spontaneity offered unforeseen gifts, including a pivotal moment that totally took me by surprise. Early readers have had no qualms about pacing or character motivation. And Tara and Joan were given what every character deserves — a plot integrated with their core desires and beliefs.

Rebecca Baum is a New York City transplant from rural Louisiana. She’s authored several short stories and two novels. The most recent, Lifelike Creatures, was published by Regal House Publishing on September 17, 2020. She is represented by Jeff Ourvan at Jennifer Lyons Literary Agency. She’s a cofounder of a creative studio where she is a ghostwriter, copywriter, and blogger. She lives in Greenwich Village with her husband and their cat.

Rebecca Baggett:

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The Nostalgia for Things Lost & A Tenderness for the World in Which We Find Ourselves

Winner of the 2020 Terry J. Cox Poetry Award

Rebecca Baggett

In December of 2019, I retired from the University of Georgia after over thirty years as an academic advisor.  In that time, I worked at three different universities, sometimes advising students in pre-professional programs, but primarily with liberal arts majors in UGA’s Franklin College of Arts and Sciences—students studying languages, literature, theatre and film, religion, anthropology, women’s studies, history, resulting in conversations that animated and enriched my life and my writing.  My last months were spent in hours of discussion with students and colleagues and concluded with a farewell gathering that included former and current colleagues, administrators, and a variety of faculty across the departments for which I advised. 

I retreated to my “book fort” for the winter, almost literally hibernating with a stack of novels and poetry collections, and emerged only occasionally to poke a pen around a legal pad or go online to submit individual poems and my full-length manuscript.  As an introvert in recovery from years of professional talking, I gave myself full license to sleep, read, nap, read, and catch up on a few Netflix series. 

I began to wake as spring and Covid-19 arrived in Georgia and by mid-March found myself in full-on isolation with my husband, a retired high school teacher.  Our church shifted from in-person to Zoom to YouTube, as our bishop (wisely) tightened restrictions on gatherings, weeks earlier than Georgia’s governor.  Our city closed down large gatherings, then schools, bars, restaurants, again, long before the state at large. My book group and poetry group, “dinner women” and former colleagues withdrew to our homes, and our only “in real life” contact was with our pregnant daughter and her husband, who also isolated as much as possible.  Soon after our grandson’s St. Patrick’s Day birth, our son-in-law had to return to work, so we spent weeks helping our daughter with our newborn grandson.  It was both a mercy and a gift to immerse ourselves in the immediacy of an infant’s needs and to know that between us we could provide Christopher everything he needed – food, clean diapers, the occasional bath, constant human contact, the sound of our voices, our adoration. 

Like all of us, I felt no such calm when I looked into the larger world and tried as much as possible not to imagine what horrors might loom, what this pandemic could mean for people I love and for so much of what I value in our world.  I didn’t think often about my manuscript, circling through the round of competitions, or whether it would ever be published.  When I did remember, I assumed the slim chance of publication had probably shrunk to next-to-none.

What a joyful shock to receive Jaynie’s email telling me that The Woman Who Lives Without Money had won the Terry J. Cox Poetry Award.   What a gift to receive that news at a point when I could easily imagine no publisher having the courage or the financial foundation to continue to print books.  And it is an equal gift to realize that Regal House Publishing shares my conviction that a life in the arts is, in some sense, a life of companionship and service.  Like every writer I have ever known, I struggle with the tension between creation — a focus on the work itself — and the pull toward publication – sometimes warring impulses. The reality is that only a fraction of artistic work will ever receive recognition, that few of us – whatever our medium – will be able to live on an income from our art alone, that many far more talented writers than I will give up, ground under by the necessity of earning a living, by despair, by lack of an audience, by inability to live in uncertainty.  Which is, of course, where we all live now.

In this unfolding world, perhaps we will learn that what seems most ephemeral (poems, stories, music, dance, theatre) and most fragile (the shell of my grandson’s skull beneath my cupped hand, the bloodroot petals unfolding in my spring garden, our ability to shelter those we love from harm, our desire to shelter those we do not know at all) are the essence of what it means to be human.  I believe that in this moment there is nothing more worth doing than creating art and midwifing it into the world.  I hope that readers find in The Woman Who Lives Without Money not only a nostalgia for things lost but tenderness for the world in which we live now and for whatever is coming next.

Rebecca Bagget is the author of poems, essays, and stories, published in numerous journals and anthologies, as well as four chapbooks, two of which (God Puts on the Body of a Deer, from Main Street Rag, and Thalassa, from Finishing Line Press) remain in print.  She is a retired academic advisor from the University of Georgia and she has been a Fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

Steven Mayfield: “It’s Hard to Make Up Stuff that Good”

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Writers are always advised to write what they know. I don’t disagree, but think that it’s how you come to know about something that matters. I once took a class from Roger Welsch, the renowned folklorist. He advised us not sell ourselves short on what we knew, recalling a previous student flummoxed by her lack of worldly experiences upon which to draw. Dr. Welsch gave her an assignment. “Think of something about your family that you find interesting.” The girl came back with the following tale: Her grandmother and grandfather lived in a small Nebraska town where everyone knew each other. It was in a time when people talked over the back fence and hung their laundry on a clothesline. Every week the girl’s grandmother washed her husband’s pajamas and hung them on the line. When they were dry, she neatly folded them and placed the PJs in a dresser drawer where they remained until the next week when she removed the clean, unworn pajamas, rewashed them, and again hung them on the line. Why did she do this?

“Well,” the girl told Dr. Welsch, “my grandpa slept in the nude and my grandma didn’t want anyone to know.”

“It’s hard to make up stuff that good,” Dr. Welsch told his student.

So, she did have something to write about, even though it wasn’t drawn from her own experience. She’s not alone. Frank Herbert created the world of Dune, J.R.R. Tolkien the inhabitants of Middle-Earth, J.K Rowling the wizard’s school at Hogwarts. My next book, Treasure of the Blue Whale, describes a town and a time period that I never knew. Don’t blame me for such presumptuousness. Blame Alastair MacClean. When I was a teenager, I loved books by MacClean, the Scottish schoolteacher who wrote The Guns of Navarone and other adventures. His tales of mountain-climbing commandos, nuclear submarines, and double agents were concocted without actual experiences. He did not learn about such people and things by scaling Matterhorn, doing battle with Blofeld, or splitting an atom. He went to the library. Afterward, he didn’t write what he knew; he knew what he wrote.

The Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, CA at sunset.

A few years ago, when I lived in San Francisco, I picked up my wife from an appointment in Pac Heights. When I pulled up to the curb, she was waiting alongside a very old man. “This is Zane,” she told me. “We’re giving him a ride.”

Zane got in the car and introduced himself. “Thank you for your kindness,” he said. “In exchange, you will get a really good story.”

Zane was 90 years old and Nisei—born in America—the son of a Scotch-Irish mother and a father who was Issei—born in Japan. He’d gone to high school in San Francisco, graduating in 1942 just a few months following the attack on Pearl Harbor. Not long thereafter, Zane and his parents were shipped off to an internment camp in Utah. He spent a year there before being allowed to enlist in the Army.

“I moved to New York City after the war,” he told us. “I lived there for twenty-six years. I was a dance instructor.” He offered to give my wife and I free lessons. He said the rumba was easiest and we’d start there.

Zane’s home was in an assisted living facility not far from the Golden Gate Bridge. The sidewalk fronting the building was steep and we offered to help him to the door. “I can make it,” he assured us. “Have you heard of Michael Jackson? He did the moon walk. I can do the moon walk, too.”

And then he did.

“He was interesting,” I said to my wife as we drove home. I was already planning the book I would write, one currently in progress.

“Yes he was,” she replied, “he was very sweet. And his story…can you believe it? Why, you just can’t make up stuff that good.”

Steven is the past recipient of the Mari Sandoz Prize for Fiction and the author of over fifty scientific and literary publications that have appeared in Event, The Black River Review, cold-drill, artisan, The Long Story, and the anthology From Eulogy to Joy. In 1998, he was the guest editor for Cabin Fever, the literary journal of the Cabin Literary Center. He is the author of Howling at the Moon, a Best Books of 2010 selection by USA Book News as well as an Eddie Hoffer Finalist.