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Author Interview

That’s My Story: Scott Lambridis

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We were delighted to have a virtual sit down with Scott Lambridis, author of St. Ulphia’s Dead, to discuss his creative process, and to share his answers with you.

1. 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?

Italo Calvino has a great line in an essay about how, when he encounters an idea he believes is “completely beyond his temperament and technical skills” to write, that’s when he sits down to write it. He knows that writing into the unknown, into discomfort, is the way to get at a richness you just can’t reach through situations, characters, voices, or ideas you’re already familiar with. Sure, familiarity and life experience help bring nuance and authenticity into work, but those are the blood of the work, not the body. I love Calvino’s quote, and try to follow it when I’m brave enough. I think more writers should write what they don’t know.

I don’t really experience that as being in tension with lived experience, though. Lived experience gives you the tangible details, the emotional truth, the contradiction and paradox that make something feel human, and fiction lets you bring order to that chaos and pressure it into asking larger questions. I’m a collector of scenes, moments, images, scraps from life that can be repurposed in fiction such that they carry the authenticity of life better than what can often be completely invented. 

I’m also just drawn to stories that are strange and outside my daily experience. A great many readers pick books they can relate to, and maybe that’s fine if you’re looking for consolation or validation, but I think it’s a trap. For me, the point of reading is to go into the unfamiliar. I avoid books that seem relatable. I want the ones that push my thinking, imagination, and empathy. What’s the point of stories if not to experience lives and situations and ideas beyond yourself?

So yes, there’s a tension, but it’s the productive tension fiction depends on.

2. Has your education helped you become a better writer?

Absolutely, though maybe not in the obvious ways.

My neurobiology background gave me a deep and ongoing fascination with brain science, consciousness, perception, belief, and the unstable relationship between what we call reality and what we merely agree to call reality. That drives most of my writing, and clearly fed St. Ulphia’s Dead. One of the central tensions in that book is between science or medicine as one of our most secure stories of truth, and lived experience, which has a way of continually exceeding those categories. For example: we as a culture name conditions, and then rely on those names to explain our everyday experiences. When you type it out like that, it starts to sound questionable, doesn’t it? The more I learned, the less interested I became in certainty, and the more interested I became in where certainty breaks down—where naming something starts to feel like one story among several, rather than the final truth. Of course, having a background in neuroscience made it easier to pull in case studies for verisimilitude.

My MFA helped in a very different way. It taught me the old adage of writing a novel to learn how to write a novel. My first book, Hourglasses, was my MFA thesis, and even though I thought it was finished ten times over, it’s still unfinished. It wasn’t until I wrote St. Ulphia’s Dead that I understood why. Hourglasses had wonderful content and a big idea, but it never hung together because I never found the vision—or the way of telling it—that the book required. 

The MFA also forced me, because I wanted to really take advantage of it, to push beyond my comfort zone—new subjects, new voices, new structures, filling up the toolbelt. That ultimately gives you confidence for tackling what’s unfamiliar and uncomfortable. It also sharpens your editing eye. You learn what’s good, often by workshopping other people’s work first and helping them get closer to, as Truman Capote once described it, the orange: something complete, whole, and independent from its creator.

And then there are the little teachings you keep forever. My mentor Peter Orner once emphasized that good characters need to feel like they have blood pumping through their veins. I’ve never forgotten that. Education helped not because it gave me rules, but because it gave me better questions, better instincts, and the courage to write beyond what I thought I could manage.

3. How do you develop characters?

As I mentioned above, voice comes first. If I don’t have it, I can’t write the story, no matter how well composed the characters or plot are. 

Contradiction, I realized some years ago, is essential for good characters, for two reasons. First, contradictions are memorable. They capture a nuance of character and personality, including worldview and personal aesthetic, that you can’t get any other way. Second, they’re more realistic. We are contradictory, and those contradictions not only make us human, they literally set characters alive, give them blood pumping through their veins, to borrow Peter Orner’s phrase. 

I also don’t tend to build characters abstractly. I start with what’s concrete: a line of dialogue, an article of clothing, a gesture, an awkward interaction, a room charged with pressure. Those are the things that carry life. Some years ago, after going through scattered notes and realizing I didn’t understand half of them, I stopped trusting ideas by themselves. I trust scenes now. “Capture the scene, not the idea” is my mantra. If something occurs to me, I start writing into it immediately and go as far as I can in that moment. Later, at the computer, I work that material—expand it, refine it, connect it, discover what belongs together. I can’t really sit down at a desk and write from nothing. 

A lot of character-building for me comes from collecting details: emotional truth and unique details anchored in truth. The pink fluff that so fascinates Jo throughout St. Ulphia’s Dead was something I found once in real life and described in my notebook exactly as it appears in the book. I still don’t know what it was and have never seen it again. Even something like the chiffchaff bird, which I discovered while researching flora and fauna for the island, felt immediately useful—not just because of its absurdly delightful name, but because of its cackling laughter and the way a detail like that can undercut a solemn scene and make it feel more real, tense, and contradictory. 

Once there’s a certain center of gravity to a character, those charged fragments start accreting, and character development starts to feel less like invention and more like uncovering, then creating situations that test them. After that, I let them go and write what seems most authentic to them. They already want to live; I just help them. 

4. Do you come to your writing through a particular lens?

I definitely do, though it took me a while to recognize it. While doing my SANA series, I stumbled onto a kind of thematic rule that emerged as I went, which I then tried to adhere to: sweet, paradoxical, and full of vague menace. I think that describes pretty well the general aesthetic I tend to go for in most of my stories, even though the balance tips one way or another depending on the piece.

Absurdity is also central to the lens I come through. I think of absurdity as a mismatch of proportion: a mismatch between events and reaction. Humor in dark work is usually a question of proportion, of balancing tone, philosophy, and structure in a way that carries verisimilitude and gets to the emotional punch through disproportion. When the circumstances are extreme, but the human reactions are nuanced, downplayed, evasive, or awkward, that’s absurd dark comedy to me. In some way, I almost want you to feel bad about laughing. I want myself to feel bad about laughing too. It’s a strange paradox of permission.

That’s the same kind of approach at work in St. Ulphia’s Dead. The premise and tone have to work together to ask philosophical questions you can’t get at in quite the same way otherwise, because they come at you unexpectedly, and with a freshness that comes from being unmoored from their usual drapings.

I’m also motivated by inventiveness. I want to write the stories that don’t yet exist. So many of my stories were spawned by reading something I thought was going somewhere and then it didn’t, and even if where it went was satisfying, I still wanted to know the story I thought it was going to be. I’m always chasing that unrealized possibility—the weirder, more emotionally enticing version.

And of course, if you’re going to write—a generally thankless job—you have to write what’s fun to you. Or as Vonnegut said: first, entertain.

So yes, style matters enormously to me. But I don’t think of style as surface. Style is how a story discovers its logic, its emotional register, its philosophy, and even its characters.

5. What do you wish people would ask you?

Ask me the question my wife often challenges me to answer: Why do you write fiction at all?

We have a family mantra, which she invented: “The purpose of life is to be moved and enchanted,” and that is essentially the point of fiction for me. If I’m successful, there’s a transformation that happens, for myself first, and hopefully some form of transformation to the reader, if only briefly.

It’s like magic: I want to cast an illusion of reality that is believable, which might also be true. Wouldn’t the limiting beliefs we all have—the ones that hold us back from a better world, or a better experience of our world—become slipperier and more suspect if we could believe the unbelievable more often? That’s what fiction can do. It can destabilize what seemed fixed. It can make us newly suspicious of the stories we’ve inherited about ourselves and others and reality itself.

Fiction does that in a way abstract thought cannot. It gives the mind and heart handholds. It lets you enter destabilizing questions—about love, death, belief, fear, consciousness—through experience rather than argument. It makes those questions concrete, and therefore moving. It lets you approach what ordinary life does not.

And on the most immediate level, I write because I have to. Because playing with stories is so naturally the one thing—save for being with my wife and child—that, when I’m doing it, I don’t think I should be doing anything else. If I’m not playing with stories, I don’t feel like I’m doing what I should be doing. I’ve always been this way. It’s less a choice than a compulsion, but luckily it’s also the most pleasurable and life-giving one I know. Fiction is where curiosity, obsession, compassion, intellect, and strangeness all get to meet.

That’s My Story – Maryka Biaggio

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RHP staff had the pleasure of sitting down with Maryka Biaggio, author of Margery and Me, to talk about her path to publishing as well as her approach to the writing craft. We are delighted to share her answers with you!

When did you start writing?

I started writing in grade school. I found a short-story contest advertised on a matchbook and told my mother I was going to enter. Being busy with cooking, cleaning, and doing laundry for a husband and five children, she said something like, “That’s nice. Now get out of my way.” I submitted a story and anxiously waited to hear back. They never responded, and I hadn’t saved a copy of the story, so who knows what it was about—probably something about the hijinks my siblings and I got into when left on our own. [See photo, right, of my siblings and me making a pyramid.]

Do you ever use your cell phone to compose your work or track your ideas? Are there any author/writing apps you recommend?

I absolutely adore Scrivener, a writing tool that lets me put everything I need in one place—not just the chapters, but character sketches, photos of important places, website addresses for essential information, and even marketing materials. You could say it keeps me from straying too far from the novel in progress because it allows me to put all my resources in one place. And I also have Scrivener loaded on my phone, which is great on those occasions when I’m out and about and have some idea I want to record lest I forget it.

What is the most cringe-worthy thing someone has said when you tell them you’re a novelist?

“I’ve always wanted to write a novel. When I find the time, I’ll bang out a bestseller. How hard can it be?”

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?

A good author has to be a little crazy. How else could they stand to spend endless hours putting words down on a page and hoping that the story they build will actually find its way out into the world? It’s a rough business, and I can encourage only those with thick skin and lots of perseverance to undertake the writing of a novel.

How do you develop your characters?

I find I have to write my way into my characters. I’ve chosen quite an array of real people as subjects—ranging from a nineteenth-century con woman to a model-turned-spy during World War II. I couldn’t be more dissimilar from those two characters, both of whom were gorgeous and wily, so I often spend weeks, sometimes months, trying to find the voice. But when I’m on my morning walk or baking a pie, and the character starts talking in a way that sounds like how I’ve imagined them, I know I’ve found their voice! It’s as if, after a great deal of mulling and research, my subconscious finally comes through for me. That’s the magical part of writing. [See photo of The Model Spy book cover, left.]

Maryka Biaggio is the author of Margery and Me, releasing from Regal House Publishing on April 21, 2026.

That’s My Story: Regal House Publishing (RHP) Interviews Novelist James Janko

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We were delighted to sit down with James Janko, the author of The Wire-Walker, to talk about life, literary pursuits, languages, science, and the value of meditation.

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.

Letting the Story Lead: Valerie Nieman and Upon the Corner of the Moon

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by Valerie Nieman

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.

That’s My Story: David Ebenbach on Fiction, the Writing Process & Jokes You Love

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The RHP team sat down with David Ebenbach, author of Possible Happiness, to chat about fiction, humor, and the writing process.

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.

That’s My Story: Beth Castrodale on Literary Adventures, the Importance of Friendship & the Influence of a Depression-Era Corset Maker

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In the lead-up to the publication of her novel The Inhabitants, Beth took part in a virtual sit-down to discuss her writing process, the role of friendship in her writing, and more.

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 of Beth’s hand-sewn dresses, based on a forties-era pattern

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?

A scene from the family farm that inspired Beth’s novel-in-progress

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.

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.