Interview by Karen Halvorsen Schreck
Wide-ranging research takes me to unusual places. Surprises often await me there. Opportunities for connection, too.
Such was the case when I began researching independent publishers at AWP this past March. One publisher, Regal House, happened to be publishing two writer-acquaintances of mine, whose work I knew and respected. Based on this, I dug more deeply into the bios of other Regal House author’s bios, wondering if any lived in the Chicago area. Oh, happy day, there was Janice Deal, who lived only a handful of suburbs away from me. Janice’s novel, The Sound of Rabbits, was about to hit shelves. She had a release party coming up at the Book Cellar, where she was going to be interviewed by Katherine Shonk, a terrific writer who also happens to live in Chicago.
Reader, I went to the release party. I met Janice Deal. I appreciated Janice’s gracious, open-hearted, and magnetic self. I got my hands on a copy of The Sound of Rabbits. I read the book and loved it—in particular, the memorable characters, effective dialogue, and strange-to-the-point-of-surreal-yet-entirely-believable situations. Janice Deal is a writer who knows her settings from the classification of a cloud formation down to the texture of the dirt. My reader’s heart was won. I asked Janice for this interview, and she agreed.
Janice Deal’s collection of linked short stories, Strange Attractors: the Ephrem Stories (New Door Books), releases this September. You may find out more about the author and her books here: https://www.janicedeal.com/
How would you describe your evolution as a writer? Did you always want to write or was it a more gradual process of discovery, with perhaps some bumps along the way? What inspired you to fully commit to the practice?
I consider myself a late bloomer writer. I have loved reading since I was a kid (yep, I was the nine-year-old checking stacks of books out of the public library every week, usually about animals!). I took a creative writing class in college. But I didn’t connect with writing fiction until after I’d done some living.
My fiction-writing life began when I was working as an editor for a Chicago travel magazine, and I took a journalism class out of Northwestern University to hone my skills for the job. It had been a few years since I’d been in school, and I suddenly remembered how much I loved being a student. So when the journalism class wrapped up, on a lark I signed up for a short story writing class at Northwestern, taught by Fred Shafer. Something clicked. The timing was right, or maybe I just finally had something to say. When Fred invited me to participate in a short story writing workshop he teaches independently, I eagerly accepted. My passion for writing fiction had been ignited!
In 2013, you published a collection of short stories, The Decline of Pigeons (Queen’s Ferry Press). Your novel, The Sound of Rabbits (Regal House), hit shelves in early June of this year. Your linked story collection, Strange Attractors: The Ephrem Stories (New Door Books), releases on September 12, 2023.
You’ve been busy, Janice, clearly, and possibly all the more so because you’ve been working with different narrative forms! What is your perspective on the different challenges and rewards of writing short stories, linked short stories, and novels? How difficult is it to turn from one to the other? Do you have distinct methods for creating and shaping manuscripts, depending upon which form you’re working in at the time?
The process of writing novels versus short stories, for me, is almost like the difference between a marathon and a sprint. Short stories sometimes take me a while to complete (I tend to work at a glacial pace), but the opportunity for “reward” comes quicker. More about that in a moment.
I tend to work on several stories at once, usually at different points of development, and I toggle between them depending on what I’m feeling on a particular day. I might have a first draft of a story under way (do I feel like gushing some new discovery onto the page?). I might have another story that is almost “done” but needs some tightening (do I have the precision of mind and ready attention to detail, that day, that’s necessary for me to embrace “revision mode”?). I might have a third that I’m sending out to literary magazines. Speaking of literary magazines: with stories, there is the opportunity to earn that “carrot” of publication earlier—if you place a story in a magazine there’s that dopamine rush well before the eventual collecting together of stories into a book.
With a novel, it’s a longer haul. There’s not the same opportunity to have bits of it published earlier on (although I know some authors have had chapters or excerpts published before their novel gets published as a whole, that hasn’t been my experience to date). Writing The Sound of Rabbits took a long time, with no promise of publication before the book was done to encourage me that I was on the “right track.” Writing a novel was definitely more of a leap of faith for me.
Was it hard to turn from one to the other? I think that writing short stories is my first love, so I’ve always felt very at home with that process. Embarking on a novel was a bit intimidating, and my way of making that process more manageable was to approach it in bite-size “chunks.” The Sound of Rabbits is told from multiple perspectives, so I’d give myself an assignment: “Write Len’s chapter today.” That felt more like the short stories I was accustomed to writing—that was something I could get my arms around. After I had several of these chapters written, I could play around with them, see how they informed one another, and how they might work in the rough outline I’d created.
Which brings up another point: I never create outlines for stories, but for the novel I created a very loosey-goosey outline. I considered it a rough map, so that I wouldn’t wander too far off track. With stories, the format is short enough that I feel comfortable just vibing and seeing where my imagination—and the characters—take me. The novel format is longer, of course, and I think in the back of my mind, I worried that I’d go off on some tangent and find myself, years down the pike, in the wilderness. So I created an outline—it was almost like insurance. The outline was rough, and I gave myself permission to diverge from it and make discoveries, but it provided guardrails so that I didn’t feel like I was going off the road.
Finally, perhaps it’s no coincidence that I wrote my collection of linked stories, Strange Attractors, after I’d finished the novel. I liked the idea of characters wandering into one another’s stories, as the multiple perspectives allowed me to do in The Sound of Rabbits. One big difference, though: In the novel, the book is, ultimately, about one character (Ruby) and her journey. The multiple perspectives exist to help readers understand Ruby better. Although we learn something about these other characters, their perspectives ultimately inform that primary arc. In the linked collection, the cast of characters is large; their stories inform one another, and they all carry equal weight.
When someone asks what Ruby’s story is about, what do you tell them?
The Sound of Rabbits is about self-discovery. It’s about a character, Ruby, who is invited to understand how her past—and the small town she thought she’d left behind—has shaped her. The story is like blues music for literary fiction, resonating with people who’ve done some living and understand the power of stories that emerge from humble experience and pain.
What inspired you to write The Sound of Rabbits? Could you describe the evolution of the book, from the first hint of the idea to the day of its publication? The Sound of Rabbits actually began as a short story. But it pretty quickly became apparent that there were too many characters; there was too much going on. I was workshopping it in Fred’s class, and at one point he suggested that I might have a novel on my hands. Once I got my head around that, I began to ask myself, how do I make Ruby’s story come alive? How do I introduce readers to the many facets of her journey?
But before it was even a short story, The Sound of Rabbits began with place. I was road-tripping with my husband, David, in northern Wisconsin, and we stopped in the very real town of Ladysmith. I was enchanted by this place: the town’s history of copper mining, the river that ran through it, the mid-century motel that was like something out of “Pulp Fiction.” I started taking notes; I knew I wanted to set a story there. But when I got home, I also understood that I didn’t want to be constrained by fact: I live far enough away that I couldn’t drive over and double-check details. So I invited Ladysmith to be the “springboard” for the fictional town of Ladyford, Wisconsin. Ladysmith’s bones are there, but there’s a lot of imagining that takes place, as well. I like to think The Sound of Rabbits creates a powerful portrait of the role of place in shaping personal identity. Ladyford, a small, hardscrabble town, becomes a character in the book in its own right.
And finally, to begin the story, I asked myself: “What might make a character want to leave this place?” And Ruby’s journey began.
So, it sounds like place preceded character in The Sound of Rabbits. Is that always the case in your work?
Yes, for The Sound of Rabbits, but other stories have begun with an anecdote. For example, a friend told me about a subdivision near my home that never got finished and ended up a forest preserve, the old sidewalks buried in leaves and ground cover; in another case, a friend told me a story about a home invaded by a squirrel. I get this moment of quickening—I’ll think, that’s interesting! Then I ask myself questions:
who might be drawn to the mystery of subdivision “ruins”? What kind of person might want to invite a squirrel to stay? And the stories grow organically from these beginnings, these questions.
Regarding place: I tend to be drawn to humble locales. In Strange Attractors, I created a fictional town on the border of Illinois and Wisconsin. It’s an exurb—not quite rural, but not exactly urban, either. There’s a community college, there’s a dying mall. And I am interested in the ways human truths flourish in these often overlooked communities.
You have lived much of your life in the Chicago area. Do you consider yourself a regional writer? If so, how do you define a Midwestern sensibility? Great question! Much of my work takes place in the Midwest, but not all of it—I recently completed a novella set primarily in Arizona, for example. But I do think my work overall has a Midwestern sensibility. By that, I mean that my characters tend to be down to earth. They possess a plainspoken, no-nonsense approach to living. These are everyday people; there is a particular humility about them that speaks to the Midwest for me.
Music figures importantly in the life of Ruby, one of the main characters in The Sound of Rabbits. Does music influence your writing process? Structurally or rhythmically? Does it impact your work on the level of the sentence or on a larger scale?
I often listen to music when I write, and the “soundtrack” differs depending on what I’m working on. Some days I listen to instrumental music—this is usually when I’m in the thicket of revision, and my brain just gets too distracted by “music with words”—but music with vocals works just fine when I’m whacking out a first draft. I love how music can put you in a certain frame of mind, help you access a specific feeling or mood; that’s a useful space to be in when creating. There’s a powerful link between writing and music that’s hard for me to put into words—maybe it’s the visceral quality both music and literature can possess. And as you have intuited, the rhythms of music are akin to sentence rhythms for me. I consider well-paced writing to have its own “music,” in fact.
Finally, for The Decline of Pigeons and Strange Attractors, when sequencing the stories, I thought a lot about the effort that goes into creating a compelling arc with songs on an album. That order isn’t arbitrary; there’s a conversation that takes place between the different tracks, and the musician has ordered them that way for a reason: to take listeners on a particular journey. The same thing applies to stories in a collection, I think. That’s why as a reader, I always read stories in the order they are presented. And I put a lot of thought into the ordering of the stories in my books.
Describe your writing regimen, or, if you prefer, process. How do you get work done? Do you have any rituals or traditions to help jumpstart the process and sustain you along the way?
I am a morning person, so it’s probably no surprise that I seem to get my best work done in the mornings. My routine goes something like: drink one cup of coffee (lots of cream), eat some breakfast (plenty of protein), then pour that second cup of coffee and start working. On writing days, I’ll work hard until lunchtime and get a little more work done early afternoon, but then my productivity tapers down.
I work at home, but sometimes I’ll steal away on a writing retreat with my husband or writing friends. Then the above routine is pretty much canon. At home, the routine is looser: life, you know? There might be breaks to get things done around the house, or I’ll work in the morning, run errands, then work some more.
Here’s something that informs my writing whether I’m at home or on retreat, though: wherever I am, I try to find a place where I can swim laps. Swimming clears my head, and I find myself untangling knotty questions about what I’m working on, or making discoveries about a character, as I splash back and forth.
In an interview with Regal House, publisher of The Sound of Rabbits, you suggest that the editors ask other authors what literary pilgrimages they’ve gone on. Now I’m asking you: have you gone on any literary pilgrimages, Janice? If so, how did they shape you as a writer?
My husband and I love driving. We’ve made a road trip to Oxford, Mississippi, to visit William Faulkner’s home, and visited Ernest Hemingway’s grave in Ketchum, Idaho. Music is so important to my writing that I include musical pilgrimages in this list: a drive to Elvis Presley’s birthplace, for example; a mandatory visit to the Johnny Cash Museum while in Nashville.
On all our travels, I tend to take notes: about the things we do, the people I see, the way the land looks. You never know what details are going to end up in a story. I can refer to the notes later, of course, but just the act of writing them down really “sets” them in my brain—the ideas that “stick” in this way often are the seeds for new work.
What’s next with your writing? Are you working on anything new?
I have just completed a novella, a literary fiction mashup of a contemporary story with a fairy tale of my devising. In the present-day story, the protagonist, Flo, is processing, among other
things, the death of a dear friend who was a pastor. As the work progresses, the line between Flo’s story and the fairy tale becomes increasingly blurred. My exploration of the two storylines reflects my interest in the role faith plays in our lives, whether we rely on stories from our past or the tenets of organized religion. I’m fascinated by the ways in which fairy tales and religion can mine similar veins of loss, redemption, identity, and transformation, even as they offer solace.
Next up is a new collection of short-short stories, tentatively entitled Whale Fall. I recently learned what a whale fall is: the carcass of a whale, fallen onto the ocean floor, that creates a complex localized ecosystem providing sustenance to deep-sea organisms. I envision linked stories exploring themes of death and resilience inspired by this phenomenon. But we’ll see where the writing will ultimately take me!
Janice Deal is the author of a novel, The Sound of Rabbits (Regal House, 2023), and two short story collections: The Decline of Pigeons (Queen’s Ferry, 2013), and a linked collection, Strange Attractors (New Door Books, 2023). The Decline of Pigeons was a Flannery O’Connor Award finalist. The Sound of Rabbits was a finalist for both the Many Voices Project annual competition and the Black Lawrence Press Big Moose Prize. Stories from Strange Attractors won The Moth Short Story Prize and the Cagibi Macaron Prize. Janice has also received an Illinois Arts Council Artists Fellowship Award for prose. She lives with her husband in the Chicago area.
Karen Halvorsen Schreck is the author of the historical novel Broken Ground (Simon & Schuster 2016), called a “masterfully written . . . must-read” by USA Today. Her previously published historical novel, Sing for Me, was described as “impressive…a well-wrought and edifying page-turner” (Publisher’s Weekly, Starred Review). Karen’s young adult novel, While He Was Away, was a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award. She’s also the author of Dream Journal, which was a 2006 Young Adult BookSense Pick, and the award-winning children’s book Lucy’s Family Tree. Her short stories and articles have appeared in Consequence, Hypertext, The Rumpus, Belt, American Fiction, and Image, as well as other literary journals and magazines, and have received various awards, including a Pushcart Prize and an Illinois State Arts Council Grant. Karen received her doctorate in English and Creative Writing from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She works as a freelance writer and editor, as well as at her local public library, teaches writing, and lives in Oak Park, Illinois.
