Megan Staffel
Author Interview - Megan Staffel
Author of The Causative Factor
When Rachel and Rubiat meet at art school, they are surprised by a sudden passion. But it is tested, right away, when Rubiat gives in to a reckless, self-destructive impulse that sets him adrift. Rachel has no choice but to resume her studies even though she doesn’t know what happened to him or if he survived. After graduation, she moves to Queens, New York, where she begins a career as a painter while she supports herself by teaching ESL classes to immigrants. When she gets together with another man and things become serious, she realizes she can’t go forward until she solves the mystery of Rubiat’s disappearance. Told in shifting points of view, The Causative Factor explores the power of art and love in a story that asserts the complexities of human nature.
Author Interview - Megan Staffel
Author I draw inspiration from:
In the early days of my writing career I read all of Alice Munro’s stories. This was back in the eighties when she was relatively unknown in this country and it was hard to find her books, so I commissioned a Canadian friend to bring me everything Munro had written from the bookstores up there. I still am inspired by the brilliance of her long career and her ability, within that period, to change focus. In the early collections her protagonists were always girls or young women, and as a young woman myself, I enjoyed her keen eye on emerging sexuality and independence. But she had the courage to move out of that comfortable territory where she had received honors and accolades, and enter a new zone of interest writing about characters who were middle aged and older and their challenges within human relationships. At first, I missed the coming-of-age focus of the early stories, but soon discovered that she was a compelling storyteller regardless of the age of her protagonists. In all of her collections, there are many stories I love, but the one that remains with me now, years later, is the eponymous “Runaway” in which she shows how a relationship between a man and a woman changes, but she doesn’t do it by focusing our attention on the couple; instead, she expands outwards to the wife’s employer and a stray goat. This gives the story energy and suspense.
Author Interview - Megan Staffel | Author I Draw Inspiration From
Favorite place to read a book:
In 1980 I was in a terrible car accident in Manhattan that resulted in an eye injury. Because of that injury, my best reading position is sitting upright in a chair with the book held by my book holder, a device that looks like a music stand and positions the book at eye level so I don’t have to look down. For the same reason, reading in bed is also comfortable, but the problem is that I get sleepy. So I save books I don’t particularly care about for bedtime.
Book character I’d like to be stuck in an elevator with:
I’d like to be stuck in an elevator with Helen, the first-person narrator of The Spare Room, the most recent novel by the Australian writer, Helen Garner. The spare room is where Helen’s old friend Nicola stays while she undergoes a radical treatment for cancer. Helen lives alone and when Nicola arrives, she is run ragged doing for her, washing her sheets after copious night sweats, and picking up and delivering her from and to appointments. It’s a demand on her time that she begins to resent. I admire Helen because she doesn’t suffer in silence, she tells Nicola all that she’s finding difficult about the treatment and its effects on her, ones she must clean up from and others that she observes. Remarkably, through it all, they remain friends. They have a level of trust and honesty I aspire to. If we were stuck in an elevator together, I think Helen would encourage us to vent about our predicament first and then laugh.
Author Interview - Megan Staffel | Book Character I’d Like to be Stuck in an Elevator With
The moment I knew I wanted to become an author:
My parents were artists, my mother was a painter and my father was a ceramic artist. They both taught in their respective fields at two of the three art schools in Philadelphia. So, when I reached the age when I had to think about what I wanted to do after high school, I decided I wanted to be a painter and headed off to the only art school that accepted me, the Kansas City Art Institute. I was there for only a semester but in that time, in the course of completing a project, I discovered acting.
Certain that was the field I wanted to go into, I returned to Philadelphia and took acting classes, one at Temple University where the teacher believed in the new approach to teaching acting, asking us to become seals or sea gulls, and one at Hedgerow Theatre where the approach was rigorously traditional and we acted out scenes from plays by Chekhov and Lorca. That was where I discovered I had very little talent, but I had already applied and been accepted to Emerson College, a school in Boston that had a large theatre department.
I was lucky that Emerson also had a small but serious writing program headed by Jim Randall, a publisher and editor who ran Pym Randall Press and was involved with the literary journal, Ploughshares. His class met in a small room that overlooked Beacon Street, all of us who wanted to be writers sitting around a large table. We might have numbered ten, some of us writing poetry, some of us prose. Each week, a few of us would read our work to the others. This was in the days before Xerox machines when the department had a single mimeograph machine that made copies in purple ink. But Jim never had us make copies because our purpose wasn’t to critique each other’s work; we were simply to read it out loud to our peers. Sometimes, as I was reading to them, I could tell they were moved. I had crafted a character who made these people I didn’t know very well experience an emotion they weren’t feeling when they walked into the room. That was powerful: all of these other people hanging onto my words, waiting to find out what happened to an imaginary person I had created. It was indirect attention and I liked it. I’ve been doing it ever since.
Hardback, paperback, ebook or audiobook:
I read e books only if there isn’t any other form that’s available, but I don’t like them because it’s difficult to go back and reread something and it’s difficult to make notes on the page. I don’t like hardbacks because they’re expensive and too heavy and more difficult to slip into a bag to read on the subway. The only time I listen to an audio book is if I’m in the car on a long trip. Paperbacks are my favorite form. I wish the major publishing houses would release their books in paperback and hard cover at the same time. The fact that when the book is first published and being reviewed and talked about, and hard cover is the only available form, turns reading into an elitist activity and simply sends everyone to the library where, in Brooklyn at least, there are long waits for every newly published novel.
The last book I read:
I am a very picky reader so I finish a novel only when I am compelled by the writing and the characters. So, most novels that I read to the end are ones I admire and enjoy. The novel I’ve read most recently is Held by Anne Michaels, an episodic novel on the theme of love that is wholly original and brilliant and very moving. I wrote about it on my blog at www.meganstaffel.com in May, 2024 and also in my substack newsletter, Pen and Story. Incidentally, I also wrote about Helen Garner's The Spare Room, mentioned above.
Author Interview - Megan Staffel | The Last Book I Read
Pen & paper or computer:
I write my rough drafts with pen and paper, then type them into the computer, print it out, and revise on the screen or on the printed copy. Then I print it out again after more revision. It’s a method that uses a lot of paper, but it works for me and I try to make up for it by limiting paper use in the other areas of my life.
Book character I think I’d be best friends with:
Jean Swinney in Clare Chambers’ novel, Small Pleasures. She’s a reporter for a newspaper and is trying to uncover the circumstances of a pregnancy a woman claims is an immaculate conception.I admire her rugged, down to earth personality and persistence in getting to the truth.
Author Interview - Megan Staffel | Book Character I’d be Best Friends With
If I weren’t an author, I’d be a:
If I weren’t an author I’d be a visual artist, probably a painter. My mother was a painter and my daughter is a painter and I get a lot of pleasure from looking at and living with paintings. I like to visit galleries and museums and often find inspiration there.
Favorite decade in fashion history:
I live in jeans and loose cotton shirts, so I like our present decade.
Place I’d most like to travel:
I’m hoping to travel to Barcelona to see the buildings by the architect Antonio Gaudi and practice my Spanish.
My signature drink:
I love anything that my mixologist son, Arley Marks, creates.
Favorite artist:
And since I mentioned my son, in the question above, I will say here that I love looking at my daughter, Annabeth Marks' paintings. When I want to listen to music I choose jazz and at the moment, my favorite artist is a jazz pianist named Junior Manse.
Number one on my bucket list:
I would like to try to have a long conversation in Spanish with a speaker who doesn't speak too rapidly.
Anything else you'd like to add:
I am a walker. My husband and I moved to Brooklyn in 2013 because we were tired of having to drive a car to get places. When I’m in the city I love being able to walk to do errands, and when I need to go somewhere that is too far to walk, using the subway. When I’m in the country, I walk everyday, checking out birds, plants, trees, and views of landscape. If a problem comes up that I can’t solve, I step into my shoes and go out the door, heading to Prospect Park if I’m in Brooklyn, or down the road if the country. I do my best thinking when I’m surrounded by green.
Find more from the author:
https://www.facebook.com/megan.staffel.7/
https://www.instagram.com/meganstaffel/
Author Bio:
Author Interview with Megan Staffel
My most recent novel is The Causative Factor, winner of the Petrichor Prize. I have written five other books of fiction, the novels, The Notebook of Lost Things, She Wanted Something Else, and three collections of stories, most recently The Exit Coach and Lessons in Another Language. I taught for many years in the MFA program at Warren Wilson College and keep a blog, What I’m Reading, on my website and a newsletter at substack called Pen and Story, where I discuss craft elements in the fiction I love. I live in Brooklyn and a small town in western New York State.
