Tell us about yourself.

I'm a poet, novelist, short story writer, and essayist. My other books include Manhattan as a Second Language, Poems (Harper and Row) and Oh How Can I Keep on Singing? Voices of Pioneer Women, Poems (Ontario Review) both Pulitzer Prize nominees. Oh How Can I Keep on Singing? is being adapted for educational television. My novel Alaska was a Book-of-the-Month Club alternate selection. My most recent poetry book is a novel in verse form The Dust of Everyday Life (Sasquatch), which concerns the lives of forgotten Northwest pioneers. THE PEARL OF RUBY CITY (St. Martin's) is my second novel. I am editor and founder of a cyberspace poetry journal, Switched-on Gutenberg.

I was born in San Francisco and moved the Oregon as a teenager. I graduated from the University of Oregon in mathematics and from San Francisco State University in creative writing. I've taught mathematics in the Bay Area and creative writing at Modesto Junior College, New York University, The Manhattan Theatre Club and currently teach at the University of Washington. I've lived in New York and Princeton and worked at the Manhattan Theatre Club in New York for six years. I've also worked on commercial fishing boats in Alaska. Presently I live in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains where my husband and I raise horses.

Are you coming to mystery writing from another job?

I still teach creative writing, both fiction and poetry. I think in lines of poetry. My current novel THE PEARL OF RUBY CITY, began as the poetry book Oh How Can I Keep On Singing?I set out about eight years ago to write a book about a woman miner in the last century. I have been reading pioneer reminisces for a very long time, probably since I worked in South East Alaska and used to listen to the elderly who lived in the Old Pioneer's home in Sitka. I think out narratives in lines of poetry (my poetic line, by the way, usually has three to four stresses). Anyway, I sat down to write a book about a woman miner and got caught up in the real life reminiscences of women who lived near the silvermining camp of Ruby in the Okanogan Valley in central Washington state and wrote the poetry book Oh How Can I Keep On Singing, a series of dramatic monologues. I got very interested in the life of the camp laundress who eventually became the main character in THE PEARL OF RUBY CITY. Then I wrote another poetry book, an epic about pioneers in the Northwest, The Dust of Everyday Life. Then I finished my novel about mining camp life.

What led you to write mysteries?

When I first started reading as a child, I read mysteries. Nancy Drew. Judy Bolton. These books were about women who were important people, women who had the insight and intelligence to solve mysteries. Nancy and Judy had power and were loved and admired. When I'd read all the mysteries in the local library, I stopped reading, because the women and girls in other books seemed so peripheral and unimportant. Perhaps my early reading has caused me, as an adult, to always see life as a mystery, a puzzle. When someone tells you about one of their personal dramas, there is always a piece missing. In life we sometimes never learn the answers. In literature, the pieces fit together, eventually. The question, the craft of writing (any piece of writing, whether it be mystery, poem, essay), is how. Which is where the art of telling a story comes into play.

Tell us about your road to publication.

I wrote in college, then went to graduate school in creative writing. I have always sought out and tried to be a part of the local literary community--the Haight-Ashbury, Berkeley, Princeton, New York, Seattle, and now the World Wide Web--and began publishing in regional presses. In life, I have been blessed with two very good long-time friends. My high school best friend is a police detective and helps me with certain aspects of crime solving, whether it be in this century or in the last. My college roommate has read everything I've ever written (she's my first reader as am I for her—she's a short story writer and an essayist). My husband teaches medicine, so information from him about physiology helps in the development of my character's crime-solving ability.

When my poems first appeared in the Sunday Magazine of the San Francisco Chronicle, that led to the publication of my first poetry book by an establishment press. My poems about Alaska led to the publication of my novel, Alaska, a historical saga about five generations of women who helped develop the state. My first publications led to others. Which eventually led me here.

Tell us about your research for THE PEARL OF RUBY CITY.

I read everything I can get my hands on regarding the paper trail our forefathers and especially our foremothers left behind. Also I visit any small out of the way historical society museum or archive that I can find. People have opened up their private family archives to me. A nonagenarian sent me a photo of the comb and mortar & pestle his immigrant mother played to accompany the fiddler at Saturday night dances (There's some secret to playing a comb, I forget what.). People in their seventies and eighties have sent me copies of their grandmother's cookbooks. Until recently I had a hundred-and-one-year-old neighbor and have interviewed other centurions. I want to know about their lives and what they were told or remember of their parents and grandparents' lives. People have lent me their privately published family histories.

I probably got started on this when I worked at the Manhattan Theatre Club and lived in New Jersey and used to visit the archives of the Firestone Library at Princeton University. When I was a kid I lived near Stanford University and we used to go to the museum where Mrs. Stanford's clothes were kept and let me tell you her dresses and the remnants of her life impressed the tar out of me. My mother and my grandfather were both born in Idaho, so I have what I remember of their stories. Other relatives were from Humbolt, Nebraska, an important stop-over for buying livestock on the trail west. Some of my father's relatives left Boston temporarily and homesteaded in the Dakotas. It builds. It melds together.

I have a particular interest in the time period depicted in my novel. I own a farm in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains where I raise horses. Up until the middle of the 19th Century and the invention of the steam engine, the wind and beasts of burden powered the universe. If you could control transportation, you could control the world as much as it is possible to do so. The horse was an important beast of burden. Not as steadfast or reliable as the ox, the horse had speed, which the ox did not. With the advent of the steam engine and then the gasoline engine, the importance of the horse vise-a-vi transportation dwindled. So did the industrial worlds' knowledge of animal husbandry. There is the science of raising and training beast and there is the art of raising and training beasts. You can read about the science of it in books, but much of the art has been lost to us. Rediscovering this skill is one of my interests in excavating the lost minutia of the past. Also, because I live on a farm I was interested in reading about a time when agrarian life was the norm, not an anomaly. In the beginning, what I was looking for was common ground. I've been formulating this theory, when America exited the family farm, following World War II, our nation lost is way and hasn't quite found it again.

Who are your influences as a writer?

I would have to say, in no particular order: Alice Munro, Joyce Carol Oates, Maxine Kumin, Flannery O' Connor, P.D. James, Anne Perry, Franz Kafka, Dorothy L. Sayers, Grace Paley, Tony Morrison, Jamaica Kincade, William Faulkner, Charlotte Bronte, William Trevor, Annie Proulx, Alicia Ostriker, Sharon Olds, among others.

What does your family think of having a mystery author in their midst?

As long as dinner is on the table (with a possibility of dessert) and the bill for the TV satellite dish gets paid, nobody complains.

Tell us about plans for future books.

I'm working on a sequel to THE PEARL OF RUBY CITY which is set in 1894. I'm also working on a contemporary thriller which is set on a racetrack which concerns the thoroughbred racing world. As far as poetry goes, I'm working on a book of poems concerning a year in the life of a school marm set in Cottonwood, Idaho, 1889.

How can readers get in touch with you?

I can be reached by e-mail at the following address: jnh@u.washington.edu

Thank you, Jana, and best of luck! Readers, check out our review of The Pearl of Ruby City.

January 6, 1999