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| Laurel Schunk began writing secretly at her grandmother's antique secretary desk at the age of seven. She has a bachelor's degree in French from the University of Illinois as well as a second major in psychology from Wichita State University. Her books in print include Black and Secret Midnight, The Voice He Loved, The Snow Lion, Rocks in My Socks, the Regency mystery Death in Exile, as well as the first book in the Callie Bagley Mystery series Under the Wolf's Head. A member of Wichita Press Women, Kansas Authors Club, the National League of American Pen Women, Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators, and Sisters in Crime, she lives in Wichita, Kansas with her husband John and their youngest child. She has four children, two in-law children, three grandchildren, and assorted pets. Feature by Nancy Mehl. Read our reviews of: Black and Secret Midnight Death in Exile The Voice He Loved and Under the Wolf's Head. NANCY MEHL - Welcome to The Charlotte Austin Review. You’ve written several novels, including The Voice He Loved, Black and Secret Midnight, Death in Exile and Under the Wolf's Head. How are they similar to each other? How are they different? LAUREL SCHUNK - Thank you for inviting me. My four mysteries are very different from each other in many ways, beginning just with the tone of the four books. While there are some light touches in all the books, the first three - The Voice He Loved, Black and Secret Midnight, Death in Exile - are more serious than Under the Wolf's Head. One way they are similar is that they all deal with social justice issues. My first book The Voice He Loved is more suspense than mystery. All my books are written from a mainstream Judeo-Christian viewpoint. This book, published by Thomas Nelson, a big Southern Baptist publisher, underwent a lot of changes to make it more evangelical. The story deals with the effects of child abuse on an adult who seems to have everything going for her but feels like a piece of trash. I used two newspaper stories to build the two main murder events, because I felt the real-life murders reflected the tragic results of child abuse. Before writing The Voice He Loved, I had gone back to school in my forties to get a second degree in psychology in order to do something about child abuse. Once I started graduate school, I realized I wanted to write popular fiction more than scholarly articles that would be read by very few people. Black and Secret Midnight, set in Georgia in the early 1950's, was truly my first love because of all the autobiographical aspects of it - except for the murders of course, as well as the great-uncle's dalliance with a servant. I have always had a deep hatred for racism. This story was my attempt to show a child who struggles to understand why her beloved family is racist. Death in Exile is a mystery set in the British Regency. It deals with the criminal justice system in Great Britain at the time, the convict ships and the practice of exiling prisoners to Australia in particular. Originally written as a regency romance, I decided to turn it into a mystery on learning how difficult it was to find a publisher for regencies. Much of the romantic language had to go but I left enough in for a flavor of the times. I had a great time putting Jane Austen in the book as a character. Under the Wolf's Head the first book in a series features Callie Bagley, an independent woman who just wants to get on with her gardening. But people - beginning with her sister Lacey - keep asking her to solve mysteries. This book takes place in a fictional Kansas town full of eccentrics. I used a pseudonym because it is much lighter in tone than my other books. Ageism is the issue here. Callie's friends are older ladies that others don't respect much, in Calllie's view. It's a mystery about gardening, with gardening hints in the same way that series featuring cooking include recipes. You have a degree in French and a second major in Psychology. How does this influence your writing? I love foreign languages and have studied five formally, two more informally. I would love to become more proficient in several of them, especially Chinese and Lithuanian. I believe studying grammar in different languages helped me understand language structure better. And the study of psychology helped me understand more about human motivation and behavior. How much of your own life and personality is seen in your novels? I'd have to confess and say a lot. My family members love to find out what 'family things' I used in a new book. For example, Callie in Under the Wolf's Head is based on my husband's aunt Leah. Black and Secret Midnight is the most autobiographical. I was a younger child than Beth Anne in the early fifties but still, there are similarities. In The Voice He Loved Paul and Jamal play a movie game that my husband and I have played for years, citing dialogue from a movie that the other has to name. Where do you get ideas for a novel? Largely from my reading. Like most mystery fans, I read widely. I also get ideas from the people around me. We all see people and events in life that come across as wildly chaotic and random, and we try to use our art to bring order to these events and give them meaning. How much research do you do? Briefly explain the process you use. I do quite a bit of research, mostly by using the library and the Internet. Some of the information I have found on the Internet is not always reliable, but much of it is very valuable. When do you find time for writing? This is difficult. The past year I have not been able to do much writing because we had three young and disturbed children abandoned with us May 2, 1999. For ten months I did my best to take care of them, and it left almost no time for writing. I did finish the book I was working on, although it took much longer. Now I am trying to get back to my old routine of writing about three hours every weekday morning and editing late afternoon or early evening. Are you working on anything new? I am working on the second book in The Lithuanian Saga. Early this year I finished the first book in this series A CLEAR NORTH LIGHT, set in the Holocaust period in Lithuania, when the Nazis and the Soviets were fighting over the domination of this small Baltic state. It was by far the hardest book I've ever tried to write and took almost four years to complete. The research was an incredible bear, partly because the town where the book is set was mostly destroyed in World War II, so it is so hard to show what the town looked like then. The book is due to be released at the end of this year. The second book which I've just started is called THE EAST WIND SCATTERS, and it takes place during most of the fifty years of Soviet domination. The third book called THE JULY TREE, takes place just before the fall of the USSR and at the rebirth of independent Lithuania. These books are all mysteries, but larger in scope than the typical genre mystery. What advice would you give to aspiring writers? Write. Read a lot. Do what you love. Perfect your craft. What are your future goals? To get through the Lithuanian Saga - an incredibly difficult set of books to write. I met fifteen people in Lithuania who lived through what the Nazis and Soviets did to their country, and I want to tell their stories faithfully. EAST WIND has a main character who is a "holy fool," like characters in Dostoevsky, and it's a struggle to get him right. The Soviet era was also so gray, repressive and flat emotionally that it will be a challenge making it seem passionate and alive. Any closing thoughts or comments? I love mysteries and I have a passion for words. I enjoy being part of a community of people who love these things too. |
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